That Sounds Incredibly Boring: Keith Teare's Vision of our Jobless AI Future

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. This day in history is Saturday, May 9th, although I might actually run this on May 10th. One of the things about time, of course, is it moves forward. Although history itself isn't quite as linear as some people think. Earlier this week, I did a show with a very popular podcast historian, Patrick Wyman, very talented man based in Arizona. We did a show which I entitled "Why History Keeps Happening." It was based on his fascinating new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World. It's about the unintended consequences of civilization, of why some civilizations work out and some don't. It's all about the unintended consequences of history, very relevant these days in our AI age. Wyman's Tides of History is an extremely popular podcast, and we ran the show with the title "History Keeps Happening," and it seems to be the same situation when it comes to technology. Keith Teare, That Was The Week's publisher, has an editorial this week, "Civilization: What Is Worth Doing," which in many ways addresses some of the themes that Patrick Wyman addresses in his new book and in our conversation. So Keith, is civilization linear? You're a progress man, aren't you? Do you believe in the end of history?

00:02:10 Keith Teare: Well, look. I mean, I think he defines civilizations, plural, coming and going, prospering and declining. I use the word slightly differently. I think it's a singular word for human progress collectively. So I wouldn't talk about the Egyptian civilization, although it was an empire, or the Roman civilization. I think if you look at civilization as the entire world, it is fairly linear over the long term, let's say two hundred years, but it's nonlinear in the short term. And so he's quite right that most of the history of progress is a history of learning from failure. I agree with that. But it's persistence in the face of failure, which is striking.

00:03:05 Andrew Keen: Although, no, I mean, I don't wanna put words into Patrick's mouth. He's got enough words of his own to put in his own mouth. But if you think of it as a journey, you don't know where you're going. There's a storm going on. You may be in a vehicle, but you have no idea of direction. I think what's interesting about this coming together of your work and people like Wyman's, Keith, is that we're living, for better or worse, however you think about things — I don't think anyone would deny this — at a civilizational moment. More and more pieces, and a lot of the articles that you connect with this week on That Was The Week, are about the future of civilization: Western civilization, human civilization, global civilization, technological civilization. I think everyone, whatever side of the argument you're on when it comes to AI, we can all agree that we're at a fork in the road. Is that fair?

00:04:06 Keith Teare: Yeah. I think that's a good characterization. You know, it's an interesting discussion, your initial point about, do we know where we're going? And my subtitle is, you know, "What Is Worth Doing," which implies that we should at least try to answer the question, where are we going? And I think, depending on who you are, the answer might be yes or no. I think there are a group of people in society who think they know where they're going and have a plan. And there are others who are observers and passive in relationship to these changes. Most people, probably, they're receiving the change as opposed to making it, and that is a kind of key distinction.

00:05:01 Andrew Keen: Although most of us don't do newsletters or write books, or, like, Ezra Klein and have all sorts of platforms. I know you link with Ezra Klein this week, who's one of our best, I think most articulate observers on the future of civilization. Most people just don't have the time. I mean, if you're worried about working, supporting your family, you can't really worry about the future of civilization. Can you, Keith?

00:05:29 Keith Teare: You know, I find it hard to answer because I can only be me. And I can tell you, my brain constantly reinterprets the present in the context of my view of the future. I do it all the time. I kind of have a constant view of the future that gets challenged every week. And I take in what I take in and adjust what I think based on the information that's inbound. So I do think about the future. I think a lot of people think about the future. I think almost anyone that has the audacity to do something, you know, to have a plan and execute it, is thinking about the future.

00:06:16 Andrew Keen: You're linking with others who are thinking about the future. The first is, I know he's a friend of yours, Norman Lewis, not really a tech writer. He has an interesting piece this week, "The Future Is Not Scarce," on Nervous. He writes about a 1970s environmentalist called Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, who is less well known now than he was back in the seventies. What is Lewis's point on civilization in the future?

00:06:50 Keith Teare: I think his point's subtle, and it's really the difference between technology and human goal-setting and achievement. He's trying to distinguish between technology as a good in and of itself, and technology as an instrument used by human agency. And he uses Ehrlich as an example, a good example of the ability to think, dream, imagine, and then make something happen within the constraints of science, of course. So it's very much about, you know — I've known Norman for a long time. I've always — if Norman, if you're listening to this — I've always suspected Norman is a little bit anti-tech, you know, intuitively.

00:07:44 Andrew Keen: You think everyone, Keith, everyone except yourself is anti-tech. You think I'm anti-tech?

00:07:48 Keith Teare: Well, I thought this was a really good piece that properly puts the balance.

00:07:54 Andrew Keen: Well, it reminds us, I think, that history — coming back to Wyman — I mean, everything changes. Back in the 70s, there was the assumption of people like Paul Ehrlich that by having too many people, we were gonna do away with all the Earth's resources. You never hear about that anymore. And I think that comes back to Wyman's point about its unintended consequences. And, of course, the great debate these days is on AI. And if Norman Lewis is right to remind us that we usually get it wrong, and Ehrlich certainly kind of got it wrong in the seventies, most of us are probably getting it wrong today on AI. Both the doomers and the optimists. Yeah. I mean, you're in the optimist camp. Where are you least confident, Keith, on your optimism when it comes to AI?

00:08:50 Keith Teare: Well, you can't be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. It's very hard to be confident about human decision-making because humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions. And so there is a kind of an onus on leadership, or intellectual input into a discourse around the future that you want. And absent that, you assume bad decisions will be made, and you only have to look at the state of the world now in, you know, the civil society and politics, to see the confusion that reigns.

00:09:35 Andrew Keen: Well, then you're blaming other people, you're saying. And I know one of the other pieces you linked to this week is by an old friend of mine and of the show, Nirit Weiss-Blatt, who once called in from her car when we were discussing her work — "What 10 Studies Revealed About AI Panic in the Media." She seems to think — and I suspect, Keith, you kind of agree with her — that a lot of the doomerism has been created by media. So if things go wrong, are you suggesting that we blame the op-ed writers who are dark about the possibilities of AI?

00:10:10 Keith Teare: You know, I actually am not that much of a media basher. I do think the media plays a role, and I do think that role can be positive or negative. And in the case of AI, the zeitgeist is so negative that media reflects that. But I do think media mainly reflects as opposed to creates thought. And I do think that this negativity around AI is a reasonable reaction to not knowing. And when you don't know, you can believe anything. And so I think the proper state of most normal people's attitude to AI will be founded on not knowing, and therefore subject to all kinds of influence, if you will. And most of the influence is on the negative side. So it's not a surprise. In the long run — and this is where being wrong in order to eventually be right, the Lewis point — in the long run, you know, AI will deliver something good or not. And if it does, opinions will change. And so the media will continue to reflect. If that were to happen in the positive sense, media would become very positive. So I don't think of media as opinion-forming. I think of it as opinion-reflecting.

00:11:41 Andrew Keen: One of the things that Wyman said in our conversation, which I thought was really good, was that we're always in the middle of history. And I didn't quite say it — I think he implied that we always think we're either at the beginning or the end. I mean, we've got the famous Fukuyama observations about the end of history, which he didn't really quite mean in those terms, but it became his phrase, which made him famous and rather controversial at the same time. One of the nice things, though, about the point we're living in, at least we're having the conversation, Keith. I mean, at least people are beginning to think. And I think, whatever you think of Ezra Klein, he's very good at laying out the possibilities here. He did it in his book Abundance. He had an interesting op-ed in the Times this week, which you linked to, "Why the AI Job Apocalypse Probably Won't Happen." The reality is nobody knows. Klein, the greatest economist in the world, Krugman, the greatest technologist, Sam Altman, certainly doesn't know. Dario doesn't know. Even Demis doesn't know. I mean, nobody knows. That's Wyman's point.

00:12:48 Keith Teare: Well, let's just unpack "knowing" in quotes. What is knowing? Well, knowing implies that there's, like, a secret. The future's already happened, and we just don't know it yet. But it isn't like that.

00:13:03 Andrew Keen: The future, you know — we're all on the bus. We know where we're going, but only the driver knows, and he's not telling everybody.

00:13:10 Keith Teare: Well, that's different, because the driver has a route and a plan, and, you know, absent some catastrophe, is gonna get there. That's not the same with history. History is contested, and therefore, the future is a variable. And the future that you get is the future that most people make happen. And most people is not, like, flat. There's a hierarchy. It's more like a pyramid. Think of the pyramid as the agents of change. And at the very top, there's a small number of people who will have a much bigger influence on change than the people at the bottom. That's just the nature of change. So those individuals who are stepping outside the norms and making things happen — those are the people who make history.

00:14:06 Andrew Keen: But do we even know at this point — I mean, if we said, who's making history? I mean, the Darios and the Altmans would obviously come to mind, the Demis Hassabises. But do we even have an idea, Keith, on May 9th, 2026, who's making our AI future? Could be someone we've never even heard of.

00:14:29 Keith Teare: There's completely contested versions of that. And so what you're really asking is who's gonna win.

00:14:39 Andrew Keen: We're not asking that. I'm asking who's actually making this history. Who's determining where we're going?

00:14:44 Keith Teare: Well, that's an easy question to answer at one level. It's a combination of entrepreneurs like Musk, for example — this week did a deal with Dario Amodei to give Anthropic a new lease of life. It's those kinds of decisions.

00:15:00 Andrew Keen: Some people might challenge that — the idea that Anthropic certainly wasn't dying.

00:15:06 Keith Teare: Well, Anthropic, by its own confession, was struggling with compute, and didn't have enough computers to serve the demand. And, you know, Musk, who on the face of it has no love lost between him and Amodei, but is a businessman — there was a win-win deal.

00:15:26 Andrew Keen: My enemy of my enemy is my friend, when it comes —

00:15:29 Keith Teare: But that deal is making history. That's an example of making history. And now SpaceX, in response to that, changed its name from SpaceX to SpaceX AI. And Musk earlier took the decision to fold xAI in with SpaceX. And now he's providing data centers for Anthropic, thus making SpaceX part of the infrastructure solution along with Google and Amazon and others. So that's making history. So history is made in a whole series of small —

00:16:06 Andrew Keen: Well, it is certainly Silicon Valley history. Some people might be listening to this and thinking, well, if he lives in Palo Alto, he's always had Elon Musk on the brain. So whatever Elon does that week is history. You might not have —

00:16:18 Keith Teare: I've been responding to your deeper question, which is, who's making history is what you ask. And my answer is, all of these little decisions impact what the future is going to look like. Whether you make it grandiose or not, it doesn't really matter. These are the decisions that determine the future. When the government this week said that it wants some kind of understanding of the dangers of each new model prior to them being released — and there was a three-day back-and-forth debate about that, and eventually the government said they don't want to become a regulator. They just want to be given a heads-up so that they can patch, you know, computer software before it's vulnerable. That is history. So That Was The Week, in a way, encapsulates this week's contribution to history.

00:17:18 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You talk about regulation. One of the other pieces you linked to is Esther Dyson, old friend of the show, old friend of mine, from a very distinguished technological intellectual dynasty. Her father was one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. She talks about regulation. What is Esther saying, and coming back to the issue of regulation — was it a big regulatory week? This was a week where it struck me, at least — you never know with Trump — but he seemed to be backing off a little bit the laissez-faire attitude he had towards AI and suggesting that, actually, AI needs to be regulated a bit more carefully. Maybe it's because Susie Wiles now is dominating the administration, and the JD Vances have become less influential.

00:18:08 Keith Teare: Yeah. So Esther's point is a good point, which is, you know, an agent has been built by a person and acts on behalf of a person or an organization, and the two should be coupled together. It should be possible to have identity ownership, if you will, over agents. Be transparent as the agent moves around doing things. And she talks a little bit about ICANN and domain names as, in her view at least, not a perfect solution. She's looking for a better solution.

00:18:47 Andrew Keen: And she was involved with ICANN. Right?

00:18:49 Keith Teare: She was the initial — I don't wanna get this wrong. She was either CEO or chairman originally, and I kind of forget which it was, but she was probably the CEO initially.

00:19:01 Andrew Keen: Her career — she was the original Kara Swisher. She was ubiquitous in media and tech in the nineties, and then leveraged that into more political and environmental initiatives.

00:19:16 Keith Teare: And more — you know, she was, but she still is a very thoughtful observer of history and has a very strong opinion about the future she wants. So she's certainly influencing outcomes, and this piece of writing is an attempt to do that, for sure. Sorry, Andrew. You asked — there was a second part to your question that wasn't about her. It was a bigger picture. I forgot what it was.

00:19:43 Andrew Keen: Well, going back to Dyson, I think one of the things she brings is that knowledge of the history of physics and of the nuclear issue, which her father was involved with. So she brings a broader kind of historical perspective as well.

00:19:57 Keith Teare: Yeah. Absolutely. She does. And, you know, I'm not really a historian, even though I collect [things].

00:20:06 Andrew Keen: Well, you are a historian when it suits you. When it comes to nuclear, you're always saying to me, name me a technology, name me something that wasn't progress. And I'm never quite sure what to say. But what would you say to somebody about the nuclear breakthrough? I mean, is it possible to argue that the invention of nuclear weapons is a good thing for progress, Keith? Can't that be used as at least a warning that not all progress is good, not all technological progress is good?

00:20:42 Keith Teare: Well, that's — you know, going back to the things we said at the start of the show, the distinction between science and breakthroughs on the one hand, and what humans do with it on the other, is the key. And, certainly, splitting the atom and capturing energy is a huge breakthrough. I mean, it'd be very hard to argue scientifically that wasn't fantastic. By the way, it's probably inevitable. So it doesn't really matter whether you like it or not. Science, unfortunately — science, as it's discovered, your awareness is that it exists. And, you know, it isn't really the subject of opinion anymore. It just does exist. Nuclear energy exists. This is the Iran thing today. Is it okay for Iran to have nuclear electricity? This is a very different question to, is it okay if they, you know, turn the nuclear output —

00:21:47 Andrew Keen: Into — but then you're having your sort of historical materialism and eating it, Keith. You can't have it both ways. If all history is inevitable, or all technological —

00:21:56 Keith Teare: No, no. Science is inevitable.

00:21:58 Andrew Keen: All science is — and that's what technology is — is inevitable, then why even get involved in any kind of value proposition when it comes to progress?

00:22:10 Keith Teare: No. Yeah. Because you want to influence what happens to it. So would I have been in favor of dropping a bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Absolutely not. Would I be in favor of the Oppenheimer project? No. Am I in favor of splitting the atom? Yes. Am I in favor of nuclear power? Yes. So these are not hard questions, and they are — you're allowed to have opinions.

00:22:35 Andrew Keen: Well, they are hard questions, because some people might say, well, if you're in favor of the original technological breakthrough, then if, what you just said, the nuclear weapon inevitably comes out of splitting the atom, then you would be against splitting.

00:22:51 Keith Teare: Well, the possibility of a nuclear bomb comes out of it. Thank goodness humans have — and let's give humans some credit here — haven't used one since the end of the Second World War. Hopefully they'll never use one.

00:23:05 Andrew Keen: Well, I certainly agree with you on that one. Your ears must have been burning this week, Keith. Branko Milanović, another old friend of mine of the show, very distinguished economist, probably one of the world's leading economists when it comes to inequality, wrote an interesting piece entitled "99% Utopia and Money." What he wanted to know was, if money didn't exist, is that good or bad? You always talk about this, and you quote Elon Musk. I can't imagine a world without money. But what did you make of Branko's post about whether or not the elimination, the disappearance of money, would be a utopian or dystopian event?

00:23:50 Keith Teare: Well, look. He's well-read in roughly the same fields as I am. So I —

00:23:56 Andrew Keen: Expert, Keith. You're a dabbler compared to him.

00:24:00 Keith Teare: I'm a dabbler compared to him. I would agree with that. So, look, what is money? Money is a mechanism for the distribution of scarcity. That's really what it is. It's a store of value that lets you get scarce things. And the more money you've got, the greater the power you have to get things that are very scarce. And so it's a distribution mechanism for a world in which there isn't enough to go around. And so the real question about utopia and money is, are we gonna get to a point where there is enough to go around? And if that happens, do you still need a distribution mechanism?

00:24:47 Andrew Keen: Is that Musk's point?

00:24:49 Keith Teare: That is Musk's point. Yeah.

00:24:51 Andrew Keen: But isn't it —

00:24:53 Keith Teare: He makes the point that it would be irrational to use money in a world of abundance, because there'd be no constraint on getting what —

00:25:03 Andrew Keen: I mean — and I'm sure everyone thinks this — isn't it, excusing the pun, a bit rich for this to come from the first trillionaire, a man who epitomizes the increasing inequality between a tiny group of billionaires and multibillionaires and the rest of us?

00:25:19 Keith Teare: Well, you could say it's a bit rich, but I think it's actually a signal that Musk is only a billionaire or trillionaire measured by money. He doesn't have the intellectual viewpoint of an elitist. His intellectual viewpoint is that of the benefit to everyone. And so he doesn't identify with his own net worth, actually.

00:25:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I agree with you. I don't think he probably cares about his money. If you took all his money away, I don't think it would actually mean anything. And in fact, where he's scarce is in empathy and other intrinsic human skills, which he struggles so dramatically with, which I think explains why he's so unpopular — not just because he's rich. I mean, I think if Musk was a more empathetic, more rounded human being, he'd be much less unpopular. But then if he was more empathetic and rounded, he probably wouldn't be quite as rich.

00:26:15 Keith Teare: Well, he wouldn't have done any of the things he's done if he was — you know, he has to be a crazy outlier to have even taken on the challenges he's taken on.

00:26:25 Andrew Keen: But even you — and it drives me mad because you always talk about this abundance — even you, in the editorial this week, acknowledge that we're not gonna get rid of all scarcities, that whatever happens, even in the best case in the future of AI, even if these machines do most of the stuff that we have historically done to create value and work, scarcity hasn't gone away.

00:26:50 Keith Teare: What will change is what is scarce. But, yes, you're right. I mean, I think creativity will be scarce. I think imagination will be scarce. I, you know, I think not everybody could go to the Mediterranean and be on the beach all at the same time, because beaches —

00:27:13 Andrew Keen: Well, the English always, and the Germans always, do that, which is why the beach is always so crowded.

00:27:19 Keith Teare: Yeah. But the Germans put their towels out early in the morning, so they always win.

00:27:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, Germans are very good at winning, except when they lose, of course.

00:27:29 Keith Teare: But yeah. I mean, obviously, the word scarcity, if applied to economic scarcity — for, let's imagine, basic foodstuffs — I can imagine easily that that can go away, and basic foodstuffs are not scarce. Clothing, not scarce. So lots and lots of the necessities of life, not scarce. I think, you know, paid labor will probably go away. So leisure time will not be scarce.

00:28:01 Andrew Keen: In the very long term, Keith, we're talking about several hundred years. You're not talking about even the end of the century.

00:28:08 Keith Teare: I actually wouldn't put a time on it because I think it depends on the acceleration of robotics and AI, how fast that happens. But hundreds of years seems too long. I think it's more like — I'd be pretty shocked if it hadn't happened in fifty years.

00:28:23 Andrew Keen: I mean, the more I talk about this and think a bit, the more I think Wyman's observations are right. We actually have no idea on any of this. You end by saying — I'm quoting you, the end of your editorial — "and then we have to build a society with enough freedom, competence, courage, and responsibility to do it, to make it all worth doing." I'm not saying you used an AI to write that, but it sounds like you did. And that goes without saying —

00:28:52 Keith Teare: — saying that.

00:28:53 Andrew Keen: No. What I'm saying is that it sounds like it. Maybe you're —

00:28:57 Keith Teare: I use AI for everything, Andrew, including my editorial, although it never writes it. But I definitely use it because it's a kind of useful talking partner.

00:29:07 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But it doesn't really help. I mean, my point is, would it be fair to end today by saying we have absolutely no idea where we're going, which explains why we're all over the map, you and I and everybody else?

00:29:19 Keith Teare: Well, I would add one rider to that, which would be — and I have an opinion, what I think — which is that we've got to embrace economic growth, which takes the form of billionaires today, by the way, as a necessary byproduct. We've got to embrace economic growth whilst having a very strong opinion about what kind of society you want to build, and how that will be created. That second piece is missing, which makes us all passive.

00:29:54 Andrew Keen: Okay. Well, dependent on that — what kind of society on May 9th, 2026, does Keith Teare want?

00:30:04 Keith Teare: I want a society where everyone can eat, everyone can be warm, everyone can have leisure time, take vacations, doesn't have to work unless they choose to, certainly doesn't need to get paid to work because society's already gotten past that stage. And, you know, where the civil society and politics represents an eroding governance structure. Eroding meaning that we need governance less and less, the more satisfied and happy we are. So a shrinking governance structure, which, at the end of the day, all it does is preserve freedom.

00:30:52 Andrew Keen: Well, I have to say that sounds incredibly boring. I don't wanna live in that kind of society, and I don't think I will. But we will see. Keith Teare, as always, an honor to speak. It's an interesting week, more of an abstract week. Next week, I'm gonna be away. We're gonna run a show that features Keith Teare in conversation with Jonathan Rauch, the Brookings Institution and Atlantic writer, talking about AI. So, Keith, I will see you in a couple of weeks.

00:31:20 Keith Teare: Will do. Bye, Andrew, and everyone else.