Baratunde Thurston

November 23, 2024

After Baratunde Thurston’s program, we fed a transcript of the event into ChatGPT. With a few rounds of revisions and some increasingly specific prompting, our virtual reporter penned the summary below. How did it do?

Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept—it’s a reality shaping every facet of our lives. At The Richmond Forum, Baratunde Thurston, a storyteller navigating the intersections of technology, humanity, and nature, confronted this pressing question: What does AI mean for us?

Using humor, personal anecdotes, and philosophical insights, Thurston painted a vivid picture of a world at a crossroads—where AI could either strengthen human connections or unravel the very fabric of our shared humanity. “The future,” he insisted, “depends not on the machines, but on our ability to make thoughtful, ethical, and inclusive decisions.”

For Thurston, the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT marked a pivotal moment in the AI revolution. “It was a surprise to many of us,” he said. “Even people in the industry had predictions about this technology being available, and it blew away most of those predictions.” This, he argued, exemplifies the staggering pace of technological development.

At the heart of Thurston’s message was a call to use AI to augment, rather than replace, human relationships. He warned against allowing AI to deepen connections with technology at the expense of bonds with each other and the natural world. “It’s a great loss if we use AI to connect more to technology and substitute for connections with our fellow human beings or with the planet we are a part of,” he said. “It’s unavoidable, but we should be more active in choosing.”

Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy-nominated multi-platform storyteller and producer operating at the intersection of race, technology, democracy, and climate. He is the host of the PBS television series “America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston,” the creator and host of “How To Citizen with Baratunde” (which Apple named one of its favorite podcasts of 2020), and a founding partner of the new media startup Puck.

Thurston uses his unique ability to integrate and synthesize themes of race, culture, politics, and technology to explain where our nation is — and where we can take it. At Puck, he regularly writes about new developments in AI and their implications across different industries, individuals, and the culture at large. He has appeared and shared these insights on numerous podcasts, including The Progress Network’s “What Could Go Right?” and Techmeme’s “Ride Home.” Thurston has also interviewed dozens of tech leaders on the Webby Award-nominated web series “Lenovo Late Night IT.”

This October, Thurston launched the video podcast, “Life With Machines,” through which he aims to demystify AI and make it personal with a wide range of guests: entrepreneurs, artists, policymakers, technologists, business leaders, creators, educators, and scientists.

His comedic memoir “How to Be Black” is a New York Times bestseller. In 2019, he delivered his speech “How to Deconstruct Racism, One Headline at a Time,” which MSNBC’s Brian Williams called “one of the greatest TED Talks of all time.”

Thurston serves on the boards of Civics Unplugged and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Los Angeles, California.