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In the wake of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Paul and Rich look towards the future with an AI lens—especially with the incoming Trump administration unlikely to put any regulatory guardrails on this rapidly evolving technology. What can AI do for people in our deeply fractured state? Are we doomed to poison the information environment forever, or could we use it to start building things that help people make sense of the world?
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Non-profits often have tight budgets and specialized needs—and wind up having to pay a whole lot of money for consultants and imperfect, out-of-the-box software solutions. As generative AI promises to drastically reduce the cost of development, how will that affect the non-profit and NGO landscape? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich assess this question, and offer up both immediate and longer-term advice for organizations struggling with software right now.
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The Biden administration recently put out their first-ever National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence, so on this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich unpack the memo and discuss what it might mean for the U.S. government’s future attitudes towards AI. Plus: They talk about recent developments with Anthropic’s Claude that allow you to control all the computers in the world.
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How has public perception of AI changed over the past two years? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich welcome on writer and editor Josh Tyrangiel, who’s been the Washington Post’s “AI tourist” columnist since early 2023. They discuss what he’s encountered in various industries experimenting with AI, and the overall sentiments he’s observed as ordinary people grapple with this technology. Plus: He discusses his recent collaboration with Oprah Winfrey on an AI special for ABC News—and the remarkable lettuce she served him for lunch.
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Reqless tends to take a measured yet optimistic stance on AI, but a lot of people out there hate it—for reasons including the environmental impact, the dubious origins of LLM training data, and, of course, the looming threat of AGI, A.K.A. our future robot overlords. On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich discuss some of those critiques, as well as zoom out to look at the longer arc of the technology industry and its impact on the world, asking the question, “In five years, is the world in a better or a worse place because of AI?”
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You’re a business stakeholder trying to evaluate AI tools for your organization. How should you assess them—and how should you measure the value of their outputs? On this week’s Reqless, Paul pitches Rich an acronym for this very task: TRACE. Transparent, Repeatable, Actionable, Clear, Efficient. How can these metrics help someone understand these tools before letting them into their org, and help them calculate the potential return on investment? Plus: Paul and Rich discuss a recent interview with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu on just how many jobs he’s calculated will be eliminated by AI in the next decade.
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These days, it can take longer to plan the software launch party than to spin up the software itself—which is exactly what happened with Aboard Climate, a new integration Paul, Rich, and the Aboard team debuted last week. Hangovers nursed and moderately rested, Paul and Rich discuss the event and the feature itself—which lets you incorporate real-time data from the climate-change literacy organization Probable Futures directly in Aboard—before talking about how the building process reflects today’s rapidly shifting landscape of software development.
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Does AI mean the end of software development jobs—or is this the start of a brand-new boom? Tech industry narratives are painting a gloomy future for coders, but on this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich take the opposite tack. AI will shift who has access to software creation and the way things get built—so how should technologists position themselves for the coming decade?
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Is the SaaS era coming to an end? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich discuss recent comments from Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who says that generative AI has allowed them to build internal tools that let them dispose of products like Salesforce and Workday. With the cost of building software on the brink of dropping precipitously, what does that mean for the SaaS giants going forward?
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If AI is about to fundamentally change software development, what should current students be learning about code? On this week’s Reqless, Paul anoints Rich as head of a fictional programming department and asks him to lay out his syllabus—before hijacking the exercise and laying out his own syllabus. You need just enough knowledge to really use these tools to program, so what exactly should students learn?
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Generative AI is already revolutionizing software development—so how long are developers’ jobs safe? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich use a recent post on the subject by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to discuss the future of coders: What these tools will mean for organizations large and small; how new development paradigms will imperil the big consulting firms; and what advice they have for a junior developer looking at the next few decades of their career.
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How is AI changing the marketing industry? This week Paul and Rich welcome Noah Brier, a marketer and startup founder who’s excited about the ways AI could be used to solve the industry’s problems. Topics discussed include his early interest and adoption of generative AI tools, the types of problems his marketing clients are trying to tackle with AI, and why the tech industry seems to be missing the true potential of AI in its messaging.
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By emphasizing the chatbot use case, are we missing the real communication powers of generative AI? On this week’s Reqless, Paul describes his recent journey to understand the 900-page, far-right master plan that is Project 2025—which he fed into ChatGPT and then asked for its contents to be summarized by “a really cheerful, optimistic squirrel.” With the power to instantly change voice and tone—for humor, to accommodate different reading levels, to speak with different dialects, etc.—is AI’s future role a sort of universal information translator?
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Are Meta’s ideas about AI the future of the technology? In the wake of the recent tech stock slump and with questions about newer AI companies’ true value, Paul and Rich look at Meta’s Llama and how the company is positioning its model in the broader AI landscape. Plus: They assess the recent decision in United States v. Google LLC—aka the Google antitrust case—and see if there are any real takeaways to be gleaned before what promises to be a lengthy appeals process.
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It’s easy to make blanket claims about “AI taking jobs”—but what does AI mean for specific industries in the near-term? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich run through five careers (musician, advertiser, teacher, therapist, and consultant) and assess the ways AI might—and might not—change work. Plus: Paul describes himself as the “slightly grumpy girlfriend” as he and Rich reminisce about going to see beloved indie band Low together.
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On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich look at how AI might affect the dominant way people organize data today: The spreadsheet. With its low barrier to entry and ability for users of all sorts to hack together solutions, does the humble spreadsheet leave any room for an AI transformation—and does it even need one? Plus: Fresh off a trip to San Francisco, Paul reports back on our driverless car future.
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On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich look at how AI is going to transform a very special industry filled with the nicest people: The law. After laying out the specific areas of the legal profession that are ripe for AI transformation, they assess a few current startups and their application frameworks (e.g., document review, research, contracts), and propose a new segment for each industry-specific podcast: “Will AI take your job?”
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Introducing Reqless—the new podcast from Aboard about how AI is changing software. In this episode, your hosts Paul Ford and Rich Ziade explain why this podcast exists, and talk about how AI is enabling everyone to start skipping steps—and why overall, you should embrace this, not fear it. (Although a little healthy fear never hurt anyone.)
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A one-minute episode—we’re taking a very short summer break! But expect some big changes when we return…
Transcript
Paul Ford: Hi, I'm Paul Ford, the co-founder of Aboard.
Rich Ziade: And I'm Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard.
Paul: And you're listening to the Aboard Po—oh, wait a minute. Oh, wow. Okay, wait. I think we're gonna rename this thing.
Rich: Yeah?
Paul: Yeah, it's time. We've received some high-level branding advice, and it is time for us to get out there and kinda own what we've been talking about, Richard. Let me tell you what we talk about. You know what we talk about?
Rich: What?
Paul: The incredibly rapid change that artificial intelligence technologies are bringing to the software industry. And sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's ridiculous. Often it's ridiculous.
Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.
Paul: And we keep dancing around it, saying, we're this or we're that. But damn it, I think that's what we are. I think that's what we're doing for the next X months or years or decades.
Rich: Great. Tune in next week. It'll be a new name. It'll show up in your same feed so you don't have to do anything. And it's fun. We still want to, like, share our ideas, thoughts, feedback to the world that is useful outside of our product.
Paul: God help anybody trying to keep us on-script.
Rich: Yeah. So world's shortest podcast this week. Have a lovely week, and we'll see you next week with a brand-new name and maybe a brand-new haircut.
Paul: I could use one.
Rich: All right, have a great week.
Paul: Bye!
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Your boss walks in and says, “What are we doing about AI?” How do you respond? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich break down the problem with the question itself, and the way AI is being offered as an imprecise, ineffective solution to solve business’s structural problems. Who actually needs AI—and how do you figure out the best way to use it?
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