Keen On America

“We don’t have to choose between AI and no AI. The bigger choice is what type of AI we want, and who we want in control of it.” — Ben Green INTRO In our age of AI, do we want to be ruled by all-knowing engineer kings? Not according to Ben Green, a professor of information and public policy at Michigan, whose new book, Algorithmic Realism, presents “data science practices to promote social justice”. Unsexy? Yes. And that, according to Green, is the whole point of algorithmic realism. Such a dow

Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels deep remorse. Afghanistan was unavoidable, he says — no president would have refrained, and the Democrats w

“They weaponized the fear, and the fear became institutionalized, and we internalized it.” — Janet Reitman Back in 2022, the ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman came on the show to talk about The Fifth Act, his account of America’s humiliating end in Afghanistan. The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, also imagines post-9/11 America as a tragedy in five acts. But, in contrast with Ackerman’s military account, The Inheritance is an American story, focusi

Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch. America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobody seems to have told either Trump or Huang. In his embrace of Huang’s supposed wisdom on unregulated

It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Johnson and the gloomy godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Today it’s the Delhi-based Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Peace Prize for his fight against child exploitation. He is now trying to globalize the ideal of compassion. But for Satyarthi, compassion doesn’t mean kindness, empathy, mercy, or even pity. In his new book Karuna (a Sanskrit word that loose

“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in his new book, A World We Share. It’s what makes us human. Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center