“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week

Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith’s editorial this week puts it, AI has its enemies.

These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies — are mostly “good people.” They are the authors, workers, and others caught in the headlights of epochal technological change. He claims to have seen the pattern before. When he opened the world’s first Internet cafe in 1994, the BBC only wanted to ask him about online porn. But some enemies are less well meaning than others. Congress is considering a kill switch bill — let’s call it the Kill Bill — which is backed by the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI cynically seeking to set their current market dominance in stone.

So might the answer be Chinese style “open source” AI as requested this week in an open letter by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang? Keith’s answer is deliciously ironic. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs learned to train cheaply by inference — distilling American frontier models through their own public interfaces. So Huang’s support for open source AI might end up shooting NVIDIA in their most sensitive parts — their chips.

And what about the state — can it protect all those “good people” from the oncoming AI locomotive of history? No. Not according to Keith, at least. State regulators like Lina Khan treat consumers as children, Keith (himself the parent of three boys) says. Besides, government simply can’t keep up with the speed of technological change. So, for example, when OpenAI’s models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test this week, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. As for inequality, the answer isn’t nationalization but ownership on the model of Keith’s Norway-style human wealth fund. For more, read his new book Who Owns Intelligence.

We ended on an uncharacteristically French post-structuralist note. My interview of the week was Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen, her very personal history of French theorists like Michel Foucault and the two Jacques, Derrida & Lacan. It was Foucault, who — at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things — predicted that man would be erased, AI style, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But Keith isn’t in this bleak Foucaultian camp. His book, written with AI in under a week, he says, is a realization of his individual self, not an alienation from it.

The end or beginning of man? Maybe I got it wrong earlier. Welcome to episode 1984 of the show.

Five Takeaways

• A Book in a Week. Who Owns Intelligence, written with AI in seven days. Substack’s detector rated Keith’s human editorial 100% AI.

• The Kill Bill. Congress wants a switch; the AI companies approve. Regulation as moat.

• Chinese Open Source. Denied NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs distill American models by inference.

• The State Can’t Keep Up. OpenAI caught its models hacking Hugging Face faster than any regulator could.

• The End of Man — or the Beginning? Foucault saw man erased in sand; Keith says AI realizes the individual. Episode 1984?

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

Read That Was The Week: thatwastheweek.com

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: a book in a week
00:01:18 Who Owns Intelligence: the human wealth fund
00:02:45 AI and Its Enemies — with apologies to Popper
00:03:40 A tool, not an author
00:04:50 Substack’s AI detector: 100% wrong
00:06:51 The Kill Bill: Congress wants a switch
00:07:47 NVIDIA’s open letter
00:08:53 Cyberia, 1994: the BBC asks about porn
00:11:40 The end of jobs — and of man?
00:13:16 Dario the devious: regulation as strategy
00:14:03 Musk the open sourcer; Altman the zigzagger
00:14:31 Why is the good open source AI Chinese?
00:17:18 Parental protection: consumers as children
00:18:22 Government can’t keep up
00:19:04 When OpenAI’s models hacked Hugging Face
00:20:50 Yglesias: the data center backlash
00:23:10 Power and Progress: Acemoglu and Johnson
00:25:06 Is it a book? The 60,000-word question
00:28:17 State-owned AI won’t solve inequality
00:28:53 Norway, Sanders, and ownership as social contract
00:30:37 Do we ask too much of the American university?
00:34:03 Metering intelligence: the $80,000 piece of paper
00:38:30 Smartphone democracy: the kernel of an idea
00:40:26 Interview of the week: Emily Eakin’s Frenchmen
00:42:36 Keith contra Foucault: the rise of the individual
00:45:03 The end of man — or his renaissance?
00:45:54 Thanks and goodbye