About Life With Machines
Welcome to Life With Machines, a project from Baratunde Thurston dedicated to figuring out together how we–the humans–want to live in a world increasingly filled with AI.
This is a truly wild moment. Powerful technologies are being released into our lives faster than we can keep up, and we haven’t even been asked what we actually want from them.
We’re told the future is about efficiency, productivity, and autonomy, and that we need to get on board or be left behind.
Across an award-winning podcast, a YouTube series, and this very newsletter, Life With Machines exists to question that story.
We want to live well with technology, not just endure it. We think AI should augment our humanity, not replace it. And we believe responsibility lies with the people who build these systems, not the tools themselves.
In short, AI isn’t doing anything that people don’t tell it to do. That means we have to hold the people building AI accountable for how they design it. And hold ourselves accountable for how we deploy it in our own lives.
The tech lords are trying to lure us into repeating the past and playing it forward. That isn’t progress. That’s regress. So the real question is this: how do we use this moment to reset the story we’re living in, instead of doubling down on one we’ve already suffered through?
Some of our favorite explorations of that question live right here:
Why Subscribe
Subscribing to Life With Machines means choosing participation over passivity.
As a free subscriber, you’ll receive essays, reflections, interviews, and experiments that help you slow down, zoom out, and think more clearly about the role technology plays in your life and our collective future. This is a space for context, curiosity, and critical imagination, instead of hype or fear cycles.
Paid subscribers are supporting something deeper. You’re helping build independent, reader-supported media that answers to people, not platforms. You’re investing in work that treats AI as a site of empowerment and choice, not inevitability.
This community is for people who don’t want to be “kept in the loop.” We want to define the circle.
If that resonates, your subscription helps make this work possible.
About Baratunde
I’m Baratunde Thurston. I tell stories of interdependence across our relationships with nature, humans, and technology. I’m the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir How to Be Black, and I’ve spent my career working across media to help people understand systems and their place within them.
I hosted and executive produced the PBS series America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, and co-created and hosted the award winning podcast How To Citizen with Baratunde–a show that redefined “citizen” as a verb.
I’ve also led digital transformation at The Onion and The Daily Show, and delivered a TED Talk praised by journalist Brian Williams as “one of the greatest of all time.”
Life With Machines is where I bring all of that curiosity to this AI moment. The future isn’t predetermined by code. It’s shaped by the choices we make together.
