Clive Thompson: Tales of Technology

Episode 136

I spoke with Clive Thompson about:

• How he writes

• Writing about the climate and biking across the US

• Technology culture and persistent debates in AI

• Poetry

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

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Clive is a journalist who writes about science and technology. He is a contributing writer forWired magazine, and is currently writing his next book about micromobility and cycling across the US.

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Find me on Twitter for updates on new episodes, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

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Outline:

• (00:00) Intro

• (01:07) Clive’s life as a Tarantino movie

• (03:07) Boring life and interesting art, life as material for art

• (10:25) Cycling across the US — Clive’s new book on mobility and decarbonization

  • (15:07) Turning inward in writing

  • (27:21) Including personal experience in writing

  • (31:53) Personal and less personal writing

  • (36:08) Conveying uncertainty and the “voice from nowhere” in traditional journalism

  • (41:10) Finding the natural end of a piece

  • (1:02:10) Writing routine

• (1:05:08) Theories of change in Clive’s writing

• (1:12:33) How Clive saw things before the rest of us

• (1:27:00) Automation in software engineering

• (1:31:40) The anthropology of coders, poetry as a framework

• (1:43:50) Proust discourse

• (1:45:00) Technology culture in NYC + interaction between the tech world and other worlds

• (1:50:30) Technological developments Clive wants to see happen (free ideas)

• (2:01:11) Clive’s argument for memorizing poetry

• (2:09:24) How Clive finds poetry

• (2:18:03) Clive’s pursuit of freelance writing and making compromises

• (2:27:25) Outro

Links:

• Clive’s Twitter and website

• Selected writing

  • The Attack of the Incredible Grading Machine (Lingua Franca, 1999)

  • The Know-It-All Machine (Lingua Franca, 2001)

  • How to teach AI some common sense (Wired, 2018)

  • Blogs to Riches (NY Mag, 2006)

  • Clive vs. Jonathan Franzen on whether the internet is good for writing (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2013)

  • The Minecraft Generation (New York Times, 2016)

  • What AI College Exam Proctors are Really Teaching Our Kids (Wired, 2020)

  • Companies Don’t Need to Be Creepy to Make Money (Wired, 2021)

  • Is Sucking Carbon Out of the Air the Solution to Our Climate Crisis? (Mother Jones, 2021)

  • AI Shouldn’t Compete with Workers—It Should Supercharge Them (Wired, 2022)

  • Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing Wired, 2024)