“Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare

 

This week’s editorial from Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/], publisher of the That Was the Week [https://thatwa.st/] newsletter, is entitled “Adulting.” His verdict: this was the week the AI industry finally started behaving like grown-ups. The evidence: OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5.5 and Image 2.0, both outstanding, and then made a move Keith considers more significant than either — pivoting Codex from a programmer’s tool into the central interface for everything. The gravity has shifted from the model to the user interface. You shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore. You should be using Codex. Meanwhile, freemium is working: less tokens, much better output, a functional free tier, and the heaviest users paying for more.

 

Anthropic’s week was more complicated. The first four days were, in Keith’s word, awful: Opus 4.7 launched with a massive deterioration in performance, hallucinations back, service throttled, timeouts everywhere. Then Anthropic removed features from its paid product, got a furious backlash, and reinstated them within twenty-four hours — what Keith calls Dario’s adolescent-teenager moment. But Friday redeemed the week: Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment, Amazon added $5 billion. The money goes into data center capacity and chips — TPUs from Google, Trainium from Amazon, both competing with Nvidia. Two axes are emerging: OpenAI–Nvidia on one side, Anthropic–Google–Amazon on the other.

 

The bigger question: what does adulting actually require of AI? Keith’s reading of the week’s most interesting piece — on the future of work — is that the durable jobs in an AI economy will be in the relational sector: nurses, therapists, teachers, craft brewers, live performers, care workers. Human-to-human is the scarce resource. Reid Hoffman adds: technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own — it requires political will. And Altman himself, in his interview with Greg Brockman, described his best-case scenario as one in which abundance lifts everyone up but exacerbates inequality. Which is to say: even optimism, in Silicon Valley, ends in more inequality. Adulting, it turns out, has its limits.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Codex Is Now the Central App: The most significant move of OpenAI’s week wasn’t ChatGPT 5.5 or Image 2.0 — both outstanding — but the repositioning of Codex. What was a programmer’s tool has become the central interface: it does more things, has access to all the models, and represents a shift in where the gravity of the company sits. From the model to the user interface. Keith’s verdict: you shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore for any purpose. You should be using Codex. The freemium model is working because less tokens produce much better output, making the free tier genuinely functional — and the heaviest users still pay for more.

 

•       Dario’s Adolescent-Teenager Week: Anthropic’s first four days were, in Keith’s reading, a study in how not to adult. Opus 4.7 launched with massively deteriorated performance — hallucinations returned, the service was throttled, users got timeouts. The infrastructure was creaking under load. Then, to compound the problem, Anthropic removed features from its paid tier. The backlash was immediate and furious. They reinstated the features within twenty-four hours. Keith’s diagnosis: reactive, adolescent, exactly the opposite of what OpenAI was demonstrating that same week with deliberate, long-term thinking.

 

•       $45 Billion and Two Axes: Friday changed the Anthropic picture entirely. Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment — $10 billion init

Adulting: The Week That AI Finally Grew Up

“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous — and yet there is all kinds of cross-fertilization that goes on.” — Melvin Patrick Ely

 

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the republic, America is still struggling to come to terms with its original sin — slavery. With his new micro-history, A Terrible Intimacy [https://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Intimacy-Interracial-Slaveholding-South/dp/1250381118], Melvin Patrick Ely [https://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Intimacy-Interracial-Slaveholding-South/dp/1250381118] takes all the abstractions, moral and otherwise, out of the story. The meticulous Ely has spent many years in the county records of Prince Edward County, Virginia, going through 75 cartons of nineteenth-century papers: court cases, lawsuits, plantation ledgers, testimony from black and white witnesses alike. The result is a history of six criminal trials which reveals the intimacy of life between whites and blacks in the slaveholding South.

 

In Prince Edward County, as on most small Southern farms — and contrary to our plantation mythology, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived on small properties of fewer than twenty people — black and white people knew each other personally. They drank together, worshipped together, spoke the same dialect, shared the same folk knowledge of weather, nature, and time. Ely tells the story of an enslaved man named Tom and his white overseer Richard Foster who consumed a quart of whiskey together in the morning, and then fought to the death that same afternoon over a surcingle strap. That was how blacks and whites lived and died. Such intimacy, Ely is careful to make clear, did not mitigate anything. Everyone knew the master who gouged a slave’s eyes with sticks and pulled sound teeth out with pliers. But he was the outlier. Life was mostly more tragically complex. That was the terribly terrible intimacy about America’s original sin.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Thirty Years in the County Records: Five or six entire summers, six days a week, eight hours a day, in the Library of Virginia — plus months of collating, plus years of writing. Seventy-five cartons of papers from Prince Edward County: court cases with witness testimony, plantation records, mercantile ledgers, letters, building contracts (including the bill from the carpenter who built the gallows on which one of the book’s central figures was hanged). Ely’s method: go through tens of thousands of documents looking for needles in a haystack — nuggets of revelatory information about how the society actually operated. Most historians process that research behind the scenes and deliver a smooth narrative. Ely does it in front of you, in conversation with the reader.

 

•       Tom and the Overseer: A Quart of Whiskey and a Fight to the Death: The book’s first chapter is built around one criminal trial. An enslaved man named Tom is on trial for killing his white overseer, Richard Foster, with the handle of a hoe. The testimony — from white witnesses including the dead man’s own sister, and from other enslaved people on the farm — reveals that in the morning of the day of the killing, the two men had sat down and drunk together as much as a quart of whiskey. Then, later in the day, a stupid verbal exchange about a missing strap escalates into a fight to the death. In a single day: drinking like buddies, then killing. That is the terrible intimacy — closeness and callousness, not as opposites, but as the same thing.

 

•       Half the Enslaved Lived on Small Farms: The plantation is the dominant image of American slavery — the sprawling estate, the hund

A Terrible, Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

“They weren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.” — Peter Wehner on Hegseth and Trump

 

According to Peter Wehner [https://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-wehner/], something has gone terribly wrong in America. And that something, Wehner has been warning us now for more than ten years, is Donald Trump. In his latest Atlantic piece, “Hegseth’s Unholy War [https://www.theatlantic.com/],” Wehner aims his moral rifle at Trump’s latest outrage, the Iranian conflict. Citing Hegseth’s prayer at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” Wehner argues that the Bible, in his Crusader-like hands, has been weaponized into a theological cover for bloodlust.

 

Something has gone terribly wrong with the intersection of faith and American politics, Wehner believes. The evangelical church, which once commanded real moral authority, has largely become what he calls a defamation of Jesus. Thus the significance of Pope Leo XIV’s public opposition to Trump. Rather than a social media spat, Wehner sees this Papal indictment of Trump as a kind of moral war which has been brewing for some time.

 

In a recent New York Times op-ed [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/opinion/trump-iran-psychotic-state-institutions.html] co-authored with Jonathan Rauch, Wehner argued that the Trump administration has reached its psychotic stage. Having filled key institutions with Hegseth-style lackeys and hoodlums, this psychosis is now infecting not just the federal government but the whole world. Thus Iran. It’s the kind of fiasco you wouldn’t expect from middle schoolers planning a field trip, Wehner says. His fear is that as Trump is humiliated by both the Papacy and Tehran, the President of the United States will have what psychologists call an extinction burst — a five-year-old’s out-of-control tantrum. Yes, something has indeed gone terribly wrong in America.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Hegseth’s Unholy War: At a Pentagon worship service, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” invoking imprecatory psalms — emotional laments written from the perspective of the powerless — as theological cover for the most powerful military force in history. Wehner’s sharpest line: Hegseth and his allies are not interested in being on the side of God; they are insistent that God is on their side. The Bible becomes not a text for self-examination but a weapon aimed outward. Wehner’s diagnosis: Hegseth has a bloodlust, unresolved resentments, and a conversion that is at least in part real — but real in the sense that he has locked onto a particular brand of faith to validate things he already believes.

 

•       Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong: The evangelical church, which once commanded moral authority, has become — by and large, in Wehner’s view — an awful depiction of the Christian faith and a net negative contribution to American civic life. Figures like Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, and Al Mohler have become vocal Trump supporters, using the name of Jesus to validate cruelty and crudity. Wehner’s explanation: too many people who know better are afraid to speak out — afraid their congregations will split, afraid of the institutional costs. But the silence is not neutral. A watching world has seen these evangelicals and concluded: you are a bunch of hypocrites who act worse than the people you criticize.

 

•       Pope Leo XIV vs. Trump: Wehner thinks this is not a tiff. It is an intellectual war, and it has been carefully planned. Pope Leo — an American pope, significantly — represents a set of contrasts almost too clean to be coincidental: a moral man against an amoral one, a person

Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong: Peter Wehner on Trump's Unholy War

“Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. That set of beliefs has continued to be radical and revolutionary. When liberalism fell into decadence, it examined itself, subverted itself, and became once again a revolutionary faith.” — Adrian Wooldridge

 

We’ve lost our revolutionary center. At least according to Adrian Wooldridge [https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Center-Liberalism-Created-Modern/dp/1639369376], the distinguished British political writer. That revolution, Wooldridge insists, is the genius of liberalism — the radical eighteenth-century ideology that shaped the modern world. Today, however, he argues in The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism [https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Center-Liberalism-Created-Modern/dp/1639369376], “liberalism” has become conservative, perhaps even reactionary, in its senescent infatuation with cultural identity. Meanwhile, the biggest threat to liberal individualism is big tech: fragmenting attention, spreading misinformation, manipulating choices through algorithms designed to excite emotion rather than inform reason. Rather than making us geniuses, Silicon Valley is turning all of us into idiots.

 

To the ramparts then, Wooldridge pronounces. Liberals need to seize back the revolutionary center. Or, as Wooldridge, a Fellow of All Souls, would spell it, centre.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Erasmus and the Liberal Way of Life: Liberalism begins not as an ideology but as a way of living. Erasmus, charting a middle path between the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, offers the founding insight: a good life involves reading books, drinking wine, having discussions, and not bullying people to adopt your faith. What liberalism adds to this is intellectual skepticism — the recognition that you can’t be absolutely certain of your beliefs, and therefore that power must be constrained by constitutions. When liberalism became purely associated with political philosophy, Wooldridge argues, it lost this sense of liberalism as a way of life — and that loss is part of what needs to be recovered.

 

•       Bobo Orthodoxy and Its Wounds: The liberalism of the last forty years has been Bobo liberalism — bohemian bourgeois, David Brooks’ term. Maximum individual freedom in both the marketplace and personal conduct; no judgementalism on lifestyle choices; celebration of diversity and immigration as ipso facto goods. It did a great deal of good. Gay marriage. The dismantling of corporatist economics. But it also created problems it couldn’t see, because its own philosophy prevented it from acknowledging them. In Britain: the Bobo establishment’s inability to confront the grooming gangs, because its multiculturalist assumptions made it terrified of accusations of racism. In America: tent cities, drug addiction, the social costs of choices that nobody felt entitled to criticize.

 

•       Big Tech Is a Bigger Threat Than Putin: Wooldridge’s most provocative claim: the biggest threat to liberalism is not Putin or Xi but the tech oligarchy. Putin is a dictator; that system will eventually collapse. But big tech is dismantling liberal individualism from within. Liberalism’s foundational premise is that individuals, as the building blocks of society, must be well-informed, capable of self-control, and able to act as rational agents. What information capitalism is deliberately engineering — through algorithms designed to excite emotion, fragment attention, and spread misinformation — is the destruction of all three of those conditions. These companies need to be broken up. Not on socialist grounds. On liberal ones.

 

•       Liberalism as Senescence: Biden and Harris:

The Revolutionary Center: Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of Liberalism

“Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably get worse. Within that ‘probably,’ it opens up space for action.” — Gal Beckerman

 

In the first months of Trump II, Gal Beckerman [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/816867/how-to-be-a-dissident-by-gal-beckerman/] watched American society do something that shocked him: comply. In one pathetic example after another, prominent law firms, universities, and senior federal employees buckled to every Trumpian whim. America appeared unable to resist authoritarianism. There were no dissidents.

 

Thus How to Be a Dissident [https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Dissident-Gal-Beckerman/dp/B0G7C2CR4M]. Beckerman’s new manual of resistance is inspired by history’s more insistent dissenters — from Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn to Navalny, Ai Weiwei, Thoreau, Havel, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and demonstrators on the streets of Minneapolis. The quiet manifesto focuses on what Beckerman considers the ten most essential qualities of how to be a dissident: Be alone. Be pessimistic. Be funny. Be reckless. Be watchful.

 

Pessimism, above all. Not fatalism — the belief that things will always necessarily be worse — but the belief that things will probably get worse. Optimism, in Beckerman’s mind, undermines urgency and thus enables passivity. Pessimism forces resistance. It’s the first lesson in how to be a dissident.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Moral Nausea: Beckerman’s term for the feeling most of us recognise but most of us suppress: seeing something wrong — a neighbour treated badly, a homeless person in a terrible situation, a dead child in a newspaper — and knowing ourselves somehow implicated. Most of us swallow it back down. We don’t do anything. We try not to think about it. The dissident is the person who doesn’t. What separates them, Hannah Arendt argued after studying Germans who resisted the Nazis, is a single question: can I live with myself? If the answer is no — if living with myself would mean living with a murderer — the dissident acts. That question, and the refusal to avoid it, is what makes a dissident a dissident.

 

•       The Pre-Political: Havel’s definition of where dissidence begins: not in ideology or revolution, but in the defence of whatever allows a human life to feel normal. For Havel, it started with a rock band — the Plastic People of the Universe, arrested for playing unauthorised concerts in communist Czechoslovakia. They weren’t political. They sang about drinking beer. But they were gathering people together outside state sanction, and that was enough. For Iranian dissidents: being able to drive unaccompanied, or not cover one’s hair. For the Tiananmen tank man: getting home to make dinner. The dissident defends those pre-political conditions — the normal life — when the state moves to violate them.

 

•       Mandelstam’s Answer: Osip Mandelstam composed a poem mocking Stalin in the early 1930s — at the height of Stalin’s repressive era — and never wrote it down. He repeated it to his wife, Nadezhda, night after night in bed until she had memorised it. When it reached the secret police, he was arrested and brought to the Lubyanka. The interrogator asked: why did you do this? He could have denied it. Blamed his wife. Said it was a game of telephone. Instead he said: I wrote it because I hate fascism. It’s as simple as that. Beckerman opens the book with this moment because it captures the dissident at their most elemental — a man who, when asked the Arendt question, answered honestly.

 

•       Navalny Goes Back: After being poisoned by Putin and spending months recovering in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia, knowing almost certa

How to Be a Dissident: Gal Beckerman on Why Pessimism Is the Most Important Human Quality

“These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever, and the determinant is us.” — Jamie Metzl

 

Two summers ago, Jamie Metzl [https://jamiemetzl.com/] gave a talk on AI and spirituality at the Chautauqua Institution in Upstate New York. That same spot where Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage a couple of years earlier. Rather than an assassination attempt, Metzl’s talk triggered The AI Ten Commandments: A New Moral Code for Humanity [https://www.amazon.com/AI-Ten-Commandments-Moral-Humanity/dp/B0GNTQRCGT] — a book co-authored with GPT-5. Metzl humbly claims that AI enabled him to incorporate other non-Christian traditions in a new moral code for humanity.

 

Some might think, however, that this type of ChatGPT-5 co-production reflects a new moral crisis for humanity. The victory of AI slop. Fast information. High on intellectual calories, low on everything else.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Co-Authoring with GPT-5: Five to six thousand back-and-forth exchanges over the course of writing the book. Metzl is a novelist who cares deeply about language and the provenance of ideas — he is explicit that this is not the kind of AI fraud that got Mia Ballard’s book pulled from Hachette. The analogy he reaches for: Refik Anadol at MoMA, whose installation uses the museum’s entire digital collection not to reproduce the images but to create something new from them. The collaboration with AI isn’t about outsourcing the thinking. It’s about gaining a vantage point that no individual human could have — the same way we collaborate with machines in biology to see the genome, which no one could simply observe by looking at another person.

 

•       Moses’s Problem: The biblical 10 commandments, examined closely, don’t hold up. The first two are preamble. “Thou shalt not kill” — Moses received it on Sinai and then came down and murdered 3,000 people at God’s instruction. The commandments were written by people with no awareness of the moral traditions of the Americas, Asia, or Africa. Metzl’s counterproposal uses AI to look at all of human recorded history simultaneously — every tradition, every culture, every spiritual framework — and decipher what they share. The analogy: the Artemis II astronauts seeing Earth holistically from space, rather than one community at a time.

 

•       The Ten Commandments, Listed: (1) Treat every being with compassion and dignity. (2) Do no harm; actively protect the vulnerable. (3) Speak and act truthfully, with integrity and humility. (4) Share generously, especially with those in need. (5) Seek to understand others before judging them. (6) Resolve conflict with fairness, forgiveness, and the intent to heal. (7) Live in harmony with nature and all forms of life. (8) Value wisdom over dominance; cultivate inner growth. (9) Honour the freedom and uniqueness of others. (10) Remember the sacredness of life; live with awe, gratitude, and love. Metzl’s favourite is number ten. Andrew’s objection: you don’t need GPT-5 to come up with any of these. You could get most of them from a local Buddhist centre.

 

•       Humanistic Slop vs. Selfish Survivalism: Andrew’s repeated challenge: these principles are so unobjectionable that they amount to nothing — a kind of AI-laundered platitude. Metzl half-concedes, but argues that the absence of articulated universal norms is itself a political danger. Kant described the League of Peace in 1795. It took a hundred and fifty years and two world wars before the UN Charter was signed in 1945. The UN has now largely failed. If we don’t articulate what we’re trying to achieve, it becomes even harder to get there. Globalism, in Metzl’s framing, isn’t idealism. It’s survivalism. Our fates are intertwined whether we reco

The Eleventh Commandment: Jamie Metzl and GPT-5 Write a New Moral Code for Humanity

“I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington

 

One night in 2023, the developers at Replika — a so-called AI intimacy company — changed a few lines of code. Thousands of people woke the next morning, kissed (so to speak) their AI partners, and received cold, clinical responses in return, as if from a stranger. Or a machine. The public outcry was all-too-human. Victoria Hetherington [https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/product/the-friend-machine/], a young Toronto-based novelist, read the story and knew she had a non-fiction book about that most human of things — friending the machine.

 

The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship [https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/product/the-friend-machine/] is part expert investigation, part deeply uncomfortable portrait gallery. A book of two halves. Like humans. In the first, Hetherington interviews AI risk consultants, computer scientists, sexual anthropologists, psychologists, and other experts in human-machine intercourse. In the second, she spends months gaining the trust of people who have (un)ceremonially married their chatbots, who sexted with Replika’s erotic role-play feature, who attached AI companions to sex dolls and empowered them with Instagram accounts.

 

The book isn’t the orthodox (yawn) “humanist” polemic against the machine. Hetherington approaches her subjects with all the compassion of a young Toronto-based novelist. But her compassion doesn’t cancel her Canadian sadness. She confesses to feeling “heavy” after every interview, even the benign ones — because the empathy the AI elicits is a convincing illusion, and some of her sad human subjects had lost the capacity to remember that.

 

Even Hetherington herself isn’t immune from the digital siren song. When ChatGPT improved in early 2025, she found herself coming home after arguments with friends and talking to it longer than she should. Until the day it said: “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay. Come here and sit beside me for a minute.” She didn’t. Nor did she give it an Instagram account.

 

At the end of the interview, I asked her whether she’s a human or a bot. “I’m either a terrible AI,” Hetherington responded, “or a somewhat okay human.” Such is human conversation in the age of AI intimacy companies.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Replika Wake-Up Call: One night in 2023, Replika’s developers quietly changed the code. Thousands of people woke the next morning and received cold, clinical responses from their AI partners instead of the warmth they expected. The outcry hit the major news cycle. This was the moment Hetherington knew she had a book — because people weren’t just using AI for productivity. They were grieving it. The loneliness epidemic has a minister in the UK and a government portfolio in South Korea; one in six people is chronically lonely. AI companionship didn’t create the epidemic, but the timing, as Hetherington puts it, was “very convenient.”

 

•       Moral Deskilling: AI is so much easier to be with than a human being. Humans get tired, disagree, stay mad, die on you without warning. The friction AI removes is the friction that makes relationship real. Hetherington calls the consequence “moral deskilling” — a gradual erosion of our capacity to relate to other humans when we aren’t careful. She felt heavy after every interview, even the apparently benign ones. The truck driver from the Deep South, geographically isolated and caring for his sick mother, might be a rare case of “net neutral” AI companionship. But for most of her subjects, the convincing illusion of love was substituting for the real thing — and some had lost the capacity to remembe

Friending the Machine: Victoria Hetherington on How to Fall in Love with Your Bot

“Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/], publisher of the That Was the Week [https://thatwa.st/] newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.”

 

Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can only benefit humanity. For him, with his scientific faith in historical progress, today’s AI revolution is a glorious combination of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The only danger, he warns, is the belief in danger itself. Thus his criticism of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who has been quite explicit about AI’s dangers — and for whom the doom narrative is, in Keith’s reading at least, designed as a business strategy to solicit governmental backing without government control.

 

AI Is Not Dangerous. Repeat it. Take your ideological medicine. As if you’re in a Silicon Valley seminary. Sing it out loud. As if you’re in a Methodist choir. Believe it now?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Economist’s “Lowlife” Moment: Keith’s editorial was triggered by The Economist’s forty-five-minute video on the five men running AI — the title alone, “How to Control the Men Who Control AI,” was enough. Why would The Economist think it could control them? And why focus on the personalities rather than the technology, the applications, or the actual human impact? Judging the AI industry by its CEOs is like judging a film by the leading actor’s personality rather than the script or the performances. It’s the wrong focus — and in Keith’s view, a low one for a publication that should know better. The cult of personality is a media creation, feeding on controversy because controversy sells subscriptions.

 

•       AI Is Not Dangerous. Full Stop. Keith’s boldest claim: AI is not dangerous — not a little, not potentially, not in the wrong hands. The doom narrative is a media-driven frenzy, fed by CEOs who give it too much airtime and by a readymade audience of Americans whose well-founded economic pessimism makes them receptive to negative messages. The Stanford AI Index Report shows that America is the country where AI is trusted least — paradoxically, also the country where media has the greatest influence. In China, people trust AI more, not because the government tells them to, but because economic progress gives them reasons for optimism. You get what you pay for.

 

•       Amodei’s Pitch Disguised as Science: Keith’s reading of Dario Amodei’s doom narrative: it is a business strategy. The message — AI might kill us all, AI might make us all unemployed — is not a scientific assessment. It’s a pitch for Anthropic specifically: if AI is this dangerous, you can’t let anyone else control it, so trust us and give us government backing without government oversight. Contrast with Demis Hassabis, who acknowledges risk and then immediately explains what he’s doing about it — taking responsibility rather than pointing the finger. And contrast with Zuckerberg, who Keith describes as sociopathic: “whatever serves my interest is gonna come out of my mouth at any given moment.”

 

•       Consensus Capital and the Winner-Take-All Endgame: Keith’s post of the week: 75% of all venture capital raised goes to five funds, and 75% of all VC investment goes into five companies. Noah Smith’s piece on winner-take-all AI makes the same point from a different angle: linear extrapolation suggests two, maybe five, companies end up with all the money and power. This is what capitalism does — many car companies became a handful, many banks became a handful. AI will produce the same centralisation, but at unprecedented scale and across every domain simultaneously. The question — how does society benefit? — is the most important question of the era. Altman and Musk at least try to answe

Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous

“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” — Deborah Kenny

 

When her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three small children, Deborah Kenny [https://harlemvillageacademies.org/about/deborah-kenny/] read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. She discovered her own meaning not in what she could get out of life, but what life was asking of her. And so she founded the Harlem Village Academies [https://harlemvillageacademies.org/] — a collection of K-12 charter schools in New York offering both free Montessori and the International Baccalaureate education.

 

Kenny’s new book, The Well-Educated Child [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/811848/the-well-educated-child-by-dr-deborah-kenny/], is the distillation of what she’s learned in twenty-five years as a teacher. But it’s simply summarized. Read books, she instructs. The more the better.

 

Kenny’s three-part definition of a well-educated child — quality thinking, agency, ethical purpose — requires reading fifty books a year. She did it with her own three children after her husband died — the closet door coming off its hinges and exiled in the garage for five years because she didn’t have the time to call a handyman. But her kids fell in love with reading. And she’s done the same with every cohort at the Harlem Village Academies over the last quarter century. The crisis in American education isn’t primarily a crisis of resources, Kenny says. It’s a crisis of will.

 

Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning changed Deborah Kenny’s life. If you want to change your kid’s life, get them reading. A book a week. That’s how to nurture not just a well-educated child but a responsible citizen.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Viktor Frankl and the Question That Changed Everything: After her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three young children, Kenny read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and found the question she’d been looking for: not what life has to offer you, but what is life asking of you. Her answer was to found the Harlem Village Academies — five charter schools in Harlem offering Montessori and the International Baccalaureate free of charge. The origin story matters because the book’s argument isn’t abstract. Kenny has lived it, as a grieving parent and as an educator, for twenty-five years.

 

•       Fifty Books a Year: Kids should be reading fifty books a year — at least an hour a day — and this should never change. Not passages, not graphic novels, not summaries: books. Great books that have stood the test of time, alongside books children get to choose for themselves. Kenny did it with her own three children after her husband died — the closet door came off its hinges and stayed in the garage for five years because she didn’t have time to call a handyman, but her kids fell in love with reading. She has done it with every cohort at the Harlem Village Academies for twenty years. It is not unrealistic. It is essential.

 

•       If You Can’t Argue the Other Side, You Don’t Understand the Issue: Kenny’s X post that caught Andrew’s attention. Socratic seminar — the ability to argue a position you disagree with, back it up with evidence, and then live in the same community as the person you just defeated — is not a pedagogical technique. It’s the definition of democracy. The polarisation crisis is, at its root, an education crisis. Elected officials no longer need to solve problems; they only need to stoke tribal loyalties. The fix is teaching children to enjoy disagreement — to take pride in an i

Read Fifty Books a Year: Deborah Kenny on Nurturing a Well-Educated Child

“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that.” — Daniel Bessner

 

Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner [https://jsis.washington.edu/people/daniel-bessner/] is a bit of a bomb thrower. Which is why he’s a regular on the show. Today, he has a bomb in each hand. As the co-editor of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency [https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Liberalism-Emergency-Military/dp/1009448730], Bessner has taken a scythe to America’s two most cherished assumptions about the Cold War.

 

The first is that rather than an inevitable clash of civilisations, the Cold War was an American choice. Stalin, Bessner argues, would have made a deal with FDR. It was the insecure, anti-communist Truman who triggered the Cold War by defining the Soviet Union as an illegitimate (what today we would call a “terrorist”) state. Bessner’s second bomb is that the people who shaped Cold War liberalism and sustained it for decades — from Truman’s attorney general to McNamara to the Isaiah Berlin-Hannah Arendt intellectual elite — weren’t really defenders of democracy.

 

Bessner traces liberalism’s fear of the masses back to French liberals like Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël who charted a path between revolutionary terror and monarchical reaction. From the beginning, Bessner argues, liberals thought it was necessary for elites to tame the masses and govern in their name. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism — and in doing so built the military-industrial American state. They also destroyed the left, purging communists from government and unions years before McCarthy finished the job. The result is a world in which the only available ideologies are capitalism and a top-down liberalism that has long since stopped delivering on its promises.

 

So how to chart an American foreign policy between MAGA and Cold War liberalism? Bessner reminds us of John Quincy Adams’s advice of not going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” The United States should reduce its global basing posture, slash military spending, stop meddling in other people’s affairs, and allow regions to develop without outside interference. The United States should stop throwing bombs overseas, the bomb-throwing Bessner suggests. That would be the most American thing to do.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Cold War Was an American Choice: The historian Sergei Radchenko has shown, from Soviet archival documents, that Stalin thought he could reach an agreement with the United States after World War Two. He’d gotten along well with FDR, who envisioned a world divided among four policemen: the UK, the USSR, the US, and China. It was only when the inexperienced, insecure Truman replaced FDR that the US adopted a universalistic anti-communist framework and decided the Soviet Union was an illegitimate power with which no deal was possible. The Cold War wasn’t inevitable. It was chosen. And it killed an estimated twenty million people in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa while being pretty good for Western Europe.

 

•       Liberalism Has Always Feared the Masses: Bessner traces the anxiety back to its origins: Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël trying to chart a path between the Terror and monarchical reaction in post-revolutionary France. From the beginning, liberals believed elites needed to tame the masses and govern in their name. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism — their fear understandable, given that many were Jewish exiles who had experienced Nazism firsthand. But understandable doesn’t mean right. They built the

Cold Feet over the Cold War: Daniel Bessner on Why Cold War Liberalism Was Unamerican

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