Actual Intelligence with Steve Pearlman

Actual Intelligence with Steve Pearlman makes one argument from many angles: thinking is a capacity people build by doing it, and handing it off has a cost. The handoff it keeps coming back to is ChatGPT. Its solo episodes play as argued essays, each with a thesis and a remedy. One explains how large language models scan bulk text for the words most likely to follow other words, then turns the comparison around. The human brain, the episode argues, is a prediction engine too, which is why a guest of honor walking into a surprise party goes briefly speechless. Its advice is practical. Take the words your mind generates and challenge them with other words, rather than drifting toward ready-made language from social media and major media. Another solo episode walks through a new MIT study in which a brain-only group and an AI-assisted group took on thinking tasks. As the episode reports it, the brain-only participants came out ahead, including on memory recall, and the speaker separates his own blunter reading from the study's language. That episode ends on parenting, arguing that children raised to think critically will stand out from a generation that may never learn to. The interviews shift the setting to higher education. Robert Niebuhr, a teaching professor and honors faculty fellow at Barrett Honors College at ASU, talks through his Inside Higher Education opinion piece predicting an impending collapse. The conversation reaches past the classroom to how the whole system might be reshaped, with talk of trade school alongside a liberal arts track, and the interviewer sets Niebuhr's piece against a more neutral article built around a survey of thousands of college students. Louis Newman, author of Thinking Critically in College, keeps the focus on teaching. He and the interviewer settle on the idea that a discipline is a conversation and a culture, and that students gain when faculty explain early what practitioners in a field actually do and how they think. Not every episode treats AI purely as a threat. 'ChatGPT - A Loaded Blessing In Disguise?' considers a suggestion from Sarah E. Eaton to use AI-generated essays as a foil, asking students what the machine got right and wrong, which only works if they have actually read Hamlet. The same episode closes by asking whether the real problem is that ChatGPT wrote a passage, that a student wrote it, or that such writing counts as valid intellectual work at universities in the first place. That question shows the show's edge: it turns its criticism on institutions as readily as on the software. It also asks educators and thinkers to send in articles, books and topics, and says some episodes have grown out of those suggestions. For a first listen, the prediction-engine episode sets out the core argument, and the Louis Newman interview shows the classroom side.