Keen On America

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial general intelligence (AGI) won’t take place in 2027 or perhaps even 2050. But it will happen, he confidently predicts, by 2100. So that only underlines Marcus’ argument, made in his acclaimed 2024 book Tami...

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Kuper who raised the alarm about “Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa” in a bracing September Financial Times column . But this is a reactionary shadow, Kuper warns, not just haunting th...

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill , whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not just a powerful critique of Trump but also of the contemporary Democratic party which he describes as a “cancerous thing”. There’s a desperate need, O’Neill believes, for the Democrats to reinvent themselves as an populist alternative to Trumpism. And tha...

As the author of the well-received Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, Seth Rogovoy knows his Dylan. So his critical review of the A Complete Unknown , the much hyped new movie featuring Timothee Chamalat as a young Dylan, is worth noting. Rogovoy questions the whole point of the movie, arguing that nobody - neither enthusiasts nor newbies to Dylan - learn anything from A Complete Unknown . And as the...

The Artificial Intelligence revolution has dwarfed everything else in tech during 2024. But according to Toby Walsh , author of the upcoming The Shortest History of AI , 2025 also promises to be a revolutionary year in the history of AI. The AI agents are coming, Walsh suggests, warning that 2025 might be the first year in which we will be able to quantify the job losses caused by smart machines....

So what’s it to be in the Middle East in 2025: Mad Max style anarchy or a "Pax Hebraica" orchestrated from Israel? According to regional expert Soli Ozel , the Mad Max scenario is more likely - although, as he notes, many of us oversimplify the contemporary Middle East into false binaries such as the Sunni vs Shiite conflict or Iran vs the Arab world. That said, Ozel warns, the mostly cataclysmic...

Time waits for no one. As 2024 winds down, what are the key moments of a year that perhaps overpromised and underdelivered? According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch , six events in 2024 captured the year’s zeitgeist. There’s the November election and the tumult in the Middle East, of course. Then there’s the ongoing lawfare between Trump and the legal establishment as well as the Supreme...

As both a much published poet and cultural critic, Adam Kirsch brings an etymological sensibility to the great issues of our day. In his new book, On Settler Colonialism , Kirsch excavates the nonsense now taken for granted by many academics about the supposedly twin intrinsic evils of American and Israeli history. Unlike the European colonialists in America, Kirsch reminds us, Jewish settlers in...

Bloomberg columnist, Parmy Olson , won the FT Business Book of 2024 for Supremacy , her story of the race between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ Google DeepMind for control of the AI ecosystem. Given that Parmy Olson finished writing Supremacy at the end of 2023, I asked her what she would have added to her narrative with the hindsight of knowing what actually transpired in 2024. And what...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation between Andrew and That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare looking back at the major tech events of 2024. Today, Andrew and Keith look forward to the upcoming year for big tech. What will be the fate of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft in 2025? And who, if anyone, will win the multi trillion dollar race for AI supremacy in 2025? Keith Teare i...

So how will future historians think about 2024? In tech terms, 2024 will probably be remembered as the year when AI began to become ubiquitous. Although, as Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in this special 2024 edition of THAT WAS THE WEEK , only hardcore techies like Keith are currently making the use of AI central to their lives. For mainstream users like Andrew, AI in 2024 remained an abstract pr...

As Elon Musk continues to plot, with Trumpian glee, against the American Federal government, it is important to remind ourselves of the essential value of this state bureaucracy. As the founding president and CEO of the Washington DC based Partnership for Public Service , Max Stier has spent the last quarter century focused on making American government more efficient and accountable. And Stier’s...

The supposed “science” of eugenics is one of the most dangerous myths of the modern age. As Erik Peterson, author of The Shortest History of Eugenics explains, it not only was used by Nazi thugs to justify the Final Solution, but also has been deployed by American racists to justify slavery and inequality. And today, in a brave new world increasingly shaped by advances in biotech, Peterson warns,...

There is a counter intuitive school of thought - represented by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen - which suggests that America, for all its technological innovation, remains trapped by long term economic stagnation. So it’s no coincidence that the Austin based investor, consultant, and writer, Byrne Hobart ’s co-authored new book, Boom , comes with enthusiastic blurbs from Cowen, Thiel...

The iconic DLD conference will be holding its twentieth annual event in Munich next month. Founded in January 2005, DLD has hosted many of the world’s leading tech thinkers and entrepreneurs from both Europe and the United States. What most distinguishes DLD, however, is its community of loyal regulars whose presence in Munich in January promises a degree of certainty in an increasingly uncertain...

Yesterday, we ran Bethanne Patrick’s five best novels of 2024. Today, we feature her top non-fiction of the year including new books about reality television, Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and Handel's Messiah. ‘Tis the season. Enjoy! Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Bethanne Patrick maintains a storie...

Pity the novelist. In a year which brought us the unbelievable non-fiction of a second Trump victory and the establishment of Luigi Mangione as an American folk hero, what can novelists do to stretch our imagination? But according to the LA Times literary critic, Bethanne Patrick , novelists do, indeed, still have something to tell us. And to make her case, she discusses her five favorite works of...

For all the hysteria about misinformation and disinformation, maybe we prefer ignorance. That’s the intriguing thesis of the illustrious Columbia University intellectual historian, Mark Lilla, in his new book, Ignorance is Bliss. It all begins, of course, inside Plato’s cave in his Republic , that metaphorical preface to Western thought where we are subjected to illusionary shadows and delusional...

It’s been coming a while. But now it’s official. Keith Teare has declared his love for Elon Musk. In this week’s THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter, suitably entitled “ I’m With Musk ”, Keith argues that without Musk “I have no idea what a positive narrative about modernization and growth would be.” America, Keith argues, needs “builders” like Musk who will enable “a real conversation about change”. I’m...

On May 24, 2022, a 18 year-old walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and shot to death 19 students and 2 teachers. In Uvalde’s Darkest Hour , the owner of the local Uvalde Leader-News , Craig Garnett tries to make sense of these tragic events. Although making sense might be the wrong words to describe either the book or Garnett himself. While this mass murder occurred more than two y...

While many of us fear a future in which all our online interactions are with algorithms, the young Florida based programming prodigy, Michael Sayman , actually looks forward to this brave new world. In fact, earlier this year he started a controversial social media app called SocialAI which exclusively feature bots responding to its human users. For Sayman, our ubiquitous interaction with smart ma...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Jonathan Taplin about the dearth of high quality contemporary music and movies. The music writer, David Rowell , agrees with Taplin, but goes one step further, suggesting that we no longer even like new music. In his new book, The Endless Refrain , Rowell the rise of music streaming and the consolidation of digital platforms has so decimated the musical l...

A few months ago, I interviewed David Leonhardt , author of Ours Was the Shining Future, about the death of the American dream which, he argued, can be dated from on 5 June 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And it’s on that infamous date that I begun my conversation with Jonathan Taplin about the rebirth of the American dream. According to the Los Angeles based Taplin, who is now working o...

On the week that the price of Bitcoin rose above $100,000 and Trump appointed David Sacks as his “AI and Crypto Czar”, has Silicon Valley finally succeeded in conquering Washington DC? In today’s That Was The Week summary of tech news, Keith Teare and Andrew review what appears to be a tectonic shift in power between Silicon Valley and Washington DC. Are “right-wing” Trump supporters like Sacks, E...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Mozilla co-founder and Internet Hall of Famer, Mitchell Baker, one of the great champions of an open web. Today’s guest, the prolific writer and journalist Jeff Jarvis , is another leading defender of the internet. In his new book, The Web We Weave , Jarvis explains how we can reclaim the internet from moguls, misanthropes and moral panics. The Web, Jarvi...