Keen On

Not only is the AI revolution really happening, but its Large Language Model technology is becoming an independent actor in the world. Rather than the dark conclusion of a techno-pessimist, this is actually the view of one of the leading AI platforms. For this week’s episode of That Was The Week, we ran Keith Teare’s editorial summarizing this week’s tech news through Google’s Notebook LM. Rather than a tool, NotebookLM concluded, it’s becoming an independent actor in today’s world. And this provocative conclusion is substantiated in much of this week’s tech news, especially the rise of what’s being called “agentic AI” and the renaissance of robotics. Even today’s American politics, with its two Presidential candidates obsessed with telling voters what they do and don’t want to hear, seems to confirm the way in which the human world itself is a mirror of a Large Language Model. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures L

From the introduction of North Korean troops into the war in Ukraine to a budding friendship with Elon Musk, Putin continues to make strange headlines. The real question is whether Putin actually knows what he’s doing or if he, as a wannabe 21st century Russian Tsar, is subject to the same seemingly inevitable historical forces as the Tsars of yesteryear. As both a seasoned Putin watcher and the author of many books about Russia, Mark Galeotti is as well positioned as anyone to determined if Putin is a prisoner or a master of history. Churchill famously described Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." In his new book, Forged in War: A Military History of Russia from its Beginnings to Today, however, Galeotti unwraps this mystery by seeing Russia as an eternal prisoner of its geo-strategic vulnerabilities and thus, like Putin, always insecure, land-hungry and bellicose. Professor Mark Galeotti is one of the foremost Russia-watchers today, who used to travel there regularly to teach, lect

The Politifact founder, Duke University professor and Pulitzer Prize winning writer Bill Adair certainly isn’t the first person to raise the alarm about the problem of lying in American politics. But what’s really interesting about his new book, Beyond the Big Lie, is that Adair also has innovative solutions to fixing what he calls an “epidemic of political lying.” One idea, he explained to me, is punishing politicians for their lies through fines. Another, is by pioneering a national pledge, in the manner of Grover Norquist’s successful taxpayer protection pledge, to commit politicians to telling the truth. Good honest stuff from America’s foremost authority on political lying. As a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, Bill Adair covered everything from small-town crime to big-time politics. He was a metro reporter who wrote about natural disasters, a business reporter who covered the airlines and a data journalist who explored the patterns of race and wealth. As the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, he took

In February 2011, I had the maven of mavens, Seth Godin, on the show to discuss the end of the industrial age. “So why are you so popular?” I asked the best-selling author, entrepreneur and teacher. “I notice things,” he explained. Luckily for all of us, nearly fourteen years later, Godin is still noticing things, especially the obvious stuff that most of us miss. The problem, as he notes in his new book, This is Strategy, is that we mostly think tactically and thus overlook the strategic insights that enable us to plan a good life for ourselves and our community. And so we struggle to establish agency over our own lives, which is a particular problem in what Godin calls our era of carbon & AI. That said, Godin remains cautiously optimistic about all of our futures because, as he asserts, “we are hardwired for hope”. I hope he’s right - thereby probably proving his theory. Seth Godin is an author, entrepreneur and most of all, A teacher. Seth is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker. In addi

New books about the impact of AI on the human condition are two a penny. But it’s rare to have an AI book by such a prominent author as Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords and the author of the iconic three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. In his new book Mindless, Skidelsky presents a sweeping history of our relationship with machines as way of explaining how we slide into our current conundrum with AI. While Skidelsky doesn’t believe that AI offers an existential threat to us yet, he is fearful of how smart machines could ultimately threaten the human condition. And, of course, we discuss John Maynard Keynes and his (mistaken) vision of both the future of work and of humanity in a market economy.Robert Skidelsky is a member of the British House of Lords, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, and the author of a prize-winning three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. He began his political career in the Labour party, was a founding member of the So

There are some seriously heavyweight new non-fiction books this Fall including memoirs by Al Pacino and Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as an intriguing new historical analysis of the recently departed Queen Elizabeth and that inevitable pre-election Bob Woodward tome on the misbehavior of you-know-who. But for our resident book maven, Bethanne Patrick, the most intriguing non-fiction release of the Fall is by a much less well known author. The Harvard art and culture historian Sarah Lewis’ The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Patrick believes, is a major work that allows us to perceive the real truth about America in our age of hyperreality. And Sarah Lewis, she suggests, is up there with Isabel Wilkerson as an American treasure of truth-telling. So expect to see Lewis on the show in the not too distant future.Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on b

Last October, we featured a conversation with Kian Vesteinsson, co-author of Freedom House’s 2023 FREEDOM ON THE NET report, about the repressive power of artificial intelligence. A year later, Freedom House’s 2024 FREEDOM ON THE NET report is entitled “The Struggle for Trust Online”. And as Allie Funk, one of its co-authors, explains, it’s a very mixed report on the state of online trust. In some countries - most notably Iceland, Chile and Taiwan - internet freedom has improved in 2024. But in others - especially Russia, Iran and, especially, China - things have only gotten worse over the last year. So, I asked Funk, what needs to change to build online trust around the world? How can the large democracies of North America and Europe learn from Iceland, Chile and Taiwan to build more freedom on the net?Allie Funk leads Freedom House's technology and democracy initiative, including Freedom on the Net and Election Watch for the Digital Age. She also represents Freedom House on the Freedom Online Coalition's

The conventional way of thinking about digital technology revolutions is akin to thinking about how to build a house. First we build the foundation, then we add the frame and finally the cosmetic furnishing. In tech, this is known as the “stack” - and traditionally, each chapter in the narrative involves different companies and technologies. So in the case of the Internet boom, for example, first there were tech plumbing companies like Cisco, then middleware companies, and finally consumer companies like Amazon that interface with customers. But, as Andrew and Keith Teare discuss in this week That Was the Week tech roundup, in the case of the AI revolution, the entire “stack” might be owned by a single company. So OpenAI or Anthropic threaten to quite literally control the construction of the entire house - from laying the foundations to painting the walls and laying the carpets of tomorrow’s AI world. As Keith and Andrew warn, the implications of this on the future of innovation in the digital economy are im

Early today, we posted a conversation with Celeste Marcus, LIBERTIES Quarterly managing editor, about her hard-hitting “Hate Lands” essay in the Fall 2024 issue. In the same issue, there’s an equally hard hitting piece by the Rutgers historian, Katherine C. Epstein. But whereas Marcus goes after Trump and Putin, Epstein’s ire is reserved for her fellow American historians who, she believes, are, literally, “killing history”. And Epstein doesn’t pull her punches in this conversation either. America, she told me, is the “world’s teenager” in terms of (not) making sense of its own historical narrative. Meanwhile, “the donkeys are leading the donkeys” inside American history departments, creating a crisis of this most essential academic craft.Katherine C. Epstein is associate professor of history at Rutgers-Camden.  She is currently working on her second book, which examines government secrecy, defense contracting, intellectual property, and the political economy of power projection.  Her first book, Torpedo: In

In the Fall 2024 issue of Liberties Quarterly, managing editor Celeste Marcus writes about the great Polish movie director Agnieszka Holland. Marcus argues that the 75 year-old Holland - best known for her 1990 movie Europa Europa - remains as relevant as ever because of her focus on what she calls the “terrifying contingency” of social breakdown. Linking Holland’s latest film, Green Border, a movie about the the plight of east European migrants with Donald Trump’s dehumanization of American migrants, Marcus argues that “no human hates like the human.” And the very worst humans, Marcus reminds us, with a barely concealed reference to Trump and Putin, “do not live under beds or in our imaginations; they sit in paneled offices behind mahogany desks, signing bills into law, raising and razing cities with the same hand.”Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics and the co-host of “The DC Salon” podcast. She is at work on a biography of the artist Chaim Soutine.Named as one

Do we shape the future or does it shape us? That’s the core question in Brian Solis’ new book, Mindshift which provides lessons for corporate executives in transforming leadership and driving innovation. Like so many other futurists, Solis’ work focuses on how we can become irreplaceable in the age of AI. Agency still lies with us, he acknowledges. But unless we use that agency to shape the future, Solis warns, then that future will eventually make all of us eminently replaceable. Brian Solis is Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. In his role, Brian sets the strategic direction and programming for ServiceNow’s Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, and Singapore. Additionally, Brian designs and delivers strategic engagements with important customers to advise on digital and business innovation strategies. Brian Solis has been called “one of the greatest digital analysts of our time.” Brian is also a world renowned keynote speaker and an award-winning

As a longtime Harvard Business School professor and the former chief marketing officer at Aetna, David C. Edelman is all too familiar with both the dangers and opportunities of personalized technology. In Personalization, his new book, co-authored with Boston Consulting Group managing director Mark Abraham, Edelman focuses on customer strategy in our age of AI. While Edelman acknowledges that there have been dangers with Web 2.0 style products that enables personalization, he is nonetheless cautiously optimist that AI will enable companies to provide hyper-personalized services and products that will ultimately benefit consumers. Rather than the age of surveillance capitalism, then, Edelman believes that AI represents the age of the empowered and happy consumer. Fighting talk from one of the world’s leading marketing mavens.David C. Edelman has a long history of Personalization work stretching back more than three decades. In 1989, he wrote the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) classic article, “Segment-of-One Ma

Last week, we featured an interview with the leftist American theologian, Jim Wallis, who warned about the false white gospel of contemporary Christian nationalism. And we return to the existential dangers of American religion today with Talia Lavin whose new book, Wild Faith, warns that the Christian right is actually taking over America. In contrast with Wallis, however, Lavin doesn’t offer a more loving version of American christianity as an theological alternative to the evangelical right. For radically secular Lavin, the challenge is to get any kind of fundamentalist religion out of politics. That’s the way to fix democracy. That’s how to save America.Talia Lavin is the author of the critically acclaimed book Culture Warlords. She is a journalist who has had bylines in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times Review of Books, the Washington Post, and more. She writes a newsletter, The Sword and the Sandwich, which is featured in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024. Named as one of the

The 2024 winners of the Nobel prize for Economics were announced this morning. One of the winners was the MIT economist Simon Johnson, who, as the co-author (with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu) of Power and Progress, appeared on KEEN ON just over a year ago to talk about technology & prosperity. Given that the prize was given to Johnson (and Acemoglu) for their work on explaining the gaps in prosperity between nations, we thought it worthwhile to rerun the interview from last year. Particularly since, if anything, the relationship between new technologies like AI and economic inequality is even more pertinent in 2024 than it was last year. SIMON JOHNSON is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council. In February 2021, Johnson joined the board of director

Earlier this week, the prominent African-American broadcaster and writer, Tavis Smiley, came on the show to voice his support for Reparations to correct the past racial injustices in American history. The Kentucky based historian, Joel Edward Goza, author of Rebirth of a Nation, agrees with Smiley, arguing that Reparations is, in fact, the central civil rights issue of our age. The struggle for Reparations in California, he argues, has turned the state into the Alabama or Mississippi of the 2020s. Perhaps. Although I’m not sure everyone, either in and out of California, will agree with Goza’s analysis of Ronald Reagan’s central role in 21st century America’s racial injustice. Or his suggestion that California should pay reparations to the rest of America for Reagan’s sins. Joel Edward Goza is a writer, speaker, and community advocate. He is professor of ethics at the HBCU Simmons College and teaches in Kentucky prisons. Before focusing on writing and teaching, Joel worked in urban redevelopment and community

In her quest for the White House, it seems as if Kamala Harris is doing everything in her power to disassociate herself with liberal ideas. So what, exactly, has happened to liberal politics in the United States today? That’s exactly the question which the excellent young George Washington historian, Timothy Shenk, asks in his new book, Left Adrift. And in tracing the fate of liberal politics in America today, Shenk goes back to the Democratic party’s two most influential political strategists of the Clinton era: Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen. The story of these two Zeligs of the center-left, Shenk explains, helps us understand not only Kamala Harris’ innate conservatism, but also the challenges (and perhaps opportunities) for American liberalism to reinvent itself in today’s age of illiberal populism. Timothy Shenk is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. A senior editor at Dissent magazine, he has written for the New York Times, the Nation, the New Republic, and Jacobin, among

It’s been a strange week in tech. The Nobel prizes in both Chemistry and Physics went to prominent former or current Googlers, and yet the tech news cycle has been dominated by the U.S. government’s intent to break up a seemingly prostrate Google. Keith Teare and Andrew, in their regular That Was The Week summary of tech news, discuss Google’s failure to present itself in the United States as the motor of American economic innovation. OpenAI has stolen that mantle, Keith suggests, which may be why the editorial in his newsletter this week is about OpenAI’s trillion dollar opportunity. Google’s messaging is off, Keith suggests, which is why they might consider hiring Chris Lehane, the subject of an intriguing New Yorker piece on Silicon Valley’s new master of the political message. The only problem is that Lehane is Sam Altman’s new messaging man at OpenAI. Perhaps Altman should use ChatGPT to create a Lehane bot, which they could then sell, for billions of dollars, to Big Tech rivals like Google, Amazon and M

As a Harvard trained pediatrician as well as television writer and producer, Neal Baer has particularly interesting take on the moral, policy and ethical challenges of CRISPR gene-editing technology. Baer - He is best known for his work on the television shows Designated Survivor, ER and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - has edited a new collection of essays on The Promise and Peril of CRISPR. It’s a critical issue because CRISPR technology allows us to become God in determining what types of humans should and shouldn’t exist. And Baer even has a new tv series in the works, appropriately entitled The Edit, about a group of rogue scientists who use CRISPR technology to eliminate a group of supposedly “undesirable” people. Born in 1958 in Denver, Colorado, Neal Baer is an award-winning showrunner, television writer and producer, physician, and author. He is a lecturer on global health and social medicine and the co-director of the master’s degree program in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard Medical S

Why are black men more likely to vote for Donald Trump than black women? According to Tavis Smiley, the syndicated radio host and best selling author of many books about black America include his latest Covenant with Black America - Twenty Years Later, it’s because some black men, especially younger ones, are attracted to the outlaw in Trump. Black women, in contrast, Smiley suggests, are repelled by everything about the former President, particularly what they see as his faux outlaw image. For Smiley, the host of the fastest growing syndicated Black radio talk show in America, this division between male and female African-Americans get to the heart of the complexity of what it means to be black in the United States today. Tavis Smiley is the host and managing editor of the nationally syndicated radio program and podcast “Tavis Smiley,” which is produced and distributed by SmileyAudioMedia, Inc., where he serves as founder and chief visionary officer. In 2023, Smiley received the highest honor in the talk rad

This is an important conversation. Few Americans are better skilled at listening than the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. The author of the best selling Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild’s much anticipated new book, Stolen Pride, takes place in Kentucky, where she examines rural loss, shame and the rise of the American Right. Hochschild’s superpower is her ability to listen. It’s what she defines as “bilingualism” - the skill in separating the literal from the symbolic in other people’s language. This bilingualism makes Hochschild one of the few members of America’s coastal elite able to truly listen to the other America. What she hears - and the rest of us miss - is the pained language of stolen pride, loss and shame. Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of many groundbreaking books, including The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, and The Time Bind as well as Strangers in Their Own Land, which became an instant bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Award, and Stolen Pride