Adulting: The Week That AI Finally Grew Up

“Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare
This week’s editorial from Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, is entitled “Adulting.” His verdict: this was the week the AI industry finally started behaving like grown-ups. The evidence: OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5.5 and Image 2.0, both outstanding, and then made a move Keith considers more significant than either — pivoting Codex from a programmer’s tool into the central interface for everything. The gravity has shifted from the model to the user interface. You shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore. You should be using Codex. Meanwhile, freemium is working: less tokens, much better output, a functional free tier, and the heaviest users paying for more.
Anthropic’s week was more complicated. The first four days were, in Keith’s word, awful: Opus 4.7 launched with a massive deterioration in performance, hallucinations back, service throttled, timeouts everywhere. Then Anthropic removed features from its paid product, got a furious backlash, and reinstated them within twenty-four hours — what Keith calls Dario’s adolescent-teenager moment. But Friday redeemed the week: Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment, Amazon added $5 billion. The money goes into data center capacity and chips — TPUs from Google, Trainium from Amazon, both competing with Nvidia. Two axes are emerging: OpenAI–Nvidia on one side, Anthropic–Google–Amazon on the other.
The bigger question: what does adulting actually require of AI? Keith’s reading of the week’s most interesting piece — on the future of work — is that the durable jobs in an AI economy will be in the relational sector: nurses, therapists, teachers, craft brewers, live performers, care workers. Human-to-human is the scarce resource. Reid Hoffman adds: technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own — it requires political will. And Altman himself, in his interview with Greg Brockman, described his best-case scenario as one in which abundance lifts everyone up but exacerbates inequality. Which is to say: even optimism, in Silicon Valley, ends in more inequality. Adulting, it turns out, has its limits.
Five Takeaways
• Codex Is Now the Central App: The most significant move of OpenAI’s week wasn’t ChatGPT 5.5 or Image 2.0 — both outstanding — but the repositioning of Codex. What was a programmer’s tool has become the central interface: it does more things, has access to all the models, and represents a shift in where the gravity of the company sits. From the model to the user interface. Keith’s verdict: you shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore for any purpose. You should be using Codex. The freemium model is working because less tokens produce much better output, making the free tier genuinely functional — and the heaviest users still pay for more.
• Dario’s Adolescent-Teenager Week: Anthropic’s first four days were, in Keith’s reading, a study in how not to adult. Opus 4.7 launched with massively deteriorated performance — hallucinations returned, the service was throttled, users got timeouts. The infrastructure was creaking under load. Then, to compound the problem, Anthropic removed features from its paid tier. The backlash was immediate and furious. They reinstated the features within twenty-four hours. Keith’s diagnosis: reactive, adolescent, exactly the opposite of what OpenAI was demonstrating that same week with deliberate, long-term thinking.
• $45 Billion and Two Axes: Friday changed the Anthropic picture entirely. Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment — $10 billion initially. Amazon added an initial $5 billion. The money funds data center capacity and proprietary chips: TPUs from Google, Trainium from Amazon, both in competition with Nvidia. The implication: two separate technological axes are now forming. OpenAI and Nvidia on one side. Anthropic, Google, and Amazon on the other. Keith’s view: great for Google and Amazon; a long-term bet for Anthropic that they don’t need to be an Nvidia customer.
• The Future of Work Is Human-to-Human: Keith’s most interesting read of the week: a piece on the future of work that argues the durable jobs in an AI economy will be in the relational sector — the jobs where the human element is the product itself. Nurses, therapists, teachers, craft brewers, live performers, care workers, spiritual guides. Not prompt engineering (transitional). Not monitoring AI systems (transitional). Human-to-human. Nursing is already the most popular university major. Keith’s extension: as work disappears, so does the social connection it provides — family, friends, colleagues. Which means religion probably makes a comeback.
• Sam Altman’s Best Case: More Inequality: In his interview with Greg Brockman on the Core Memory podcast, Altman described three possible AI futures. His favourite: abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but also exacerbates inequality. That was the good outcome. The others were worse. Reid Hoffman adds a necessary corrective: technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own — it requires human agency and political will. Keith’s gloss, via Robert Heinlein’s For Us, The Living: the heritage check — a monthly dividend to all humans from the automated economy’s surplus. Money as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources becomes less meaningful when scarcity itself disappears.
About the Guest
Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America.
References:
• That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week’s editorial: “Adulting.”
• Greg Brockman and Sam Altman on the Core Memory podcast — the OpenAI interview that anchors the week.
• Reid Hoffman, “Faith in the Possible,” Substack — technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own.
• Episode 2878: Victoria Hetherington on The Friend Machine — Keith weighs in on AI companionship and the loneliness question.
• Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
00:31 - Adulting: is this the week AI finally grew up?
01:05 - Brockman and Altman on Core Memory
03:15 - ChatGPT 5.5, Image 2.0, and the Codex pivot
05:47 - Yann LeCun on Dario and the labor market
06:28 - Anthropic’s awful first four days
07:38 - Feature removal and the twenty-four-hour backlash
08:24 - $40 billion from Google, $5 billion from Amazon
09:19 - Two axes: OpenAI–Nvidia vs Anthropic–Google–Amazon
11:00 - The future of work: relational vs automated sector
29:37 - Reid Hoffman: technology’s arc bends toward access
30:16 - Altman’s three futures: best case is more inequality
31:56 - The heritage check and the post-money economy
33:58 - Victoria Hetherington and AI companionship
00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, April 25, 2026, the last Saturday in April. And this might be the week when finally the AI business grew up. That, at least, is according to Keith Teare, the publisher of That Was the Week newsletter. His editorial this week is entitled, very tersely, Adulting. Keith, is this the week that Sam and Dario and everybody else finally grew up and became mensches?
00:01:05 Keith Teare: Well, for anyone paying attention, it was a dramatically high energy week from both Anthropic and OpenAI in very different ways. OpenAI went on a PR binge that kicked off with, Greg Brockman, who is the cofounder and Sam Altman together being interviewed. Brockman, it turns out, is an extremely good clear thinking representative for OpenAI.
00:01:32 Andrew Keen: And just to be clear, this was, on the Core Memory podcast. Yeah. Not as good as ours, of course, although we didn't get Sam or Dario or Dario or Brockman on our show.
00:01:46 Keith Teare: Exactly. Not as good as ours. But anyway, Brockman, that was his first of probably five appearances during the week on various podcasts. This was the longest and most in-depth, and the two of them interacted a lot. And you really got a an insight into a company that's really thinking things through, being quite deliberate, very long term thinking with, with no tendency to, feed any of the memes that they're arrogant or, self obsessed. It was very good for them.
00:02:22 Andrew Keen: I mean, does that suggest, Keith I don't wanna pee on your parade, so to speak, but, that they're getting a lot of grief from their investors. I know there have been rumors that the investors don't think that the valuation now is justified. Are they getting a lot of pushback from people saying you gotta grow up, you gotta you gotta be responsible?
00:02:48 Keith Teare: Investors don't tend to do that. They more lean in to become part of strategy. It has the same effect. That is to say, an increase of energy in areas of weakness. I think good investors do that. And, there's a good investor, so I'm sure there is some of that happening.
00:03:07 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, they got the top investors in the world. So what is, so what is Altman and, Brockman, what are they saying that's reflected of the fact that they're now you claim at least this week. They finally reached adult status. It's taken a while, but they're there.
00:03:24 Keith Teare: They're saying a lot. They launched two products. One is, Image 2.0. The other is, ChatGPT 5.5. Both are not just good. I mean, they're outstanding. And, you wanna be you wanna be using them because they're the best at what they do. They also change their Codex
00:03:45 Andrew Keen: When you say you wanna be using them, who's the you? Is this programmers? Is this you and I?
00:03:51 Keith Teare: Oh, you and I as well. These things are just for coding. They're just
00:03:56 Andrew Keen: app Every week, somebody it's we've talked about this before. It's like wacky ray races. Every week, there's a new leader. So next week, probably, Anthropic will come out with something equivalent.
00:04:08 Keith Teare: Well, I think you have to use it to appreciate the qualitative change. Whether someone's a leader or not, I honestly don't really care. I do care how good the output is and how fast it is and how cheap it is. So they achieved a few things. They're using less tokens for much better output. The therefore, it's get more scalable. That means the free version is quite functional. They've changed Codex from a programmer's app into the central app, and the central gravity has now moved from the model to the user interface, which is a huge move. And Codex now should be everyone's starting point. You shouldn't be using ChatGPT, the app, anymore for any purpose. You should be using Codex. It's a better interface, doing more things, and it has access to all the models. So they've shifted their company to the next stage qualitatively. It really is real.
00:05:09 Andrew Keen: You said that the free model now is functional. That might make some investors a little nervous. How are they gonna make money if the free model is functional?
00:05:19 Keith Teare: Well, it's called freemium. It's the proven model of the Internet is you've gotta get people using it for free, and the heaviest users will pay for, more access or improve quality. And that seems to be working for them. Look. There's nothing really bad to say about it. Yeah. One can be skeptical always. But, I think skepticism isn't really earned this week. It's more, praise.
00:05:47 Andrew Keen: Although there is some skepticism, not of, at least in your newsletter, not of Brockman and Altman, but of, Amodei. Yann LeCun, another of the very influential founders of the AI revolution, suggests that Dario is wrong. He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the on the labor market. What's Dario been up to this week? Because how's he if, Sam has become an adult overnight or over week, what's Dario been up to? And why you tend to be much more critical in my view, at least of Dario than you are of Sam. What's Dario done good this week?
00:06:28 Keith Teare: Yeah. If we if I'd have been writing the newsletter on Thursday, I would have, had a very different view of Anthropic, because the first four days of the week for them were awful. A few things happened. The first thing that happened is, they released the, point seven version of Opus, 4.7. And, the performance massively deteriorated from 4.6, and everyone was complaining about its hallucinations were back. The service was throttled. You got timeouts. So, basically, their infrastructure was creaking, if you will, with the usage. And, it was it was a pretty bad week. Everything was going
00:07:20 Andrew Keen: We've said this before is, your fellow Yorkshireman, Harold Wilson, famously said a week's a long time in politics, and it's certainly a long time in tech. Yeah. What changed then? So the first four days of the week weren't great for, Dario and Anthropic. And then what changed?
00:07:38 Keith Teare: Well, what changed is in response, they removed some of the features from their paid product, features that people care about. And they got such a backlash, they put it back in within twenty four hours. And this was Dario, what I call his add the adolescent teenager being reactive. But yesterday, it was announced that Google is gonna invest up to $40 billion for infrastructure and that Amazon is also gonna invest in an initial $5 billion. Google's initial is 10. So $15 billion coming in initially from a gross of over $50 billion to spend on infrastructure, which they have to do because their service can't scale without it.
00:08:24 Andrew Keen: So when you say, infrastructure, Keith, not everyone is as familiar with these terms and what they mean. Does that require them to build data centers? Where does the money in infrastructure where
00:08:37 Keith Teare: Well, they don't have to buy them. They can lease them. OpenAI don't own data centers. They lease them, and they charge them out at a, a profit margin above what they pay for the lease. Anthropic can do the same. And Google, as their supplier of TPUs, which is the Nvidia competitor chip, has data centers with TPUs in. And so Anthropic most likely is gonna spend a lot of money on both Amazon and Google leasing data center capacity using the chips that both of those companies manufacture in competition with Nvidia. So it feels as if Anthropic, this is probably a bad decision long term.
00:09:19 Andrew Keen: For who? For Anthropic or for Google and, Amazon?
00:09:22 Keith Teare: It's great for Google and Amazon. For Anthropic, they're making a bet they don't need to be a Nvidia customer as a
00:09:31 Andrew Keen: So we're seeing two worlds, two separate, axes emerging, the Nvidia OpenAI axis and the Google Amazon Anthropic axis. Is that fair?
00:09:44 Keith Teare: It's directionally fair, although there is a huge overlap. I mean, they all the companies use everything, so it isn't binary. It isn't strict. But, directionally, yes. What you said is correct.
00:09:58 Andrew Keen: Keith, it's been a good week for Wall Street, unusually good week, especially given what's happening in The Middle East. Some people are still scratching their heads. Is this deal between Anthropic and Google and Amazon, is it another example, or could it be used as an example of this circular economy where nothing's really being produced? Amazon and Google are pouring money into Anthropic who simply really, in the end, just give the money back to Google and Amazon in their data centers.
00:10:26 Keith Teare: That would be, both wrong and crude. The Have
00:10:30 Andrew Keen: I ever been wrong or crude, Keith?
00:10:35 Keith Teare: Let's not go there. But back to the question.
00:10:38 Andrew Keen: And for people just listening, you have to look at Keith's face to understand that what he was thinking was I'm always wrong and crude, but go on.
00:10:47 Keith Teare: So the money here, and I talk about all the money, is coming from customers paying for services. Google is certainly fronting upfront costs. But how Google gets paid back isn't with its own money. It gets paid back from customers using Anthropic and paying for it. So it isn't a circular economy. Although there are there are, bilateral deals between buyers and sellers.
00:11:20 Andrew Keen: Use a Keith Teare euphemism, bilateral deals as opposed to circular.
00:11:25 Keith Teare: Yeah. That well, they even they're not circular because the same money isn't coming back. It just isn't. There's no evidence that's happening. You Google doesn't give you money. In fact, there is no money coming from Google. There is probably an agreement for $10 billion.
00:11:41 Andrew Keen: So when Google says they're investing $10, $20, $40 billion, whatever it is, that's not cash. That's services. That's data centers. That's infrastructure.
00:11:51 Keith Teare: It's in kind, but it gets paid for in equity. So it's equity being traded for services.
00:11:58 Andrew Keen: And, of course, in a way, some people might be scratching their heads and thinking, well, why would Google invest in Anthropic when they already have Gemini?
00:12:07 Keith Teare: Because Google is a multi headed hydra. It is
00:12:11 Andrew Keen: All hydras are multi headed, Keith, I think.
00:12:13 Keith Teare: Yeah. Exactly. So, sorry for the redundancy. But it Google is both a player and a vendor. So
00:12:24 Andrew Keen: it really holds all the cards. It'd be interesting to see. And next week, I think Google coming out with their numbers, it'd be interesting to see, what they are, how much they're investing in infrastructure themselves, and where the revenue is coming from on AI and cloud.
00:12:38 Keith Teare: Yeah. But I think it's now beyond doubt that if you add together OpenAI Anthropic, that here's the adulting theme. They are now both committed to spending what is required to deliver a usable service, and they are both building huge mountains of revenue off of the back of that, which will make them the world's two biggest and fastest growing companies ever.
00:13:06 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you're gonna push back on this, but for months, if not years, you've been saying there's only one player in this game, which is OpenAI. And now are you acknowledging, Keith, that this is a two man race, that Anthropic and OpenAI are side by side here?
00:13:25 Keith Teare: I think it's more like a five plus man race. But I think So
00:13:31 Andrew Keen: OpenAI is you used to always argue, well, OpenAI is so far ahead. No one can catch them up. They're gonna be a $10 to $15 trillion dollar company inevitably in the next few years.
00:13:41 Keith Teare: Well, OpenAI are clearly ahead, on all measures, and that's what I've always said by the way. I didn't say they were the only player. I just said they're far ahead, and I still think they're far ahead and will end up being the biggest company of the group. But that said, who are the others? Grok this week acquired Cursor for $60 billion. That's the biggest acquisition in the history of acquisitions, for private
00:14:10 Andrew Keen: And just to be clear, Keith, because not everyone's as much of an insider as you, what is Cursor, and why did Grok is, of course, Musk's AI company. Why would they buy Cursor for 60 bill? I mean, the way we throw around billions of dollars these days, especially on shows like this, it doesn't seem a lot. The $60 billion is an awful lot of money for a starter.
00:14:32 Keith Teare: It's well, the buyer is SpaceX, and SpaceX is, the rumor is it's gonna be valued at $2 trillion when it IPO's in June. So you've gotta think of $60 billion as a percentage of $2 trillion, and it ends up being a stock deal. So there's no cash involved.
00:14:55 Andrew Keen: So Again, some people might say, well, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
00:15:01 Keith Teare: And they're paying 30 times revenue. Cursor's revenue is $2 billion. So they're paying What is Cursor? Cursor is the equivalent of Codex. It's the user interface that people use to use underlying AIs. And, its history is specializing in coding. But as these user interfaces evolve, they end up being used for everything, not just coding.
00:15:27 Andrew Keen: So if, OpenAI has Codex and, Grok has Cursor, what does Anthropic have?
00:15:37 Keith Teare: Anthropic has the Claude app, which is on Windows and Mac. Mhmm. It also, this week, announced Claude Design, which is a Figma or Canva competitor, which is, outstandingly good.
00:15:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I asked my Claude. You as I'm a Claude person. I asked it if it could enable me not to use, Canva, which is an AI kind of design tool. Yeah. And it said, no. Not yet. So it's not an alternative to Canva, although the Canva market, the stock price of Canva crashed after the release of this.
00:16:18 Keith Teare: Well, so you firstly, Claude Design isn't in the Claude app. You've gotta go to a URL on Claude's website to use it. It creates brand assets. So the things that designers highly paid creative designers usually get paid to create for a company, and it does an extremely good job. I used it for SignalRank. Really good. You can then export that into either Figma or Canva and have it become your base, design for everything else you do in those environments. Now if you also use image from OpenAI, you really can start to replace Canva and Figma.
00:16:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although you're a pioneer or certainly very advanced in this. For someone like myself,
00:17:06 Keith Teare: who's more
00:17:07 Andrew Keen: of an everyday user, that's not possible. But, anyway, you put all these things together, and we seem to be seeing the emergence of, I don't know whether you would call it an adult economy, but certainly a more coherent economy. Is that fair, Keith?
00:17:22 Keith Teare: I think that's very fair. That's exactly what's happening. I hope Dario can bite his tongue and stay on this trend.
00:17:30 Andrew Keen: What is it about Dario that pisses you off so much? You're not alone, of course. Yann LeCun, as I said earlier, argues that Yann LeCun should keep his mouth shut when it comes to economics and jobs. Is he just an annoying guy to guys like yourself?
00:17:46 Keith Teare: He gets distracted by ideologically driven narratives that don't serve his business, and that doesn't help him or his business. And he's gotta get become more disciplined. I'm not against him at all. I'm more I'm more giving him advice.
00:18:04 Andrew Keen: Well, it's all interesting. Meanwhile, that's all very short term. Next week, maybe we'll have a Keith Teare tutorial about these people becoming teenagers, but there are longer term consequences. That was a very interesting piece, I thought, in the FT this week. I don't know if you, added it to the newsletter, Keith, about America's revolt is coming in the wired belt. I mean, clearly, the Facebook news this week that they were cutting 10% of staff. The wired belt of people, professionals, people who, have jobs in the late industrial or post industrial economy, I mean, this thing is becoming real, is it?
00:18:50 Keith Teare: Yeah. But I do think there's that's more of a consumer backlash against data centers, driven by the belief that electricity prices will go up, which, any amount of investigation you do will prove to you that is gonna happen. What, government has made deals with all the AI companies that they have to be self sufficient at the level of paying for power, and they're protecting consumers from, the burden of that. But that the but the zeitgeist doesn't yet understand that. So there is this consumer backlash. It's fairly populist, and it's anti big tech. And it is coming from working class communities in poorer towns. That's definitely true. So
00:19:34 Andrew Keen: As opposed so this is so the what's interesting is that the revolt is coming currently from the Rust Belt against the establishment of data centers. The Wired Belt has yet to revolt, although it seems to be brewing.
00:19:51 Keith Teare: Well, there's anxiety, particularly amongst engineers, that, automation is gonna hit, white collar jobs and jobs in tech, every tech firm is having layoffs, everyone. And some of that is unraveling the exuberance of 2021 when money was flowing through the hallways. And some of it is AI
00:20:19 Andrew Keen: literally flowing through the hallways?
00:20:22 Keith Teare: Metaphorically, of course.
00:20:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So I couldn't just pick it up.
00:20:26 Keith Teare: But so some of it is that. It's the unraveling. You know, Salesforce lost 10% of its value yesterday in one day.
00:20:34 Andrew Keen: How much was that? It
00:20:36 Keith Teare: was It's $100 billion? $15 billion, I think, or something like that.
00:20:39 Andrew Keen: Although Salesforce is increasingly seems to be, roadkill. It's a classic company that's roadkill in this new economy, isn't it?
00:20:49 Keith Teare: You know, I think it's probably a buy now. It's the market's over, Salesforce this week announced headless Salesforce, which sounds like a weird thing. But headless Salesforce just means you can use Salesforce using APIs.
00:21:05 Andrew Keen: And headless, of course, gets to the core issue, the longer term issue, which is on the back of many people's minds, the front of many economists' mind, the, on the minds both of the wired belt and the rust belt, and it comes to jobs. What are we gonna do in this new economy as it becomes more and more mature? There was a good piece, I thought, by Alex Imas, Keith, in your newsletter this week, which gets to the core issue of this brave new world. What will be scarce? In other words, what will have value in this new world? And nobody knows the answer. LeCun is critical of Dario because he hasn't really given that a great deal of thought. But the harder you think about it, the trickier it becomes.
00:21:56 Keith Teare: Well, there's logic. You can use logic. You can't really predict outcomes because as we've always said on that was the week, human agency is the key variable. What do people choose to do is the key variable, and that's hard to predict.
00:22:10 Andrew Keen: I hold on that. I mean, there's some truth to that, but however much I mean, everybody wants jobs. Right? I don't think there's anyone in the world who would say would be pleased if all work disappears. But if this AI, as, Imas suggests or, he quotes a new paper by, two very influential economists, David Autor and Neil Thompson, who consider the starker possibility that AI and I'm quoting the piece. AI advances to the point where human expertise loses its economic value altogether. And in that sense, we won't have jobs. We won't have value. So that's the real threat in the long term.
00:22:55 Keith Teare: Yeah. Well, let's do a kind of a deeper dive here and have a kind of an intellectual, time out. The word job is not an economic word. Paid labor
00:23:12 Andrew Keen: is Okay. Well, I agree. Let's leave jobs out of it. The paid labor or value economic value. How are we gonna be paid?
00:23:19 Keith Teare: So pay so value is the product of labor and capital, just to define our terms. And in this article, they rightly say that it's highly likely that, labor will cease to be part of a commodity. And so, the commodity economy we live in where in order to get something, you have to pay for it. And, what is inside of it is labor and capital con congealed, will become just capital, and there will be no labor in it. Now because of that, it ceases to be a commodity. It's no longer a commodity. It's a thing, but it's not a commodity in any economic sense. And it's probably, priced at zero. It's probably
00:24:10 Andrew Keen: So here's what I don't understand. I mean, currently, in the early AI economy, these guys are pricing their products. Why will they ever be priced at zero? There'll still be always some element of labor in it. There's gonna be thought. There's gonna be some entrepreneur who is selling who is using AI to create something of value, isn't there?
00:24:33 Keith Teare: Well, this the article you're talking about, the scare what will be scarce, basically says that, there will not be labor in it. Now that is only a logical proposition. In real life, that might never happen, or it might take a very long time. But it's just a logical proposition. And as a logical proposition, in pure economic terms, it actually makes sense. So, they he the author then says, well, what will be scarce in that world? That's their that's their framing. And what they say will be scarce is reducible down to a single word, creativity, or labor. Labor
00:25:19 Andrew Keen: Yeah. They the term they use is human services. They say from farms, which was obviously the old agricultural economy, to factories, the industrial economy, dot. And they talk about something called, the human services industry, everything from arts to education to hospitality, things that machines can't do.
00:25:42 Keith Teare: Right. And, one example is a nurse. I was just in I had surgery on Monday, and that's my second visit to a hospital in about a month. And, you can't really replace the human compassion and guidance of a nurse in a health situation with robotics. You can probably do some of the functions with robotics, but you're not gonna replace the humanness of it. And there's lots of other examples in this article of humanness, let's call it. And now the hard thing is in a world where commodities have gone and most things are free, what would be the what would drive a person to want to have paid labor? Because they wouldn't need to for their life. And it comes down
00:26:33 Andrew Keen: Well, but this comes, the other issue, which I'm not sure how much this piece addresses is you still have to pay for food. Yeah. And you still have to pay for accommodation. I mean, not everything is free.
00:26:46 Keith Teare: Not in their world. In their in their world and, again, it's a logical proposition, not it's not a prediction. Food is one of the commodities that is essentially free because it's a due to abundance. So what they're really saying is in a world of abundance, what is scarce? They're not just saying what is scarce in the abstract. They're saying in a world of When
00:27:06 Andrew Keen: you say they, who are you talking about? The author of the piece? Yes. Alex Imas or the Yeah. The Thompson auteur white paper?
00:27:15 Keith Teare: Both, actually. Neil Thompson is part of this. And, I think if you really understand labor capital, the commodification of economics in capitalism and what is changing, you can't help but agree with a lot of what's in this article.
00:27:37 Andrew Keen: Well, they're but I'm not sure they're on the same page. They're also concerned. I mean, they don't see this as some utopia. They're very worried with the implications.
00:27:46 Keith Teare: Well, that's a subjective thing whether, there probably were people worried when the twelve hour day went down to an eight hour day that, people will get drunk and be on the streets or something. There's always a
00:28:02 Andrew Keen: Or on their cell
00:28:03 Keith Teare: phones. Yeah. There's always, the elite always have a dire view of the masses unless the masses are preoccupied with necessity, and, spending their money on cigarettes and beer, which is frowned upon, but is better than
00:28:20 Andrew Keen: So to quote the piece, the future of work, if the model is right, the durable jobs of the future won't be about monitoring AI systems or prompt engineering. Though those are transitional jobs in the automated sector. The durable jobs will be in the relational sector where the human element is the product itself. Some already exist in a growing, no as you say, nurses, therapists, teachers, boutique fitness instructors, personal chefs, bespoke tailors, craft brewers, live performers, spiritual guides, childcare workers, and many varieties of hospitality and care work. So that's somewhat people should be doing. There was a piece a couple of weeks ago about how nursing now has become the most popular major in university. Certainly, it might be wiser to study nursing than law or engineering or software.
00:29:10 Keith Teare: Well, human to human, I think is the broader umbrella there. And, it's kind of interesting if you think about, the individual. The individual, as a social animal needs other humans. And a lot of that is through family, friends, through work, which if that goes away, is missing. Probably religion makes a comeback.
00:29:37 Andrew Keen: I think it's already making a comeback. You but, there is the political element here, and you quote Reid Hoffman, one of the few Silicon Valley billionaires who's clearly on the left. He writes, in his new substack faith in the possible. Technology's arc bend I mean, obviously, borrowed from Martin Luther King. Technology's arc bends towards access, but it does not bend on its own. So that bending still requires a third force. It's not gonna come just through Anthropic or OpenAI. It's gotta come through the government. Doesn't it, Keith?
00:30:16 Keith Teare: Yeah. It's interesting going back to the beginning, the Brockman Altman interview. They talked about the future in this context. And, Altman said, well, there's three possibilities. His favorite possibility was that, abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome. He had two other worse outcomes. One of which was apocalyptic.
00:30:47 Andrew Keen: So in other words, the best case scenario is more inequality according to Sam?
00:30:53 Keith Teare: He thinks that will happen. Now what is missing is what Reid Hoffman brings to the table, which is human agency, when faced with abundance as an open question. What should we do with the, I don't think the right word is value, but wealth. What should we do with the wealth that's created through automation? And, the obvious answer is, everything that humans need to enjoy their life should be improved. Travel, teaching, education, health, and so on.
00:31:31 Andrew Keen: But I think the obvious or certainly from a progressive point of view, the logic is that AI is should be commonly owned by all of us because we're all contributing to it. So we should all be beneficiaries rather than just a tiny group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Yann LeCun, Dario Amodei.
00:31:56 Keith Teare: Yeah. That's the thesis in, that famous book for us, the living, the, Robert Heinlein wrote during the second World War, actually, where he talked about, a heritage, bonus that, basically, the bonus for being human and living at a time when human history has evolved towards automation and, the end of commodities, is that there's a bonus that all humans get. They call it the heritage check, which came to people every month or every week. And, that came from the Austrian school of, monetary economics that believes that printing money is not inflationary as long as there's consumption.
00:32:44 Andrew Keen: But, I mean, the heritage, you're always talking about this post money economy. If you get a heritage check, whatever that means, how are you gonna spend it if there's no longer any money?
00:32:55 Keith Teare: Yeah. Money Musk makes this point that, money is, hard for us symbolically to, remove from our minds. But money is just, a way of where scarce resources are allocated, and that people with money get more than people without money. Once there is no scarce resources, the function of money is massively reduced.
00:33:22 Andrew Keen: Well, we got the very short term. We got the very long term. Somewhere in between, we're beginning to friend the machine. My win interview of the week is with, a Canadian writer, Victoria Hetherington, who has a new book out, The Friend Machine, on the trail of AI companionship. I know, Keith, you looked at the interview and thought that she didn't respond to my questions. What's your sense of our current relationship with machines? Is this the way to end our loneliness? You talked about all this isolation.
00:33:58 Keith Teare: Well, look, she there is a dimension of that. I mean, when I use, my AI agent every day, the OpenAI one, it feels like you're talking to a being because it's doing things for you and coming back with answers. So there is certainly a kind of a presence which is proactive, like you would only be able to have with a sentient being. And so humans are wide open to that relationship. What she talks about is taking that to an extreme where, she has examples of people forming sexual relationships with robots that have AIs attached to them and stuff like that. That is a bit I agree with her. That's the sad version. It's when loneliness, isn't resolved through human to human connection, but it resolved through human to machine connection. I don't think that is a good outcome for the human race. I doubt it's the gonna be the main outcome for most people. I think more time with other humans is the big win.
00:35:06 Andrew Keen: Well, you and I spent a lot of time together, Keith, and we're human. That was the week, the week that AI, at least according to Keith Teare, the week that AI leaders matured. Some people might say that was not very hard given how immature they've been, but we shall see. This is, ongoing. Next week, I'm sure we will talk about some crisis or crash or other opportunity. Keep well, Keith, and we will talk next week.
00:35:36 Keith Teare: Bye, everyone.