Episodes

It hasn’t always been easy being Gary Marcus these last few years. OpenAI’s most persistently outspoken AI sceptic has been in minority, sometimes of one, in his critique both of Sam Altman’s claims about the imminence of AGI as well as the general “intelligence” and economic viability of ChatGPT. Since the supposedly “ botched ” release of GPT-5, however, even Sam Altman seems to want to be Gary Marcus. For Gary, who has endured what he diplomatically calls "an unbelievable amount of s**t" for ...

Maybe he never went away. But Dr Strangelove is back now at the heart of America’s new military-industrial-digital complex. And Strangelove 2.0 might offer an even more existential threat than Kubrick’s original cigar-chewing model played with such absurdist aplomb by the great Peter Sellers. While the first Strangelove was just dumb, today’s powers-that-be at the Pentagon are both stupid and corrupt. That, at least, is the worrying view of Ben Freeman , the director of Democratizing Foreign Pol...

What’s the matter with America? We’ve been told for years about the dumb working class MAGA voter. That they are exploited by Trump, that their interests are the reverse of a self-interested Republican cultural or economic elite. But according to the iconoclastic Tablet magazine contributor Michael Lind , we’ve got it the wrong way around. MAGA Voters are anything but stupid, he argues. That's why they don't care what dissenting podcasters like Tucker Carlson think. Instead, they're making rati...

For lonely young men who have forgotten how to read, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick some some simple advice: Get Queer Quicker. And to make her point, Patrick discusses five great books on today’s male identity crisis - including from Keen On alums like Jessa Crispin and Andrew Lipstein . Patrick argues that reports of the literary man's death are greatly exaggerated - he's just evolved beyond the Philip Roth archetype. From Michael Douglas movies to Danish masculinity models, from to...

Those who do win . Those are Keith Teare’s immortal words to describe the winners of today’s Silicon Valley battle to control tomorrow’s AI world. But the real question, of course, is what to do t o win this war. The battle (to excuse all these blunt military metaphors) is to assemble the AI pieces to reassemble what Keith calls the “jigsaw” of our new chat centric world. And to do that, the veteran start-up entrepreneur advises, requires owning “the front door”. Yet as Keith acknowledges, we're...

Is the history of New York City the heart of the American story? Or does it exist in parallel, perhaps even independently, from the main American narrative. As with everything about the Big Apple ( so good they named it twice), the answer is both. Or everything. At least according to Jonathan Mahler , author of The Gods of New York , a new history of the egoists and opportunists who remade the city in the 1980s. It’s the story of Donald Trump, of course, as well as Rudi Guiliani, Ed Koch, Spike ...

It’s not often that there’s sunny news on the environmental front, especially from grizzled activists like the great Bill McKibben . But in his new book, Here Comes the Sun , McKibben argues that the sun - or, at least, solar power - might actually save the earth. There’s a pagan quality to McKibben’s manichaean message: the sun, he says, offers both last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. McKibben's optimism, he guarantees, is anything but naive cheerleading—it's ground...

Who is to blame for the redistricting farce that many fear is breaking American democracy? There’s Trump, of course, and his gang of MAGA crazies. But according to David Daley , the author of Antidemocratic, Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, the real culprit is anything but crazy. It’s John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In a devastating 2019 decision, Daley argued in a powerful New York Times essay this week, Roberts closed federal courts to partis...

Might the supposedly revolutionary future of AI healthcare actually be a return to the gig economics of Uber and Airbnb? That’s the intriguing proposition put forward by former Kaiser Permanente Chief and Stanford Medical School professor Robert Pearl , a prescient observer of the future of his industry. According to Pearl, we may be returning to the digital future: freelance doctors, he predicts, will train people to use existing AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) for managing chronic conditions...

Anyone lucky enough to have seen Wim Wenders’ 2023 masterpiece Perfect Days is familiar with the dignity of professional Japanese toilet cleaners. Mark Eltringham , the publisher of the excellent future of work newsletter Workplace Insight , hasn’t seen Wenders’ movie, but he is nonetheless sympathetic to the dignity of the armies of invisible workers paid to clean up our mess - from those who tidy up offices to to those who scrub public toilets. We conveniently ignore this precariat, Eltringham...

Once upon a time, it was very easy for the American left to determine progress. The working class was good, the traditional left knew, and so progress meant embracing the economic and cultural interests of that class. Today, however, in our age of authoritarian populism in which part, at least, of the (white) working class appears nostalgic for the economics and culture of industrial America, things aren’t quite as self-evident. As both David Masciotra and Soli Ozel note, then, this leftist dile...

Tech nostalgia. Winner-take-all economics. The cult of "storytelling". A Stanford educated aristocratic elite. This was the week that nothing changed in Silicon Valley. Alternatively, it was the week that radical change broke some ChatGPT users hearts. That, at least, is how That Was the Week tech newsletter publisher Keith Teare described this week in Silicon Valley. From Sam Altman's sensitivity to user backlash over GPT-5's personality changes, to venture capital's continued concentration in ...

I’m not sure on this one. On the one hand, Isabelle Boemeke is a pin-up of an environmentally activist generation - going from superstar Brazilian model and Instagram influencer to the author of Rad Future , a manifesto about how nuclear electricity will save the world. On other other hand, there’s something slightly troubling in our social media age about this kind of dramatic trajectory - especially given the existential stakes here. Especially since Boemeke - who happens to be married to Joe ...

Few of the world’s great scientists have given more thought to the existential threats to humanity than the irrepressible British cosmologist and astronomer Martin Rees . He’s the co-founder of Cambridge University’s Centre for Existential Risk as well as the author of the 2003 book Our Final Hour . So it’s striking that Rees has a quite different take on the existential risk of artificial intelligence technology than many AI doomers including yesterday’s guest , the 2024 Physics Nobel laureate ...

So will AI wipe us out? According to Geoffrey Hinton , the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, there's about a 10-20% chance of AI being humanity's final invention. Which, as the so-called Godfather of AI acknowledges, is his way of saying he has no more idea than you or I about its species-killing qualities. That said, Hinton is deeply concerned about some of the consequences of an AI revolution that he pioneered at Google. From cyber attacks that could topple major banks to AI-designed viruses, fr...

We all are familiar, of course, with Robert Altman’s classic 1971 movie about the settling of the west, McCabe and Mrs Miller . But most of us, I’m guessing, don’t know about another McCabe, this one African-American, the black Moses in fact, who almost created an African -American land in Oklahoma. McCabe’s all-too-American story is told in Caleb Gayle ’s new book, appropriately entitled Black Moses , the saga of Edward McCabe’s transformation from a Wall Street clerk to one of the first promin...

Should we be defending American democracy if it never really existed? That’s the controversial thesis at the heart of Osita Nwanevu ’s new book, The Right of the People . What America needs, the Baltimore-based Nigerian-born Nwanevu argues, is a radical reinvention of its political system. Nwanevu dismantles liberal pieties about traditional American institutions, arguing that the founders deliberately created an anti-democratic republic designed to prevent majority rule. While conservatives cel...

In what climate pessimists define as our environmentally apocalyptic times, we’ve become the metaphorical frog in the boiling water. That, at least, is the bleak conclusion of Roy Scranton , the author of Impasse , a new book about climate change and the end of technological progress. For the deeply pessimistic Scranton, the planet is screwed. So the real question is how we can live ethically in these environmentally apocalyptic times. Drawing on his experience as a soldier in Iraq, where he lea...

How many more times can we report on a week in tech that changed the world? But here we go again…. We just had a week in Silicon Valley where everything , supposedly, changed. At least according to Keith Teare , publisher of the tech That Was the Week weekly newsletter. But last week really really was a special week, Keith insists. It was the week when AI became an actor. When it broke all our traditional software assumptions by becoming an actor, not an app. It was the week AI entered what Keit...

Like it or not, Trump and his surreal version of a libertarian patrimonial America is reshaping the world. At least in what the FT’s Janan Ganesh dubs “the high summer of Donald Trump”. But my old friend Jason Pack , host of the excellent Disorder podcast, doesn’t believe that a strategy of short-term chaos is a viable long-term global strategy for America. Pack argues that while Trump may be achieving tactical wins through short-term disruptions—from ending the Iran-Israel conflict to forcing ...

Are we Rome yet? It’s become all too easy to compare contemporary America's woes with those of late republican Rome. And even easier to argue that the democracy destroying Donald Trump is the second coming of Julius Caesar. But according to the distinguished American classicist David Potter , author of Master of Rome, we’ve got Julius Caesar all wrong. Don’t trust Cicero’s version of Caesar, Potter warns. Julius Caesar was actually a friend rather than a foe of democracy—he wasn't even 'Caesaria...

For five hundred years, scientists as credible as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Freud chipped away at the scientific existence of God. So, by the beginning of the 20th century, Nietzsche was able to announce the death of God. A century later, however, modern science is now resurrecting God. That, at least, is the suggestion of Michel-Yves Bollore, the co-author of Europe’s latest publishing sensation, GOD The Science The Evidence . It’s a post Einsteinian science, Bollore and his co-au...

For all its multiple obituary notices, the American Dream is alive and kicking. That, at least, is the view of Matson Money CEO and founder, Mark Matson , author of Experiencing the American Dream . But you have to work for it, the Scottsdale, Arizona based Matson says, arguing that many Americans have lost agency over their own lives. Growing up in poverty in West Virginia, Matson built an $11.7 billion asset management firm by embracing his father's core principles: nobody owes you anything, p...

Podcasts are ruining our lives. That, at least, is the thesis of the sometime podcaster, Liel Leibovitz . It’s the insidious charm of chat, Leibovitz believes, that is behind the faux intimacy of popular podcasters like Joe Rogan. Speaking from Tel Aviv, the Tablet magazine editor-at-large argues that what began as a revolutionary medium for deep, unfiltered conversation has devolved into the same shallow journalism that plagues mainstream media. Podcasters, Leibovitz contends, have traded meani...