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I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

By: Tom Johnson
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A technical writing podcast about the latest trends and practices in the field of technical communication. Technical communication includes topics like technical writing (software help), AI, information architecture, usability, API documentation, information design, web design, illustration, DITA, structured authoring, content strategy, visual communication, and more. If you're a technical writer or interested in technical writing, this is the one of few podcasts in this niche. I also have a blog at https://idratherbewriting.com where the podcasts and other blog topics are published. For an index of all podcasts, see https://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts.2023, I'd Rather Be Writing Education Politics & Government
Episodes
  • AI Book Club discussion of The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby

    AI Book Club discussion of The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby
    Jun 28 2026
    This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. In the discussion, we talk about the complex character of Demis Hassabis (and comparisons to Ender's game), the idea of founders' personal morality acting as a final safeguard, and the relentless acceleration of AI development. We also talk about the historical rivalries between deep learning and reinforcement learning, the growing urgency around AI-driven job displacement, and what it means to train AI to automate our own work.
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    58 mins
  • Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop

    Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop
    May 31 2026
    In this podcast, I chat with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about a variety of topics related to AI and docs, such as applying Italo Calvino's literary principles of lightness and quickness to evaluate docs, the reality of AI review fatigue versus creator fatigue, whether vibe-coded tools are tools slop, developing internal skills for repeatable doc processes, and the utility of running local AI models.
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    58 mins
  • AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark

    AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark
    May 17 2026
    This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Our discussion explores Tegmark's visions of superintelligence, the unpredictability of AI goals and subgoals, and how the Asilomar principles fare against the relentless market pressures of today's AI arms race. We also contrast the book's theoretical focus on cosmic energy (and how superintelligence might more efficiently extract energy from matter) with the immediate, tangible threats AI poses to cybersecurity and global financial systems.
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    57 mins
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