Keen On America

As the longtime collaborator of the 2024 Nobel laureates John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, Terrence Sejnowski is one of America’s most distinguished AI scientists. In his new book, ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution , Sejnowski addresses some of the central technical and philosophical issues of today’s large language model AI revolution. And in this wide-ranging conversati...

Not only is the AI revolution really happening, but its Large Language Model technology is becoming an independent actor in the world. Rather than the dark conclusion of a techno-pessimist, this is actually the view of one of the leading AI platforms. For this week’s episode of That Was The Week , we ran Keith Teare’s editorial summarizing this week’s tech news through Google’s Notebook LM. Rather...

From the introduction of North Korean troops into the war in Ukraine to a budding friendship with Elon Musk, Putin continues to make strange headlines. The real question is whether Putin actually knows what he’s doing or if he, as a wannabe 21st century Russian Tsar, is subject to the same seemingly inevitable historical forces as the Tsars of yesteryear. As both a seasoned Putin watcher and the a...

The Politifact founder, Duke University professor and Pulitzer Prize winning writer Bill Adair certainly isn’t the first person to raise the alarm about the problem of lying in American politics. But what’s really interesting about his new book, Beyond the Big Lie , is that Adair also has innovative solutions to fixing what he calls an “epidemic of political lying.” One idea, he explained to me, i...

In February 2011, I had the maven of mavens, Seth Godin , on the show to discuss the end of the industrial age. “So why are you so popular?” I asked the best-selling author, entrepreneur and teacher. “I notice things,” he explained. Luckily for all of us, nearly fourteen years later, Godin is still noticing things, especially the obvious stuff that most of us miss. The problem, as he notes in his...

New books about the impact of AI on the human condition are two a penny. But it’s rare to have an AI book by such a prominent author as Robert Skidelsky , a member of the British House of Lords and the author of the iconic three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. In his new book Mindless , Skidelsky presents a sweeping history of our relationship with machines as way of explaining how we sli...

There are some seriously heavyweight new non-fiction books this Fall including memoirs by Al Pacino and Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as an intriguing new historical analysis of the recently departed Queen Elizabeth and that inevitable pre-election Bob Woodward tome on the misbehavior of you-know-who. But for our resident book maven, Bethanne Patrick , the most intriguing non-fiction release of t...

Last October, we featured a conversation with Kian Vesteinsson, co-author of Freedom House ’s 2023 FREEDOM ON THE NET report, about the repressive power of artificial intelligence. A year later, Freedom House’s 2 024 FREEDOM ON THE NET report is entitled “The Struggle for Trust Online”. And as Allie Funk, one of its co-authors, explains, it’s a very mixed report on the state of online trust. In so...

The conventional way of thinking about digital technology revolutions is akin to thinking about how to build a house. First we build the foundation, then we add the frame and finally the cosmetic furnishing. In tech, this is known as the “stack” - and traditionally, each chapter in the narrative involves different companies and technologies. So in the case of the Internet boom, for example, first...

Early today, we posted a conversation with Celeste Marcus, LIBERTIES Quarterly managing editor, about her hard-hitting “Hate Lands” essay in the Fall 2024 issue. In the same issue , there’s an equally hard hitting piece by the Rutgers historian, Katherine C. Epstein . But whereas Marcus goes after Trump and Putin, Epstein’s ire is reserved for her fellow American historians who, she believes, are,...

In the Fall 2024 issue of Liberties Quarterly, managing editor Celeste Marcus writes about the great Polish movie director Agnieszka Holland . Marcus argues that the 75 year-old Holland - best known for her 1990 movie Europa Europa - remains as relevant as ever because of her focus on what she calls the “terrifying contingency” of social breakdown. Linking Holland’s latest film, Green Border , a m...

Do we shape the future or does it shape us? That’s the core question in Brian Solis ’ new book, Mindshift which provides lessons for corporate executives in transforming leadership and driving innovation. Like so many other futurists, Solis’ work focuses on how we can become irreplaceable in the age of AI. Agency still lies with us, he acknowledges. But unless we use that agency to shape the futur...

As a longtime Harvard Business School professor and the former chief marketing officer at Aetna, David C. Edelman is all too familiar with both the dangers and opportunities of personalized technology. In Personalization , his new book, co-authored with Boston Consulting Group managing director Mark Abraham, Edelman focuses on customer strategy in our age of AI. While Edelman acknowledges that the...

Last week, we featured an interview with the leftist American theologian, Jim Wallis, who warned about the false white gospel of contemporary Christian nationalism. And we return to the existential dangers of American religion today with Talia Lavin whose new book, Wild Faith , warns that the Christian right is actually taking over America. In contrast with Wallis, however, Lavin doesn’t offer a m...

The 2024 winners of the Nobel prize for Economics were announced this morning. One of the winners was the MIT economist Simon Johnson , who, as the co-author (with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu) of Power and Progress , appeared on KEEN ON just over a year ago to talk about technology & prosperity. Given that the prize was given to Johnson (and Acemoglu) for their work on explaining the gaps...

Earlier this week, the prominent African-American broadcaster and writer, Tavis Smiley, came on the show t o voice his support for Reparations to correct the past racial injustices in American history. The Kentucky based historian, Joel Edward Goza , author of Rebirth of a Nation , agrees with Smiley, arguing that Reparations is, in fact, the central civil rights issue of our age. The struggle for...

In her quest for the White House, it seems as if Kamala Harris is doing everything in her power to disassociate herself with liberal ideas. So what, exactly, has happened to liberal politics in the United States today? That’s exactly the question which the excellent young George Washington historian, Timothy Shenk , asks in his new book, Left Adrift . And in tracing the fate of liberal politics in...

It’s been a strange week in tech. The Nobel prizes in both Chemistry and Physics went to prominent former or current Googlers, and yet the tech news cycle has been dominated by the U.S. government’s intent to break up a seemingly prostrate Google. Keith Teare and Andrew, in their regular That Was The Week summary of tech news, discuss Google’s failure to present itself in the United States as the...

As a Harvard trained pediatrician as well as television writer and producer, Neal Baer has particularly interesting take on the moral, policy and ethical challenges of CRISPR gene-editing technology. Baer - He is best known for his work on the television shows Designated Survivor , ER and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - has edited a new collection of essays on The Promise and Peril of CRIS...

Why are black men more likely to vote for Donald Trump than black women? According to Tavis Smiley , the syndicated radio host and best selling author of many books about black America include his latest Covenant with Black America - Twenty Years Later, it’s because some black men, especially younger ones, are attracted to the outlaw in Trump. Black women, in contrast, Smiley suggests, are repelle...

This is an important conversation. Few Americans are better skilled at listening than the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild . The author of the best selling Strangers in Their Own Land , Hochschild’s much anticipated new book, Stolen Pride , takes place in Kentucky, where she examines rural loss, shame and the rise of the American Right. Hochschild’s superpower is her ability to lis...

In December 2008, Lily Bock, the daughter of the novelist Charles Bock , was born. But Bock, the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver, was a reluctant parent, tagging along for the ride of fatherhood, obsessed primarily with his dream of a writing career. However, when Lily was six months old, his wife, Diana, was diagnosed with a complex form o...

American Christianity appears in a state of disrepair, perhaps even imminent civil war. On the one hand, of course, we have the evangelical right who make up much of Trump’s ideological base; on the other hand, there are progressive American theologians like Jim Wallis who argue that this Christian nationalist wing of the Republican party isn’t quite kosher. In his new book, The False White Gospel...

Might future multi-trillion dollar AI platforms like OpenAI represent not just the end of the app age but also of economic competition itself? As That Was The Week’s Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in today’s weekly KEEN ON tech round-up, the news of OpenAI’s $6.5 billion new funding round suggests that big tech is going to get even bigger because these new post-platform AI leviathans will control...

Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley both teach at Stanford’s interdisciplinary d.school . They are also the joint authors of Assembling Tomorrow , an intriguing new book in which, using their D School experience, Carter and Doorley provide a guide to designing a thriving future. They argue that the future, in all its socioeconomic complexity, can de designed so that we can mend the mistakes of our pa...