Home » Burn The Map: Herding AIs, Dodging Doom, and the New Ethics of Intelligence w/ Dr. Craig Kaplan

2025

Burn The Map: Herding AIs, Dodging Doom, and the New Ethics of Intelligence w/ Dr. Craig Kaplan

In This Episode: 

We sit down with Dr. Craig Kaplan—the guy who was building AI before your favorite “disruptor” learned to tie their shoes. Dr. Kaplan takes us on a wild ride from the OG days of artificial intelligence (when data lived on floppy disks and having a “machine learning” project meant you had actual machines to move) to his current crusade: making sure superintelligence doesn’t wreck the joint for the rest of us.

Kaplan lays out what everyone’s too scared—or too clueless—to admit: if you wouldn’t leave your wallet with a random LLM, why are you ready to entrust the future of humanity to black-box mega-brains? Spoiler: the answer isn’t “more GPUs.” Dr. Kaplan’s been in the room with the legends, built systems Wall Street still wishes it could copy, and now he’s here to torch lazy thinking about AI safety, collective intelligence, and why your Marcus Aurelius quotes aren’t enough to save you from an existential AI oopsie.

What We Cover:

  • The difference between “tool” AI and “worker” AI (yes, there’s a difference—catch up).
  • Why “superintelligence” doesn’t need another buzzword conference, it needs democratic crowdsourcing (and a human in the loop so we don’t all end up starring in a low-budget Skynet reboot).
  • The messiness of teaching ethics to machines—and why handing off responsibility to Silicon Valley’s overcaffeinated 20-somethings is, frankly, a terrible plan.
  • The not-so-humble history of AI: mentoring with Nobel laureates, building for Wall Street, and knowing when the hype cycle is actually a warning sign.

Guest Bio: 

Dr. Craig Kaplan—founder of superintelligence.com, patent-holding AI risk-mitigator, and straight-up legend in the AI world. He’s been in the game since the 1980s (seriously, he worked with Herbert freakin’ Simon), has built AI that beats Wall Street’s “best,” and still has the patience to explain to the rest of us why we should care before it’s too late. Want to know what’s coming next for AI? He’s been calling it for decades.

Enjoy the episode. This show is brought to you by Wrench.ai.

Follow Dan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danbaird/
X: https://x.com/mrdanbaird

Follow Craig:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigakaplan/

Follow the Pod:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@burnthemappodcast
Twitter/X: https://x.com/BurnTheMapPod
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burnthemappodcast/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@burnthemappodcast
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/burnthemappodcast.bsky.social

Selected Links From This Episode:

  • superintelligence.com (Craig’s digital lair)
  • Wall Street collective intelligence 
  • Jensen Wang’s “AI is workers” GTC speech 

People and Organizations Mentioned:

  • Craig A. Kaplan
  • Herbert Simon
  • Jeff Hinton
  • Marvin Minsky
  • Anthropic and “the chosen 20 at Google”
  • Nvidia
  • Wall Street’s unfortunately clueless quant crowd

Show Notes & Timestamps:
00:04 — Dr. Kaplan invents “AI before it was cool”
06:15 — The limitations of everyone’s favorite LLMs
17:50 — A sharp left turn into AI ethics and why Danbot needs therapy
31:00 — Why your future coworkers might be called “bots” (and outsmart you)
39:16 — The AI flywheel, the AGI endgame, and how to not get flattened
41:09 — How collective intelligence saved billions (and Dan’s blood pressure)

New Episodes

Subscribe to our Newsletter!