Hype, Horseshit & Human Intelligence with Paco Nathan

Paco Nathan has been building AI since 1983 - before it was cool, before it was profitable, and through every hype winter since. In this no-BS conversation with Nick Schutt on Robots and Red Tape, Paco explains why this wave is legitimately different (hardware finally caught up), why the AGI/superintelligence talk is marketing fiction backed by trillions, and where the real wins are hiding: anti-money-laundering, fraud detection, and preserving institutional knowledge as veteran workers retire.

A masterclass in spotting hype vs. reality:

Why hardware, software, then process is the real AI hierarchy
The dirty secrets of latency & cost killing most “agentic” demos
How graphs and entity resolution are the hidden backbone of mission-critical AI
Lessons from Spark/Databricks that every GenAI builder needs right now
Why team intelligence, not artificial intelligence, should drive policy

Go deep on Spark-era lessons every GenAI startup is painfully re-learning, why UX is now the biggest bottleneck for adoption, why relationships (in graphs and in orgs) matter more than facts, and why policy makers should regulate “team intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.”

Books mentioned:
“Seeing Like a State” – James C. Scott
“A Grammar of Motives” – Kenneth Burke
“Open Society and Its Enemies” – Karl Popper
“Human Scale” trilogy – Kirkpatrick Sale

Full episode on Robots and Red Tape, also on Apple, Spotify, and everywhere else. | Host: Nick Schutt
Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one! @RobotsandRedTapeAI