Season 1. Episode 2. Unscripted with Reid Blackman

Reid Blackman, former philosophy professor turned AI ethics advisor to Amazon, the FBI, and the Canadian government, joins Jeff Pedowitz to argue that the standard approach to AI governance is fundamentally broken. Top-down, policy-driven programs take a year or more to pass, arrive obsolete as the technology races from narrow AI to generative to agentic, and rarely change behavior. His alternative, from his new book The Ethical Nightmare Challenge, discards the values-first playbook in favor of a single pragmatic question: what are the nightmares? Name the specific bad outcomes for a given AI agent, determine the resources and training needed to avoid them, and let cross-functional teams do the problem-solving, pushing accountability to the front line rather than onto a single overwhelmed executive or an unscalable risk board. Along the way they explore why risk-obsessed enterprises are blind to AI risk, why leaders can no longer defer to the "techies," how to spot the buzzword artists in the ethics space, and why the leap from generative to agentic AI is a mountain most organizations have not begun to climb.