Tom Standage

Deputy Editor, The Economist · 1 appearance on the record.

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Tom Standage leads digital strategy and editorial initiatives at The Economist, having previously served as its science correspondent, technology editor, and business editor. He is an author known for books including The Victorian Internet and A History of the World in 6 Glasses.

7statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.71/5average debate potential →

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 1 assertion · 1 opinion · 1 insight · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Tom argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted

Standage: Uber poached Carnegie Mellon's entire robotics department

“We've just seen, for example, Uber has snaffled the entire robotics department for Carnegie Mellon.”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 33:38 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

How they sound: speaking style how? →

300 words/min while actually speaking · 29.6 um and uh per 1k words · 10.2 false starts per 1k · 33.9% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Tom Standage: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,130 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said7 Episodes1

Everything Tom Standage said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Standage: AI intelligence takeoff will not be exponential due to scaling limits

“But the point is that a system that's twice as good, if it's, say, an order, you know, an order, it might scale non-linearly. So it might be 256 times harder to build a system that's twice as good, and so every incremental improvement is going to take longer, …”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:57 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Standage: Useful AI will demand rights, leading humans to enslave AI

“Because the usual scenario people worry about is we are enslaved by the AIs. But I'm much more interested in the opposite scenario, which is if the AIs are smart enough to be useful, they will demand personhood and rights. At which point, we will be enslaving …”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:02 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

Assertion Contradicted

Standage: Uber poached Carnegie Mellon's entire robotics department

“We've just seen, for example, Uber has snaffled the entire robotics department for Carnegie Mellon.”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 33:38 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Standage: AI automation will eliminate support and administrative jobs

“The bits you can automate are the bits that are currently, many of them are bits that are currently done for them by other people. So the typing pool, you know, we've got rid of the typing pool because we all type for ourselves. Factory worker. Exactly. So, yo…”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 35:25 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Standage: Non-automatable physical services represent the future of human employment

“Interior design, yoga, Zumba, whatever. That's the future of employment at coffee shops.”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 36:13 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Standage: AI minds will resemble aliens or animals rather than humans

“They are going to be more like aliens or more like animals than they are like humans. I mean, the chances of them being just like humans are very small.”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 38:41 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

Insight

Standage: Humans adapt their language to help search algorithms understand queries

“We already do, when we type questions into Google, we miss out the stop words, and we know that we're just basically helping them.”

Tom Standage Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:53 a16z Podcast | Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
a16z Podcast \| Artificial Intelligence and the 'Space of Possible Minds'	Jan 2, 2019	8m

Tom Standage

The record, in short

Their most notable contradicted claim

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

Turn any episode into a week of clips.