Crowning Our Engineer Kings: Jensen Huang for President?

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, 08/10/2026 [ed.: recorded Saturday, October 10, 2026]. Saturdays are our day with Keith Teare of That Was the Week. To summarize, tech news of the week, it hasn't been a huge week. I was really struck with an interesting piece in The New York Times, an op-ed by Stephen Witt, on Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA. The title of the piece was he's the most powerful engineer on Earth. Here's why he thinks AI is going great. Witt was on the show, my show last year. His book, The Thinking Machine, which is, I think, the authoritative book on Huang and NVIDIA won the FT Business Book of the Year last week [ed.: the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 was announced in December 2025]. And, Witt is in some ways ambivalent and critical of Huang because he thinks that he doesn't quite understand everything about AI, which is a debatable issue. But what really struck me about the Witt piece was how engineers have become, for better or worse, all powerful in the world today. There was another important influential book brought out last year by Dan Wang, a Canadian Chinese journalist called Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, in which he broke America and China down as America as a society ruled by lawyers and China as society ruled by engineers. And I wonder whether, Witt's prominence, his wealth, his power, Witt — not Witt, Huang. Witt notes that, Trump has been very influenced by, Huang. Whether that reflects the increasing power of engineers in our society. Keith, you often talk about — and I don't know if you call it the engineering ethic, but the ways in which engineers look at the world. Huang is clearly a remarkably brilliant engineer. I mean, even Witt, who's somewhat critical of him, acknowledges that he's brilliant. Is there a — in your mind, is there a — an engineering ethic, a way of looking at the world, which perhaps Jensen Huang epitomizes?

00:02:57 Keith Teare: I think there is a way engineers look at the world, although I wouldn't call it an ethic because that implies value judgments, which I think engineers are very widely spread across the spectrum of value judgments. So I don't think it's an ethic, but I think it's, accepting the responsibility to make something work is an engineering ethos, if you will, probably more than an ethic. That's their job. You know, when you — and that goes way back. I don't even think that's new whether it was Stephenson's steam engine, the Golden Gate Bridge, or AI, I think engineers in general are trained and have the task of making things work. You — usually for good, but that's an open question. There are some engineers who are quite happy to do — make things work for bad ends as well.

00:03:54 Andrew Keen: Your editorial this week focuses on — you don't call it the ethic of engineering, the principle of engineering. You focus on a really interesting, I thought, interview on, the Ezra Klein show between Klein and Arvind Narayanan, who's a Princeton, computer scientist and expert on AI. Does Narayanan, in your view, represent, if not the ethic of engineering, engineer when it comes to making sense of AI?

00:04:28 Keith Teare: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. He — I thought it was a great interview. And I think Ezra Klein, actually, if you look at his interviews over the last three weeks, is double-clicking on the whole discussion around AI, and potential problems with AI. And he isn't happy just to talk to people that reinforce his own instincts. He's talking across the spectrum, and this was the most recent one. Of course, he talked to Jensen Huang, prior to that, and he's—

00:05:04 Andrew Keen: And we talked about that, and that was another, I thought, really interesting interview in which Huang was very clear, very articulate about his sense that it was the frontier AI companies who had the responsibility. I'm not sure if it was a moral or a business, a combination of moral and business responsibility [unclear] to bring their products to market if they were dangerous.

00:05:26 Keith Teare: Yeah. I mean, I think the best thing about this interview is that Arvind is definitive. I mean, I thought Jensen Huang was as well, but this is, if anything, even more definitive. In drawing a line between computer code and, electronics hardware and, organic consciousness, And just saying, you know, you can't really cross that line. There's no conversation to be had. The — this is something built by engineers, can be controlled by engineers, and it is engineers who have the job to do it. Now that doesn't mean there aren't political or social dimensions to it that engineers have, you know, no expertise in discussing. Of course, there are. But at root, he makes very clear that he believes at least that, this is still a very early stage technology that is largely an engineering set of tasks.

00:06:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I don't disagree with you, although I think you slightly over — you exaggerate the disagreement between Klein and Narayanan. I think — I mean, if anything, they mostly agreed. I mean, Narayanan came into, Klein's camp when he made it very clear that he thought AI needed to be regulated. And you may disagree, but I don't think Klein believes that AI can have consciousness. I think he's very clear, and he's — he said it not just in that interview, but in many other interviews that he doesn't believe it can have consciousness. So they're basically on the same page. I mean, do you think that's wrong?

00:07:12 Keith Teare: It's pretty hard to tell because Klein expresses his disagreement through facial gestures and, you know, kind of sounds.

00:07:24 Andrew Keen: I only listen, so I can't see his facial gestures. But from the audio, he sounds — I mean, as a journalist, he's asking questions, and he's trying to be relatively objective. There is a camp of people who believe that could have consciousness, so he's willing to at least talk to them. He's had a lot of those on the show too.

00:07:44 Keith Teare: Yeah. So let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that you're right, because I definitely don't have a strong case that you're wrong. And I admire him for the breadth and pace at which he's doing these interviews and shining a light on areas that are, murky at the best. So it's all to the good, really, and I thought this was the most recent example of a good interview. I do think that, let's get rid of the idea of consciousness, but there's certainly the belief — and this is due to the fact that AI is probabilistic, not deterministic. That is to say, Satya Nadella says this morning, you can't go and find the code that made a bad thing happen because bad things are not coded. When an AI doesn't follow your directions or follows them badly, it's doing it because it isn't yet good enough to not do that. It, you know, it — its ability to under — understand context is still somewhat restricted, and it's working off of skills, which are text files that describe its goals, which are not fully comprehensive. And so there's no doubt that AI is currently not controllable as in it won't precisely do what you want it to do unless you work hard to—

00:09:17 Andrew Keen: Sounds like children. Right?

00:09:19 Keith Teare: It — well, well, it is a bit — a little bit like children in that their frontal cortex hasn't developed, so they can do random things. It is a little bit like that. And now that's why it's an engineering problem because it's a function of the immaturity of AI, not a function of its core nature.

00:09:38 Andrew Keen: And let me come back then to this idea. You rejected the idea there's such a thing as an engineering ethic. I would actually disagree with that in the sense that we live in a society where, for better or worse, engineers are enormously powerful, influential, and wealthy. I mean, Huang is exhibit A, B, and C in that, and he has the ear, according to Witt, it seems from the recent conference, it's true he has the ear of the current American president. For better or worse, it is engineers making moral decisions about their products. Whether or not you agree with those moral decisions is another matter. But there seems, as you've noted many times, maybe there's a — an intramural debate amongst engineers between people like Amodei and, Huang about what AI can and can't do. Isn't that fair that they're the ones who are arguing about this? I mean, some philosophers are getting involved, but it's basically a debate amongst technologists about what AI can and can't do.

00:10:53 Keith Teare: I, you know, I actually don't think that's exclusively true, but I wanna take on board what you said because I think what you said, it, has truth in it. Especially the fact that, if you do want to use the word, ethic, you just described two very different engineers who have very different views. So as long as ethic is not intended to be a singular ethic, but is a plural, yes, engineers do have, ethics. And I would say, younger engineers have more than older engineers. They're part of a generation that's grown up, extremely closeted from harsh realities of the world. And, you know, some people use the word woke to describe the impact of that, the touchy-feely. And a lot of engineers, especially, hired by Anthropic this week made the point that, in their terms and conditions that humans will be banned for being cruel to Claude. And that they're seeing—

00:12:02 Andrew Keen: That was, Anthropic bans abusive or cruel behavior towards Claude. You know, you're obviously not a fan of that. And I — I'm not a technologist, so I can't claim to really understand a lot of the debates about whether or not AI has consciousness. But the one argument to be made in support of that is I take your point that maybe it — and the AI isn't conscious. It's not a human being. But a lot of people think it is, for better or worse. And we live in a culture where people are abusive or cruel, especially in social media towards one another, towards our politicians. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, all they're doing is requiring politeness in their space. It's rather like a restaurant that requires you to wear shoes or a shirt.

00:12:59 Keith Teare: But, Andrew, imagine just let's replace Claude with Facebook. What if Facebook said it's gonna ban people that are abusive or cruel to Facebook?

00:13:09 Andrew Keen: Some people might think that was a good thing. I wouldn't — I mean—

00:13:11 Keith Teare: There's a — banning people that are abusive or cruel to Microsoft Word. This is just software. This is just code.

00:13:21 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But it's — yeah. I understand that, and you make that point every week, and I don't disagree. But it's the code that determines, how we live. I mean, this week, you also talk about how AI agents now have established, a protocol established by Bret Taylor. So the [unclear] of the world now becoming more and more real. We talked about that last week. So this is, for better or worse, it's our common language. So the fact that — I mean, I agree with you in a way on Anthropic that it's slightly ludicrous. But on the other hand, it's encouraging people to behave themselves, to be polite. And then in a sense, if AI is us, if it is a mirror, then we're just being polite to ourselves.

00:14:11 Keith Teare: Yeah. Well, look. You and I were both raised in the UK, and one of the things about the UK — I don't know about your mom, but my mom used to hit me if I was rude.

00:14:21 Andrew Keen: You're from the working class is much more violent. I'm from the upper classes.

00:14:25 Keith Teare: Well, I'm still sure you weren't allowed to be rude without and get away with it.

00:14:29 Andrew Keen: Well, we used to, beat our parents up there in the working class. The parents beat the kids up.

00:14:35 Keith Teare: But of course, you know, we all want to be civil. We all want to be polite and it's not unreasonable to us for politeness, but you know, I don't think people even require politeness towards animals. Like if I take my dog in the park, if the dog is even a little bit unruly, other people will get aggressive and angry with it. It — with—

00:14:58 Andrew Keen: Angry with the dog or with you?

00:15:00 Keith Teare: Both. And they'll blame the dog, not me most of the time. And—

00:15:07 Andrew Keen: Well, you have a really bad behaved dog.

00:15:09 Keith Teare: What I'm saying is we humans are perfectly capable of being nice and polite to each other whilst also not extending human privileges to inanimate objects. And, you know, it is bizarre to me that this discussion is even happening.

00:15:31 Andrew Keen: I think that's very much of — and, again, coming using this term, it's an engineering ethic in the sense that you believe that machines can't think. Therefore, any idea that humans should or shouldn't be allowed to insult machines is stupid, which I don't necessarily disagree with, but it seems a little categorical.

00:15:49 Keith Teare: I will say — I will say, Andrew, I don't do it. I actually say thank you and please.

00:15:55 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So do I. To my — well, that's our English, our common English background.

00:15:58 Keith Teare: Yeah. I — so I don't do it. And I haven't really got a dog in the race or a horse in the race.

00:16:02 Andrew Keen: What about the dog?

00:16:04 Keith Teare: Exactly. But—

00:16:05 Andrew Keen: If you keep on mentioning the dog, it's gonna start barking in a minute and ruin our conversation.

00:16:09 Keith Teare: But going back to your core thing about ethics, the — these are, completely anti-human ethics. To punish a human, but how it works with software is at core, not pro-software. It's anti-human.

00:16:27 Andrew Keen: I don't agree. I think it's, a soft humanism. Maybe it's a misplaced humanism. Maybe it's a slightly infantile human. It's a slightly human humanism. It's just requiring — well, it's not requiring politeness in — and, also, it's like a restaurant. People say, well, now I go to a restaurant. I have every right to wear or not wear whatever I want. Anthropic has every right. It owns its product. It owns its space. It has every right to throw people out if they're rude to its product.

00:16:59 Keith Teare: You've seen these movies. I'm sure everyone will relate to this, where, you know, somebody throws their cell phone out of the car. Nobody says, hey. You're being cruel to your cell phone. It — the cell phone didn't work properly. Throw it out of the car.

00:17:14 Andrew Keen: I haven't seen a film.

00:17:15 Keith Teare: Or smash it on a desk. I've seen lots of, movies that have scenes like that. I was actually once driving with my CFO at RealNames, Jim Strawbridge, who was a lawyer from Wilson Sonsini by trade. Great guy. Very clever, thoughtful. He's not very technical. His cell phone didn't work, and he literally was banging it and screaming at it. It's quite normal for humans to get angry with software, especially when it doesn't do what they want it to do. And that's gonna happen, and I don't think you can, you can't characterize that the same as being mean to each other as humans. It's different.

00:17:53 Andrew Keen: But I think the thing — and Mustafa Suleyman at, Microsoft has been very explicit on this. He's made it clear. I think it's a really interesting and important debate that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have made a mistake in that they've humanized the bots. They've made them look or made them seem human, which is not true. And therefore, it's encouraged us to think of these bots, these, AIs as human. We're seeing it in a way with the new AI bots. Although, I think micro — Facebook has done — made an effort to make them not so much human as cartoon-like. But the reality is that for kids in particular, when they go on to these products, when you talk to one of these bots, they do seem human. Maybe they're not, and we won't understand that.

00:18:51 Keith Teare: I agree with that. They're not — I mean, they're trained. By the way, that's a separate discussion how they're trained, so we should come back to that. But they're trained to be able to dialogue with a human on task set by the human. So, yes, they — and some of them represent themselves as human, avatars and or characters—

00:19:15 Andrew Keen: Seem to be in the way in which they use language. And my experience also with — and I don't think I use AI as much as you because nobody does, but, I use it quite a lot. And my experience is that at first, they seem sort of human. And then after a while, once you get used to them and you learn their strengths and weaknesses, you understand that they're not. So it requires a little bit of time and experience to kind of get through their — the front window — the window of their supposed humanity. But after a while, it's clear they're not human.

00:19:57 Keith Teare: Yeah. So, I mean, they're trained to mimic being human. So — and that's their training. That's a choice that we make. Why? Because it'll — it — it's easier for us to relate to them. In fact, the trend — a lot of this week's conversation was about how, everything will ultimately move to voice, and then it's gonna even sound more human because the current voice technology is extremely good at disguising the fact that you're talking to software.

00:20:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, we've talked about that before that — why even now it feels if we're in the very early stage of this revolution. It may seem very dramatic, but as you know, with voice and video, when we're actually talking to a bot that looks and sounds human, then it will be a different situation. So—

00:20:41 Keith Teare: You remember that guy who got fired from Google about a year ago because he said—

00:20:46 Andrew Keen: Couple of years ago. Yeah. It created a great deal of controversy.

00:20:49 Keith Teare: And he said, the reason was he said that Gemini [ed.: Blake Lemoine, fired by Google in 2022, said its LaMDA model was sentient] is sentient. Well, things have moved on, haven't they? I mean, if you're just measuring that conversation, things have moved on, but actually nothing's really changed, in terms of what is it. But what's changed is what do we think it is? And your points are well taken that there are more and more people thinking that this is, I don't think we have the language for it yet. So I use words like a being or sentient or, has consciousness. I think what people are really saying is they don't wanna be, the — they relate to it as if it's alive. That's really what they're saying.

00:21:37 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I did a show this week. Maybe we can talk about it next week. I actually haven't posted it yet with, an international relations expert who's written a new book about our obsession with extraterrestrial UFOs. And he's made the argument that it sort of reflects our new reality and may indeed require a rethinking of the international system. So I think our obsession or some people's obsession with the consciousness of AI is part of a broader science fictional culture or a culture in which science fiction is increasingly central. And it's not just AIs, it's UFOs, and any other nonhuman phenomenon that's considered some reality of one kind or another.

00:22:28 Keith Teare: Yeah. But at least an alien, you would, who has, you know, the wherewithal to build a spaceship that can arrive on Earth, you would credit them with being sentient.

00:22:40 Andrew Keen: Right. Although, you know, given the sort of the traditional narratives of Hollywood, a lot of people, I think, argue that The Manchurian Candidate is being replayed now with AI. Then maybe, you know, it's aliens or some other force that has infiltrated us. I'm sure we'll see all sorts of — yeah — films on that. But let me come back to this issue of, the ethic or the philosophy of the engineer. I did an interview, which is, your interview of the week with, Matthew Botvinick. He heads up, the Anthropic Institute when it comes to politics. He's an impressive guy, law, MIT, teacher, Yale law degree expert on AI. And, he has a new book out, AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond. And I think, for better or worse, he presents the engineering take on democracy, how to reengineer tech — technology. Is there an alternative to the — I know you're not necessarily keen on this term. I can't think of another one. An alternative to an ethic, a philosophy of the engineer, which is credible. I mean, you can create straw men and say it's ignorance or stupidity. But is there an alternative to it?

00:24:04 Keith Teare: Well, look, I — I'm strongly against the idea that engineers have some special insight that should allow us to cede power to them. I don't think engineers and power belong in the same sentence if by power we're talking about societal or political power.

00:24:23 Andrew Keen: But they do. But for better or worse, they — again, because of the reality of our economy and maybe our culture, they do have enormous power. I mean, somebody like Huang, even his economic power, he has massive power.

00:24:37 Keith Teare: Well, look, let me put it plainly. I'd rather Trump was president than Huang. Whatever Trump's flaws, he's at least is a politician.

00:24:50 Andrew Keen: That's a [unclear] — I'm surprised. I'm actually surprised you say that. I would have thought you would have preferred Huang over Trump. Why do you argue that?

00:25:00 Keith Teare: Because I don't think society is logical. I think society is nuanced and complicated and I think you have to represent the people. And I think, an engineering-led society feels a little bit more like a demagogic one to me.

00:25:22 Andrew Keen: Well, that's China then. So Dan Wang's right in his argument about China's quest to engineer the future.

00:25:31 Keith Teare: Yeah. Look, democracy is about winning votes, preferably, more granular as well. The more decisions are taken, by votes, the better in my view. And then you need operators to execute decisions, and engineers are part of the operator set. It — that doesn't mean a specific engineer couldn't become a politician. They could. But engineers collectively, would represent some kind of, drone-like society.

00:26:04 Andrew Keen: But then wouldn't that justify, say — I mean, the engineer wouldn't ban — or maybe only a certain kind of engineer bans abusive or cruel behavior on a — on an AI platform. Doesn't that — isn't that an argument for allowing the banning of abusive or cruel behavior towards AIs because the world is more complicated? It's messier. Trump might do it. Huang wouldn't.

00:26:32 Keith Teare: I'll never cross that line, Andrew. I mean, I just think AI is software code and end of story. So, there's no dimension in which it plays a role in determining opinion, behavior, or anything else for that matter. It — it's just a tool like a hammer. And so — no. But the conversation you started is more interesting, which — by the way, I couldn't properly understand what the Anthropic Institute guy was really arguing. He seemed to say—

00:27:04 Andrew Keen: You may not be — yeah. I don't know. I mean, I — to be fair, I hadn't — I — I'd browsed his book. I mean, but he — again, it comes back to this idea of an engineering ethic. He seems to, at least in his analysis of politics — and maybe this reflects this new Anthropic Institute, which is a pretty big deal. He, you know, it's part of what they're trying to do in terms of their sense of responsibility of engineering the future.

00:27:37 Keith Teare: I think it's fairly simple. I mean, do — democracy is a word we use to describe, the organization of nations, effectively nations. And, you know, in the archetypal model, it involves, a legislature and executive and a judicial branch of government. And there are elections in every n years, different in different countries. And underlying that democracy is the economy. It's pretty hard to find good democracies with bad economies. You know, it's not impossible, but on the whole, a rich democracy needs a good economy.

00:28:25 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I don't think Jensen Huang would disagree with you on that. I mean, he would argue that he's driving a better economy.

00:28:32 Keith Teare: And — correct. And so the debate around abundance is directly related to the debate around democracy for me. And if America truly is in decline and China is rising at the economic level, which I think is pretty indisputable, trend-wise at least, China hasn't eclipsed the States yet for sure, but it's certainly accelerating and catching up rapidly over the last thirty years, then you question whether American democracy can be sustained when the economy isn't delivering. And—

00:29:10 Andrew Keen: But it's only delivering for the Jensen Huangs of the world as opposed to the majority of people. I mean, that's the most — that's the big critique, I think. And Botvinick's argument, by the way, is that and suggesting that this enables the Trumps and the Modis and the Orbáns of the world to take advantage with their populism. Although, I know you think this, and I don't necessarily disagree. I mean, populism is just a word that's often used by some people, as a critique. I mean, anyone who's populist is bad, which I think is also wrong, but that's another issue.

00:29:47 Keith Teare: Well, I put it in my editorial. I think populism — if you define populism, it's the people are paying attention and have an opinion. And, it's scary as hell to politicians when the people wake up and have an opinion because they're — then they're in quotes out of control.

00:30:05 Andrew Keen: Well, they're both, and to be fair, I mean, his argument in — certainly in AI and Political Freedom is then maybe some of these populists like Trump and Orbán are legitimately elected, but then when they come to power, they dismantle democracy. So I am assuming you're not in favor of that.

00:30:21 Keith Teare: Well, I don't think Trump is a populist. I think he's the symptom of populism.

00:30:28 Andrew Keen: Okay. Well, let's say — or let — I don't wanna talk about Trump. Let's talk about Orbán. I mean, something—

00:30:32 Keith Teare: Even Orbán. Orbán was the inheritor of Hungarian anger at unlimited immigration coming from North Africa through their borders [ed.: the 2015 migrant flows through Hungary came mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq via the Balkans].

00:30:46 Andrew Keen: Okay. But that — but there's no doubt that people like Orbán, Modi, maybe Trump, seem to be dismantling some aspects of democratic infrastructure, which I assume you're not in favor of. They're leaving aside their policies.

00:31:06 Keith Teare: I don't really recognize that as a description. I mean, Orbán was just elected out. So how much damage did he really do? I mean, the Hungarian people just voted him out, so he obviously didn't take — I mean—

00:31:18 Andrew Keen: Right. Yeah. Okay. So let's — I don't wanna get — so let's go back to this issue of you've made it clear that politics is a messy, complicated, sometimes irrational business. You'd rather have Trump as president than Huang. You don't want an engineering president, which is maybe what Plato warned us about, philosopher presidents, or what Socrates at least warned us about.

00:31:45 Keith Teare: Yeah. Plato is in favor of it.

00:31:47 Andrew Keen: Right. Well, that's a — that I had a — an interesting, podcast this week on the London Review of Books, which suggests that wasn't the case. But, anyway, that's another subject. Then shouldn't we be somewhat sympathetic to the maybe irrational behavior of Anthropic? Or I know there was another news story this week. Jill Lepore went to Frankfurt. Jill Lepore is a very influential Harvard historian, and she urged publishers to declare their independence from big tech. When I sent that over to you, you you replied with one word, dinosaur, which may be true. Maybe big tech, bet the big publishing is the dinosaur compared to big tech. But isn't, again, that the human response, a little irrational, a little shortsighted?

00:32:40 Keith Teare: Yeah. Look. Yeah. The whole point of debate is to acknowledge and recognize, you know, a myriad of different reactions to the evolution of society. And, a dinosaur response, which is just another way of saying saving the past or the status quo, to be more respectful about it, is always one of the dominant responses to change. And so then you have to ask the question, is the change good or bad? I personally think publishing has never been stronger. It's just that the publishing industry is weak, but publishing itself is flourishing. We are publishing now.

00:33:25 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But in your editor, you said, are you afraid of your light bulbs? That's your editorial head—

00:33:33 Keith Teare: That comes from the Arvind interview. He used that phrase.

00:33:37 Andrew Keen: Right. But you're using it to suggest that it's clearly an absurd — no one's against their light bulbs. No one's scared of the light bulbs. But there have always been — every new technology people are scared of. When people went to the first movie, they all ran out of the theater because they thought that the train descending on them was gonna hit them. And I assume even when light bulbs were involves — were invented, some people at first were nervous that they would burst or they were watching them or they were the creation of some sort of alien creature. So isn't it very human to be scared of new technology?

00:34:13 Keith Teare: It is. Yeah. Absolutely. But that's why you need people like me and others who explain as clearly as possible that isn't the, you know, that response is, whilst understandable, not the — not correct.

00:34:34 Andrew Keen: But then why not have Jensen Huang as president? And he would just make it clear. He would just announce to everyone that this technology is good and you should—

00:34:42 Keith Teare: Well, if society was only asking one question, which is what should we do with technology, then Jensen Huang might be a very good president. But, unfortunately, for Jensen, we ask a lot more than one question. Running society involved being able to answer every question. And so, technology has its place as a key driver of the economy. It's certainly very important, but it's not equal to a 100% of what we need to achieve. Just take the question of how to get the economic wealth that comes from technology into the — into everyone's hands. That's not a Jensen Huang question. He may have an opinion on it.

00:35:21 Andrew Keen: Although, I'm guessing that the Anthropic Institute, they're also economists working on fixes. Should we trust the engineers who come up with fixes to that? I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, Matt — Matthew Botvinick touches on this. But are there engineering solutions, Keith, to inequality, for example?

00:35:47 Keith Teare: There are mechanical solutions, but they're not engineering solutions because they involve opinion. So for example, my opinion is that, the rewards of automation should be owned by all citizens, not just of the US. And that you would do that through share ownership in all of the, capitalist enterprises that are mostly driving that wealth growth.

00:36:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We talked about that last week, the funds. So there — I'm not sure I've practiced that.

00:36:27 Keith Teare: But that's an opinion, and I have to fight for it. And, you know, I haven't persuaded you of it. So there's a thousand opinions. You know, democracy is about, figuring out how to get an outcome that most people will support.

00:36:46 Andrew Keen: So then what about democracy and AI? I mean, what happens — and we've talked about this a lot in the past. There seems to be, certainly in the US, a majority of people who maybe wrongly don't trust AI, maybe think it's sentient, maybe think that big tech is destroying their freedom, destroying their wealth. So a lot of people don't want data centers. So isn't that — doesn't that legitimize that?

00:37:12 Keith Teare: I think there's a close affinity between democracy and AI. I — if you think of AI as making intelligence available to everyone equally, which it almost already is. That means you have educated citizens. I would imagine that there'll be more populism due to AI, not less, because you'll have more educated citizens with more opinions.

00:37:39 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I'm not sure everyone would agree that education and populism go together. But, finally, I also did an interview with the Nobel Prize winner from 2014, an Indian-based guy, Kailash Satyarthi. He's just on a tour of Silicon Valley, and he's a big fan of the power of comp — compassion. That's what his work is focused on. He got the Nobel Prize for the work he did protecting, exploited children. He believes — and he's not alone in this sense. I had Geoffrey Hinton on the show last year, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who argued that AI should incorporate female values or feminist values. He's been making the argument in Silicon Valley that AI needs to incorporate the value of compassion. He's open-minded on AI at the moment. He thinks it has great power, but he's nervous about it. Is this right, Keith? I mean, I take your point that AI can't be sentient. It's not a person, doesn't have a soul, can't think for itself. But can we incorporate values into it, like compassion or feminist thought?

00:38:58 Keith Teare: I think it's—

00:38:59 Andrew Keen: And should we?

00:39:01 Keith Teare: I think it's very dangerous, and we shouldn't. You know, Anthropic is actually doing this. It — its current training—

00:39:10 Andrew Keen: I knew you were gonna come back to Anthropic.

00:39:12 Keith Teare: Well, it's a slightly different dimension. Its current training, proudly asserts that it is training Claude to disagree with the human using it if it feels uncomfortable with what's being asked. And so Claude is being trained to believe that it is a conscious being with decision-making power, and that's an explicit choice by Anthropic. OpenAI isn't doing that. The open models don't do that. So the idea that you can have in your mind a bit like Plato, the idea of the perfect, instrument of your thoughts, if you will. And you can craft that instrument and train it even at the expense of telling its human users no, or worse still spying on them and exposing them, which has happened due to training, not because the AI is out of control. It's actually in control. It's training. That whole idea that you can build an AI, you know, that you would want us all to be like is the essence of anti-democracy and dictatorship.

00:40:31 Andrew Keen: But you just — I mean, I take your point, but you just said that all AI systems have human values in them. So how are we gonna determine them? You don't like the Anthropic one, and you've made that clear many times.

00:40:48 Keith Teare: Well, they're not hard.

00:40:49 Andrew Keen: You also linked this week to a piece by Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who seems — I'm not sure why — whether he believes that value should be incorporated into superintelligence. But what do you think? I mean, what kind of value should be incorporated into these systems? Not Anthropic. I know you don't like them.

00:41:09 Keith Teare: There shouldn't be any values. This is software code. There should be intelligence, period. And you should be able to, as a human, ask it anything, and it should be able to deliver to you intelligence around that topic without having an opinion. So the idea that you should put values into AI is the opposite of what you should do. We humans have values. AI is our tool. And if you put values into an AI, by definition, you are, turning off the opinions of everyone who disagrees with those values. So the essence of a democratic—

00:41:49 Andrew Keen: It's completely neutral. This seems to be completely neutral. This sounds to me the maybe almost the way the utopian — a utopianism of the engineer, the idea that you could ever create—

00:42:03 Keith Teare: No. An AI isn't.

00:42:04 Andrew Keen: An algorithm which is completely neutral.

00:42:07 Keith Teare: Well, it already is neutral unless you explicitly train it not to be. It — by definition on day one, unless you tell it differently—

00:42:16 Andrew Keen: What do you mean it always is? I mean, doesn't it depend on what's incorporated into it? It's got — no. It's trained.

00:42:22 Keith Teare: Andrew, it's trained on a 100% of the world's output today. Every opinion you can imagine is in there. If you bias it towards any single stream of opinion, you've cut off the rest. By definition, you should leave it neutral.

00:42:44 Andrew Keen: We will see. This will be an endless subject. I suspect Keith has the ethic of the engineer, but he may not. Maybe that's the wrong way of putting it. Fascinating conversation, Keith. We will be back next week. Have a good week, everyone, and we will see you in a week to talk more technology.

00:43:01 Keith Teare: Indeed. We will. And Tottenham won. Manchester United won, just in case you're all wondering.

00:43:07 Andrew Keen: Yeah. That's the, that's not the ethic of the engineer. That's the ethic of the incompetent.