Season 1. Episode 4. Unscripted with Augusto Gonzalez

Augusto Gonzalez is an economist and researcher from Argentina who uses large language models to simulate entire human populations, running classic economic experiments on synthetic cultural agents. His work can match real anthropology (he replicated field results on the Hadza tribe of Tanzania) but it also revealed that these models flatten humanity's moral and cultural diversity toward a Western, wealthy, educated default, and that scaling does not fix the problem because the bias is baked into what is available on the web. In this episode he and Jeff Pedowitz pursue the deepest version of the AI question: whose humanity is inside these machines? Augusto explains why economists see incentive structures where engineers see technical detail, why naive prompting cannot represent a culture, why the danger is exporting subtle prejudices rather than values, why AI should not drive policy for populations it barely understands, and why he believes open source is the only path that lets every community represent itself.