YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Foster

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2025-11-10
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2025-11-10
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  1. “Yeah, and it might seem like a small harmless thing. But what it does is it sets the tone for what the company is interested in. And the people that work there start to talk in these ways. And like I said, I've been in so many meetings where ideas from science fiction cinema get brought up. And I think what it actually represents is a crisis of imagination. They grab at these little placeholders that they saw in a movie or a TV show and put it in the room as like this is what we should do.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “It also affects the ways that they name things, so the Falcon rockets, the Muskaz are named after the Millennium Falcon, Cortana is named after a character in Halo. The meeting rooms at Google X were all named after sci-fi robots.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And I actually think the challenge with that is a misreading of what the purpose of science fiction cinema really is, which is entertainment. And this desire to will those MacGuffin.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, and getting people excited and motivated and driving them forward, saying, These are all the things we could do. I think it's important. It's good for motivation of a team. It's good to get people to see, oh, there's some upsides here. And the canonical examples are cures for cancer and other things that we see as sort of generally regarded big problems in the world. I think there's a way that AI and other technologies like that could address that. The challenge that I've got is it does quite quickly tip into fanciful classical futurist tropes. And a lot of it is inflected by science fiction cinema. And a lot of people who meet me and find out what I've done or where I work or whatever, they think that I'm very enamored by science fiction. And I don't really watch it. I'm not really a fan of it. I certainly don't take it as a brief. But I think that puts me in a minority.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, I think all four of these things that I've identified have their own benefits. And I think could futurism does, because you do need to sort of explore the potentiality of any new. New technology”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I think so. And in my career, I've been fortunate. I'm a designer, went to art school. I've been around designers, but fortunately I've also been around investors and scientists and engineers and people from all different ilks. And I think that each of the conversations I've had falls quite quickly into one of those pockets, either based on the kind of training that somebody's had or just the nature of the place that we are.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, I'm just trying to identify these habits that I think we all fall into. So I've called them out as could, should, might, and don't, which is any conversation about the future, I think, tends to fall into one of these pockets. And so could is about being very sort of positive and excited about the future. It's often inflected by things like progress and technological progress. Should is about having some sort of certainty about the future, either an ideological destination or a prediction. And a lot of people ask me for predictions all the time, which I don't like making. Might is about uncertainty about the future, lots of scenarios, lots of potential outcomes. And then don't is about focusing on the things where we don't want to end up, where we would like to avoid, or the things we would like to change in the future.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah, and I think that that definitely exists in this. And I think we need to find that level of sort of humility and balance in talking about these things and try to move forward with caution and apprehension, but also excitement and energy.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “But I think that the challenge that we've got is trying to find a balance in the way that we talk about these things, which are, you know, the technologies are transformative potentially in good ways and bad ways. And you talk about benefit and weapon or something like that.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “But I think that what I'm saying is that it leads to unbalanced and sort of biased versions of the future. And I think when looked at in aggregate across all of the different people that are talking about AI as a technology and what it might mean for society and what products we might make, you sort of get an aggregate view, but the chances are we're not listening to all of that. We're listening to one or we're listening to two or we're talking in one way. And I think that means that we just head off down one road way too far and don't think about things in the round. And something like AI, which is a, I prefer machine intelligence actually, but we can dive into that.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I mean, it's a deep question. I think the challenge that I've got is again, without wanting to sort of lean back heavily on the title of my book, I think people are falling into one of those four buckets.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I mean, we could go long on this. I think the number of photographs I've seen of, say, early nascent VR or gestural computing mockups, for example, it didn't sort of end up like that. It doesn't mean to say that people shouldn't have looked and shouldn't have explored. But I guess what I'm saying in regards to AI is a more sort of pragmatic and rational and less hype-driven version of that, trying to think like, what are we talking about now and how are we talking and what language are we using now that might seem silly in the future?”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “With a bit of hindsight and a bit of time, we start to learn actually those bits are a bit silly. Those bits are a bit odd, those bits are a bit quirky. I think the same goes for technology. If you look back at 80s and 90s and 2000s, ideas of the future of technology, they look a bit silly. They look a bit data. They look a bit.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, I think that's right. And again, this comes with a bit of age. I'm not quite 50, but I'll be 50 in February. And I think as I get to reflecting a bit more, I realize I've been through a few of these cycles of hype and excitement, particularly around technology, but around everything else. And the example that I use when talking to people about this is, you know, most cities around the world have an 80s night where they sort of wear the 80s neon clothes and they dance ironically to the music and they sort of make fun of it. But we have to remember that those things sort of made sense at the time.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Because I thought that's what you were supposed to do. That's what all the magazines showed that I was reading and all of the shows that I watched when talking about and imagining the future. This is what I call could futurism. This idea of the sort of bombastic over-the-top energetic sci-fi-inflected work, I think I did quite a bit of that stuff. But as I've matured and I've become a bit more comfortable in my own skin and my own reckons, I've tried to be a bit more critical about that work. And since leaving Google in 2023, I've taken a bit of a reflection on that. And I do think that a lot of companies, they struggle with that question of what is the future. And they sort of throw money at it and they do projects, but it doesn't seem to lead anywhere.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I think you're right on the performative side of things. And if I'm being really frank, I think for the first part of my career, I did a lot of that stuff.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I think so But yeah, I trained as an industrial designer back in the day. I went to art school. I've been interested in designing things, physical things is where I started out working for James Dyson and things like that. But in the companies I've worked in, I've been explicitly focused on longer, more distant, more emergent, nascent technologies. And so the sort of genre of design work that I do, I call futures design. And so that looks like the sort of prototypical, sketchy, scrappy V0.0 type of products that you might be familiar with if you've followed this world. So yeah, that's the kind of work that I do just to try and kick something off and seeing if there's a there and what that might look like.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Children could ride in cars with no seatbelts, then gay marriage wasn't legally recognized anywhere on earth when I was born. So we've undoubtedly seen a lot of change. And I think our response is to try and talk more about the future. But the reason I think there's this gap, this disparity, this shortcoming, is I think that we tend to find ourselves in one of these four corners that I've described as could, should, might, and don't.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Yeah, I think the future is obviously very contextual depending on who you are, where you live, and whether we're talking about technology or community or society or culture or whatever else. Things move at different speeds. But I do think there's this general feeling that things are speeding up. More change is happening now than perhaps it has done before. There's no real metric for that, but it does feel like that. So, the population of Earth, for example, has doubled since I was born.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “I've been in conversations about the future for my whole career. And people tend to talk about the future in very imbalanced ways. And I think that represents a critical shortcoming in the world that we live in, which is changing very quickly and we're all starting to, I have this feeling that the desire to think about the future is here, high, and our ability to do so is low and underpowered. And I'm interested in trying to close that gap a little bit.”

    2025-11-10 · On with Kara Swisher · What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT