“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare

I’m in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week tech summary, Keith Teare and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch — Brookings Institution senior fellow, serial author and one of the most rigorous minds in Washington — onto the show to discuss AI.

Rauch had a simple mission. He wanted to find out why Keith Teare is just about the only person in the universe who believes that AI is benign. Jon had five buckets of doom to dump on Keith: labour market disruption, political upheaval, mental health and cognition, malicious actors, and the biggest daddy of all — AI developing consciousness, setting its own agenda, and killing everyone (even Keith).

But Keith maintained his Yorkshire stoicism under intense scrutiny from the analogue Rauch machine. AI is a word-counting machine, he explained. Large language models train on words, not experience. They split words into a probabilistic graph of correlations. When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, word by word. In that sense, he says, AI is no cleverer than a calculator. The idea that it has awareness, consciousness, or a plan is mythological. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what AI does itself. The dangers, he says, are human.

Jon wasn’t entirely reassured (his Brookings brand is scepticism, after all). What worries him most is that humans will handle these technologies irresponsibly. On that, he and Keith agree. The short-term labour disruption will be significant. White-collar service provision — legal, accounting, junior consulting — is already going. Jobs will go too. Work, Keith insists, will not. But nobody in politics is having the conversation about what comes next. Not JD. Not AOC. Only Keith and Jon.

Five Takeaways

• AI Is a Word-Counting Machine. LLMs train on words only. A probabilistic graph of word correlations. When you ask a question, a statistical engine fires word by word. No awareness. No consciousness. No plan. No cleverer than a calculator — just a very big one. The agency, Keith insists, is human.

• Doomerism as Business Model. Whenever there is ambiguity in major technological change, a business model emerges to monetize doubt. Nuclear power. Climate change. AI. The fears wouldn’t sell if they weren’t reasonable. But they should be approached with prior scepticism.

• The Guardrails Are Human. AI sits in a prison where humans decide what the doors are. If you give it access to email, it can email. It cannot act on words it hasn’t been permitted to act on. The danger is not what AI does. It is what humans choose to allow AI to do.

• Jobs vs Work. Jobs — paid labour — can go. Work — effort, creative agency — will not. Short-term disruption will be significant: legal, accounting, consulting, driving. The wealth AI creates could supplement the end of paid labour. Nobody in government is having that conversation.

• Rauch’s Verdict: Clarified, Not Reassured. His worst fear — autonomous AI malfeasance — is unlikely unless humans make it happen. His residual worry: that humans won’t handle this as maturely as one could wish. Political systems too rigid, too partisan. On that, he and Keith agree.

About the Guests

Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch.

Jonathan Rauch is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, contributing writer at The Atlantic, and author of The Constitution of Knowledge, The Happiness Curve, and many other books.

References

That Was the Week by Keith Teare: thatwa.st
The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: Andrew in Korea, Rauch takes over
00:01:44 How Rauch ended up here
00:03:00 Five buckets of doom
00:05:13 Doomerism as business model
00:07:00 The word-counting machine
00:09:03 Emergent intelligence from dumb neurons?
00:11:34 The guardrails argument
00:20:00 Political disruption and disinformation
00:30:00 Mental health and AI psychosis
00:35:00 The big one: AI kills us all
00:40:00 Jobs vs work
00:50:10 Labour disruption in the next twenty years
00:52:03 Rauch’s verdict: long-term good, short-term politically disastrous
00:53:44 Has Rauch been reassured?