Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch.
America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobody seems to have told either Trump or Huang. In his embrace of Huang’s supposed wisdom on unregulated AI, Trump is acknowledging the power of the engineer.
So would Jensen Huang make a better president than Donald Trump?
In our weekly tech roundup, That Was The Week tech news publisher Keith Teare voted for king Donald. Whatever Trump’s flaws, Keith argues, he is at least a politician. Society isn’t logical, Keith said. It’s chaotic and messy, and so should be run by messy, chaotic people. A society run by king Jensen would, Keith warns, end up “drone-like”.
But the Trump vs Huang choice might have already been made. Huang won’t appear on a ballot because he doesn’t need to. His five trillion dollar company is not only driving our economy but our politics too. Most importantly, Jensen Huang’s drone-like mindset of imagining society as an endless engineering problem is emerging as the AI policy of the current administration. Think of it as the ethic of the engineer. Only it claims there are no ethics, just engineering challenges and solutions.
Earlier this week, Hannah Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz reminded us that Arendt linked Plato’s ideal of philosopher kings with the utopian promises of 20th century totalitarian leaders. I don’t think she would have been too keen on philosopher engineers either.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. The argument isn’t whether to hand power to engineers — they have it. Keith says engineers and political power don’t belong in the same sentence. My answer: that sentence was written a while ago and nobody consulted us.
2. Keith would rather have Trump as president than Jensen Huang, which I did not see coming. Running a country means answering every question, not one. How automation’s wealth reaches ordinary people is not a Jensen Huang question.
3. Anthropic made manners a terms-of-service matter this week, alongside new clauses on elections, weapons and surveillance. Keith: swap Claude for Microsoft Word and hear how it sounds. Me: software is the medium we live in now.
4. Keith thinks AI should carry no values at all — not compassion, not Hinton’s maternal sensibility, nothing. A model trained on everything is neutral until you tilt it. I think a perfectly neutral algorithm is the week’s most utopian idea.
5. Populism, in his definition, is just the people paying attention — and it frightens politicians. Trump is the symptom, not the populist. Orbán was voted out in April. And AI will produce more populism, not less.
ABOUT THE CO-HOST
Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation and the publisher of That Was The Week, the weekly technology newsletter this conversation is built around. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded RealNames and the UK internet service provider Easynet, and was a founding shareholder in TechCrunch. He joins Andrew Keen every Saturday.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Stephen Witt on the most powerful engineer on Earth
02:57 — An ethos, not an ethic
03:54 — Ezra Klein and Arvind Narayanan
05:26 — The line between code and consciousness
06:28 — Do Klein and Narayanan actually disagree?
09:38 — Engineers are making the moral decisions
12:02 — Anthropic bans cruelty towards Claude
12:59 — Swap Claude for Facebook
13:21 — It’s the code that determines how we live
15:31 — Is that an engineering ethic?
16:09 — Anti-human, or a soft humanism?
17:53 — Suleyman: the labs humanized the bots
20:41 — The engineer Google fired
21:37 — UFOs, AI and a science-fictional culture
22:40 — Botvinick, and the engineering take on democracy
24:04 — Engineers and power don’t belong in the same sentence
24:37 — “I’d rather Trump was president than Huang”
25:00 — Society isn’t logical
25:31 — A drone-like society
27:37 — Democracy rests on the economy
29:47 — Populism is the people paying attention
30:21 — Trump as symptom, not populist
31:06 — Orbán was voted out
31:47 — Jill Lepore, and the one-word reply
33:25 — Are you afraid of your light bulbs?
34:34 — So why not President Huang?
35:21 — Is there an engineering solution to inequality?
36:46 — Democracy, data centres and distrust
37:12 — More populism because of AI, not less
37:39 — Satyarthi, Hinton and the case for values
41:09 — “There shouldn’t be any values”
41:49 — The utopianism of the neutral algorithm
43:01 — Tottenham won