Paul Ford

at all costs.

And I know, you know, I listened to What Next TBD's episode on this with Paul Ford, and he really said, this is a human failure.

It is not an AI failure.

And I think the fear comes from what you pointed out, this anthropomorphism of me being like, they're going rogue.

And now the CEOs of both companies, plus Elon Musk, are saying, hey, maybe we need to pump the brakes.

Last week, we spoke with Paul Ford, who wasn't all that worried.

So this week, we wanted to hear from someone who is.

Nate has been doing this work for more than a decade.

But its Criterion Channel release seemed worthy of a little fanfare and worthy as well of a conversation, one we're sharing today with Louis Lapham's two principal collaborators on the film, director John Kirby and and producer Libby Handros, who are generously giving away digital copies of Lewis Lapham's The American Ruling Class to all premium subscribers to the Lapham's Quarterly Substack.

Today's bonus episode features a second conversation with novelist, essayist, and technologist Paul Ford, architect of the Digital Archive of Harper's Magazine and co-founder of Abord.com, a software consultancy that this summer built in tribute to and in memory of Louis Lapham.

the new Lapham's Quarterly digital archive, which is a time machine.

With an annual subscription to the Lapham's Quarterly sub-stack, you can read every page of every issue.

I record all episodes of this podcast in a virtual recording studio.

Future print issues will have been made possible by our reliance on digital technology.

Unlike me, Paul Ford has long been... an enthusiastic, if at times critical, technologist, I thought it would be fun to record a conversation with him about the making of digital archives, about straddling the professions of journalism, literary publishing, and tech, about what it means to put humans first in the brave new world that large language models are summoning into existence.

Along the way, we end up touching on the 7,000-year-old legend of the virtuous crane from the Mahabharata, Ray Bradbury's short story, There Will Come Soft Rains, the poetry of Cavafy and Wallace Stevens, the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and we contemplate what it is that distinguishes human voices from synthetic simulations of them.

Hi, I'm Paul Ford.

And I'm Rich Ziotti.

And this is the Abord podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, the world of the world, and everything in between.

I get to do what I love and be in this world.

All right, then let's flash forward because I know you did a bunch of stuff, but I thought, I think what's real interesting about kind of this moment of time is you guys originally started Postlight with your, I guess you mentioned your co-founder, Paul Ford.

I think a lot of people know Paul, like F-Train, writes a lot, Bloomberg.

You can look him up.