“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare
The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare. “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in our AI age of supposedly abundant intelligence, he pronounces, human knowledge “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies.”
Check your pockets, everyone. Silicon Valley has another freebie for you. With AI, the entrepreneur promises, intelligence is democratized. Everybody gets it. We will all have the intelligence of a Nobel laureate at our fingertips. Even Keith.
And so he attacks Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist who has called for a “pro-worker AI.” But, for Keith — a council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose lifetime ambition was to evacuate the working class — this is “complete bullshit.” Acemoglu’s ideas, he says, are an example of the “fetishization of workers” when, in fact, we should be celebrating the end of the “working class.”
What Acemoglu is calling for in his pro-worker AI manifesto is more government planning for today’s transition to the AI epoch. But Keith disagrees. So I asked him three times what government should do while AI kills the working (and middle) class. “Allow it to happen,” he finally answers. “A good upheaval.”
Good? The former “worker” will lack jobs, wages, healthcare, housing. Even food in an America now eliminating food stamps. No matter. Let them eat intelligence.
Five Takeaways
• Humans Create Intelligence. The collective sum of all human knowledge — once locked in libraries and institutions — gets distributed by AI to billions. Experts aren’t erased; they’re elevated.
• The End of the Age of Heroes? Noah Smith says nobody gets to be Newton now. Keith: AI creates no new knowledge — it distributes the stock. Every teacher becomes a hero.
• “What Even Is Pro-Worker AI?” Acemoglu wants government-funded pro-worker AI. Keith: “complete bullshit” — the end of the working class is the point. Swap workers for people and he’d almost entirely agree.
• Bandwagons and Silences. Data-center arrests, Brockovich, Ezra Klein’s anti-big-tech turn — while Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis stay silent. The AlphaFold team is quietly broken up.
• A Drama in a Teacup. Zitron’s 70% is true and fine — two billion users pay underneath. Aschenbrenner bet the wrong layer, kept his Anthropic shares, and remains a multi-billionaire.
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: humans create intelligence
00:02:03 Individual vs collective intelligence
00:03:37 Should knowledge be trapped inside experts?
00:04:39 Noah Smith and the end of the age of heroes
00:07:03 Acemoglu, Mounk, and liberalism’s victims
00:08:05 “The fetishization of workers”
00:10:20 The end of the working class
00:11:11 Yorkshire to Palo Alto: the lottery question
00:12:25 Why “humans create intelligence”
00:14:22 The brain transplant: Claude and the Mac hard drive
00:15:58 Compounding inequality: the weekly fight
00:17:00 “What even is pro-worker AI? Complete bullshit”
00:18:22 Every teacher becomes a hero
00:19:15 A Hollywood ending? What government should(n’t) do
00:20:29 East Palo Alto, again
00:21:33 Upheaval or change?
00:23:16 Data centers: arrests, Brockovich, and the bandwagon
00:24:29 Ezra Klein joins the anti-big-tech left
00:26:18 Where’s the case for AI? The silence of Altman and Amodei
00:27:52 Hassabis steps aside: Brin’s Google shakeup
00:30:20 Zitron’s 70%: is the AI economy real?
00:33:12 Aschenbrenner, again: a drama in a teacup
00:35:42 Will Anthropic and OpenAI IPO?
00:37:59 Thanks and goodbye — see you in the Big Tech prison