We Are (Not) the Champions: Why Silicon Valley Isn’t Providing an AI Human Dividend

What’s the truth about our AI future? Our guests have different takes. On the one hand, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee predict [https://keenon.substack.com/p/our-seven-trillion-dollar-future?r=ktr9] a $7 trillion future for just three AI startups in 2027. On the other, Salima Bhimani [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-next-moonshot-wont-come-from?r=ktr9] doesn’t believe that Silicon Valley has the imagination to create the moonshot to address our jobless future.   For That Was The Week [https://thatwastheweek.com/] publisher Keith Teare [https://thatwastheweek.com/], it’s a time for what he calls “champions.” What he wants is the development of a “human dividend” from intelligence. Supposedly this will be provided by the multi-trillion dollar AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that will pioneer the social ownership of intelligence. But a Norwegian-style Human Wealth Fund is about as likely, I suspect, as a new Freddie Mercury recording of “We Are the Champions.”   Dream on. Salima Bhimani is right. The moonshot to fix our jobless AI future won’t come out of workaholic Silicon Valley. Look elsewhere for those types of champions, my friends. Brazil perhaps. The movie, not the country.   Five Takeaways   •       The Zeitgeist Exaggerates. The week’s split screen: a $7 trillion future for OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX on one side; Ed Luce’s “AI phobia” consensus and Jill Lepore’s AI-versus-the-people politics on the other. Keith’s contrarian read: the negativity is loud but thin. Most intelligent people already use AI daily — from high school onward — and simply don’t talk about it; weigh the happy users against the vocal critics and the users “massively dominate.” He suspects a tipping point has been reached, with the anti-AI minority “starting to sound a little cultish.” The political stakes are his real worry: if the Democrats mistake the noise for populism and run against AI, they will lose 2028 “quite heavily” — and Lepore, he charges, is writing opinion, not history. •       Who Are the Champions? The editorial’s diagnosis: the problem isn’t negativity but “the lack of vocal connection between AI and people’s futures.” The champions exist — but they hedge everything into pointlessness, “trained as politicians as opposed to business leaders,” each with a little voice saying don’t upset anybody. “Can you imagine any other major breakthrough in human history where people would be shy to champion it?” His roster pointedly omitted both Dario Amodei and Elon Musk (“fairly balanced with who I left out”); the goal is to assemble the articulate case so “the minority who are politicizing negativity can be exposed as a minority.” Andrew’s genealogy for the project: Nixon’s silent majority, reborn with a token budget. •       90% Sacks — and Squashed Armadillos. The hour’s fault line ran through David Sacks’s tweet: Dario believes frontier AI is “too powerful to distribute”; Sacks believes it is “too powerful to centralize,” fearing a marriage of corporate and state power. Andrew took Dario’s side; Keith claimed the middle until Andrew invoked the Texas rule — the only thing in the middle of the road is squashed armadillos — and extracted a confession: “I agree with Sacks, I’d say, 90%.” The 10% is Keith’s own position: happy with centralized giants (free intelligence needs their investment) and happy with the growing edge — the world’s intelligence in a solar-powered box, no grid required. Dario is championing “handcuffs on AI”; Lepore’s car-regulation analogy fails because corporations are already regulated and AI itself is safe; and Helen Toner’s Hugging Face alarm, aired on Ezra Klein’s podcast, was “contrived in a lab” — a dismissal that sparked the hour’s frenemy flashpoint: “Are you telling me I’m ignorant of something?” •