What does it take to trust work made with AI? Novelist Joel Borgen talks about developing The Receipt Horizon with ChatGPT and Claude, the human editing behind the book, and whether personalized AI art could leave culture with fewer shared reference points. His story also imagines communities choosing different technological lifestyles under the limits imposed by a governing superintelligence.
Then Daniel McKinnon, CEO of Gamow Labs, describes bringing a laboratory left behind by a failed drug program into the effort to solve rare-disease cases. Gamow reanalyzes unresolved genomes and is beginning to test variants of uncertain significance in relevant cells—work that could give AI systems better biological evidence to learn from. The conversation also examines AI agents searching beyond clinical cutoffs, safeguards for frontier models, and the promise of robotics and AI-assisted experimental design.
Show Notes
Joel Borgen, author of The Receipt Horizon, discusses writing with ChatGPT and Claude, editorial judgment, and how personalized AI art could change shared culture. Daniel McKinnon, CEO of Gamow Labs, explains how the company acquired a former drug-development lab to test uncertain genetic variants and improve rare-disease diagnosis, alongside discussion of AI agents, OpenAI’s enterprise push, and the need for human oversight.
Chapters
(0:00) AI novels and rare-disease genetics
(1:26) Can Astra Ultrafast keep developers in flow?
(2:09) ChatGPT sign-in makes OpenAI harder to bypass
(2:37) OpenAI apps will run rival models too
(3:11) Eight times faster means less human oversight
(5:15) OpenAI pulled a model; should Anthropic chill?
(5:46) Portable ChatGPT subscriptions cut SaaS trial costs
(7:05) OpenAI’s enterprise push is what scares Anthropic
(7:39) Everyone builds a productivity suite now
(8:16) AI agents move humans from documents to decisions
(9:25) Can OpenAI grow without racing to RSI?
(10:34) Meet Joel Borgen, novelist
(11:27) Proof of work: how Joel actually wrote the novel
(15:08) Joel cut fourteen percent from his manuscript
(17:45) Nathan’s AI songs reveal a culture gap
(19:03) Astra finally cracked Joel’s viola test
(20:35) AI breakthroughs are outrunning cultural norms
(22:47) Could communities choose their own AI future?
(25:40) The Steward’s comfort still caps human ambition
(27:57) Would the Steward be a worthy successor?
(29:50) Human taste still matters in AI art
(30:57) Meet Daniel McKinnon of Gamow Labs
(32:06) Why AI genetics needs biological experiments
(35:07) A failed drug program unlocked Gamow’s lab
(36:48) Owen’s missed diagnosis became a life’s mission
(39:18) AI agents can search beyond human cutoffs
(42:11) Sequencing got cheap; interpretation stayed the bottleneck
(44:17) Why Gamow chose diagnostics over screening
(47:37) Reanalysis in a week for ten dollars a genome
(49:25) What Gamow builds on top of frontier models
(52:07) Stronger models can break existing tools
(53:27) Better models are shrinking Gamow’s harness advantage
(54:41) Can robots make genetic experiments affordable?
(56:05) Can biological experiments teach genetic AI?
(57:53) Should AI welfare research stay public?
(59:11) Could AI design threats nature never could?
(1:01:00) Government AI upgrades meet decades of data kludges
(1:02:42) Easy name changes weaken names as identity
(1:03:28) Factory and Cognition’s feud spooks enterprise buyers
(1:05:23) Safety pledges signed, but no audit exists yet
(1:06:29) Should AI labs fund society’s cyberdefenses?
Guests:
Daniel McKinnon — CEO, Gamow Labs (𝕏 | LinkedIn)
Joel Borgen — Author, The Receipt Horizon (𝕏)
