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Hi Bert - Why is it that linguistics is such an "underground" area of study? Anyone on the street can tell you what history and physics are, and maybe even name some notable people from the field, but nobody seems to know anything about what linguists do - even though everybody speaks a language and lots of people are very interested in language, as the response to your dialect quiz shows. What gives?

Is the AI Revolution going to just be the Industrial Revolution again? How will it be different?

By this I mean that we saw an incredible technical leap forwards in just a few decades, and it forever altered the course of history. But it also saw a massive increase in wealth inequality, as factory owners could become incredibly rich while their employees lived in poverty. The increasing automation of previously artisanal jobs would take the highest toll on women and children. "Skilled" labour became in demand, while "unskilled" labour was exploited. It was years before even the most basic social safety nets, such as laws restricting working hours and children on factory floors. And that's before we even start to think about carbon emissions. In short, it was a huge boom for all the most toxic aspects of modern capitalism.

How can we reap the benefits of AI technology whilst avoiding the potential social pitfalls? Or is it inevitable that those benefits must come at the expense of society's most vulnerable people?

tldr: AI + late capitalism = ???