Keen On America

Amidst all the talk of an AI bubble, bonds are back in the news. The world’s two leading business newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, both feature stories this weekend warning about bond ructions and surging yields. While these warnings might only interfere with the sleep of bond geeks, they are a good reminder of the centrality of the bond market to our prosperity.
 
For all their financial geekiness, Robin Wigglesworth knows that bonds matter. He edits Alphaville, the Financial Times’ splendidly geekish markets blog, and he’s the author of A Fabulous Debt, a new book that tells the “epic” story of how bonds built the modern world. The bond market matters, Wigglesworth reminds us, because when it breaks — as in 1873, 2008 and very nearly in 2020 — then the whole world suffers.
 
So what, exactly, is a bond? Wigglesworth explains that it’s a tradable loan which the Venetians accidentally invented in 1171 to pay for a war with Constantinople. In Venice, it became a forced levy on every citizen, sweetened by its annual 5% interest payments and by the right to sell its paper on the Rialto. From there it runs through Amsterdam with the Dutch East India Company to modern America, where Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was financed by bonds sold by the London merchant bank Baring Brothers — remarkably, while Britain was at war with the France it was paying, and earning Barings what may have been the largest banking fee in history. Then there’s the deliciously named Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor, a bond bad boy who invented an entire country, Poyais, and successfully sold its bonds in London.
 
In spite of the shady MacGregor, the moral of the bond story, Wigglesworth reassures us, is that transparency pays. Britain could borrow more cheaply than its rivals because parliament controlled the purse and published its accounts. Europe’s greatest banker, the London-based Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who brought Prussia, Spain, Russia and the new Latin American republics to the London market after Waterloo, thus cajoled other governments into opening their books to get the same rates. Accountability was, literally, cheaper. And so the modern world — with its leviathan state and the financial muscle to conduct global wars — was born.
 
Does Wigglesworth lose sleep about today’s bond ructions and surging yields? Not exactly. But he is a tad nervous about the fact that tech giants have issued over $500 billion of bonds this year to build data centers. So rather than the feared AI stock market bust, Wigglesworth does raise the more apocalyptic specter of a bond bust. Not an imminent fabulous crisis, he reassures. Not yet, anyway.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Stock Bubbles Don’t Matter. Bond Bubbles Do. Wigglesworth’s opening move reverses the usual hierarchy. Stock market bubbles are mostly inconsequential and sometimes even welcome — we occasionally need people to dream rather than be careful, and to throw money at the hot new thing, because that is when big leaps happen. The dot-com bust is his proof: the American stock market lost half its value from peak to trough, and the recession that followed was among the shortest and shallowest in US history. Credit is the dangerous part. When the bond market breaks bad — 1873, 2008, and very nearly 2020 — it tends to be very painful for the world. The structural reason is asymmetry: a shareholder’s upside is unlimited and the downside is zero, so the stock market is the natural home of wild speculation; a bondholder’s best case is simply being repaid. That is why bonds work best when they are safe, or at least seen as safe — and why the rare occasions when bond speculation does run out of control have proved more destructive than tulips, the South Sea, or the dot-com boom.
•       Venice, 1171. Credit is ancient — Mesopotamian clay tablets recorded loans four thousand years ago, some made out not to a named person but simply to a merchant, which suggests they were traded. But the bond in its proper form was invented by accident in Venice in 1171, to finance a war with Constantinople. The city was rich, but not rich enough to borrow from the bankers at their tables in the Rialto, so the government compelled every citizen to lend in proportion to their wealth — an involuntary war tax, softened two ways: 5% a year until victory, and a receipt you could sell. The Venetians hated it at first, and then discovered it was collateral, and de facto paper money before paper money existed in Europe. Milan, Pisa, Genoa and Rome copied it; it spread to France, Germany, Spain and finally the Netherlands, where the Dutch turned a handful of loans into an actual market — cities, states and the water boards that paid for the dykes — and, Wigglesworth argues, invented modern capitalism. The Dutch East India Company sold stock once. It financed its ships, armies and expeditions with bonds.
•       The Man Who Invented a Country. The book’s great set piece. Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish mercenary who had fought beside Bolívar and married his cousin, returned to London as cacique of Poyais — a verdant land on the Honduran coast, he said, with gold, honey, fertile plains and a capital called Saint Joseph. He had songs written about it. He sold its bonds on the London Stock Exchange, raising hundreds of thousands of pounds, and persuaded Scottish families to sell up and sail. Poyais did not exist. It was a swampy hellhole with no capital and no settlement; some who arrived took their own lives, many died of famine and malaria, and only a handful got home. Why bonds rather than stock? Because that is where the money was: Britain had financed the Napoleonic wars with an enormous issue of consols, those who held them made fortunes when Britain won, and Nathan Mayer Rothschild was busy bringing Prussia, Spain, Russia and the new Latin American republics to the London market. In the middle of what we would now call an emerging market bond bubble, an invented country did not sound so outlandish.
•       Transparency Pays. The argument with the widest reach. Britain’s advantage in the nineteenth century was not only naval: its bonds were issued by a parliament that controlled the purse and published financial numbers, rather than by a fickle royal family, and Dutch, German and French investors preferred them for exactly that reason. Cheaper borrowing made Britain stronger, and Rothschild then went round cajoling other governments to open their books and issue through their estates rather than their kings, because that is what British money now expected. Accountability, in other words, had a price advantage — a quiet feedback loop pushing governments towards openness. America’s version is Hamilton, who assumed the states’ defaulted war debts and turned them into federal bonds that circulated as money in a country desperately short of coin — a financial enema, as the musical has it. The Louisiana Purchase was financed entirely by bonds, arranged by the British bank Baring Brothers while Britain was at war with France. Wigglesworth calls it a win-win-win; Andrew notes the indigenou...

Lenin supposedly said there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This wasn’t one of those weeks.
 
It might have looked like a historic week. The AI circus rolled into the UN with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressing the Security Council on the peril facing “humanity as a whole.” Britain and Australia weighed in with middling diplomatic or regulatory AI initiatives of their own. Trump renamed AI as superintelligence.
 
But none of this changed anything. The UN continued its kabuki theater of making global pronouncements without having the power to change even the most local of things. Britain and Australia remained not-great powers with delusions of grandeur. In the autumn of his patriarchy, Trump continued to flail with pathetic powerlessness. And Dario and Sam increasingly seem like bit actors in the unfolding AI drama.
 
So where’s all the power in AI? What’s this week’s real story? In Ezra Klein’s New York Times conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare called “an interview for the ages,” Huang, the CEO of the world’s most valuable company, reveals himself as the guy running the AI show.
 
The $5 trillion dollar man talks with the quiet authority of the AI headmaster, fearlessly scolding his riotous sixth form. And his most riotous pupils are Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. So, in response to their latest handwringing about AI’s existential threat to humanity, Huang’s message was unambiguous. If you can’t align it, “don’t ship it,” he said of these supposedly humanity-destroying AI products, and if you truly cannot contain your own experiments, “then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down.”
 
The most revealing part of the Klein interview was about Nvidia’s astonishing economic clout in the AI economy. Huang put his chip manufacturer’s investment in this ecosystem at around $100 billion — larger, as Klein noted, than Joe Biden’s entire CHIPS and Science Act. This guy has serious clout, equivalent to or perhaps even surpassing the US state. He doesn’t waste his time at the UN. He’s not running wannabe great powers like Australia or Britain. He doesn’t play senile semantic games like you-know-who.
 
Huang can lay down the law to Sam and Dario (and Trump) because he doesn’t fear them. As the Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar reveals in a revealing interview this week with Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson, Nvidia isn’t dependent on the walled garden innovators at OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither lab actually buys Huang’s hardware — they rent capacity from the cloud companies that do, which makes them tenants rather than customers. Meanwhile the cheaper and maybe even better open weight models now pouring out of China run on the same Nvidia silicon. Whoever wins the AI race, Jensen “Levi Strauss” Huang sells them the chips.
 
So Mr Chips to Sam and Dario: heads you lose, tails I win. Shut up or shut down. That’s what happened this week.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Theatre of the UN. Altman and Amodei chose the Security Council rather than the General Assembly — the biggest forum available, and one with at least some teeth. What they want, in Keith’s reading, is political globalization: a super-state view of AI, with rules set from New York. But AI has already globalized, through the spread of open-source models, and not in a form they like. His analogy is Facebook’s Libra, launched on the condition that every government agree, and dead for exactly that reason. The second motive is liability. The conversation of the past fortnight has moved to who gets sued when something goes wrong, and the only rational answer is the companies that built it — unless they are following rules set by government, in which case liability moves. Both are heading for IPOs. As for Andy Burnham, Keith is unimpressed: Britain built its modern advantage on not regulating, and grasping regulation as the theme of a G20 chairmanship is unlikely to serve either the country or the man.
•       Huang Calls the Bluff. The week’s main event was Ezra Klein’s long interview with Jensen Huang, which Keith calls an interview for the ages. Huang’s frame is the engineer’s: the Golden Gate was not the first bridge, and the Wright Flyer was not the first attempt at flight; engineering is failure leading to success, and what Altman and Amodei describe as species-like behaviour is to him an engineering problem. His conclusion was blunt, and in his own words: if you can’t align it, “don’t ship it”; and if the labs genuinely believe their experiments cannot be contained, “then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down,” because the liabilities — civil and criminal — are incredible. What he objects to is the request for relief: asking for regulation while asking for antitrust and product-liability protection makes no sense to him. Keith goes further: Huang is accusing them of being manipulative liars, and he agrees. Andrew pushed back on the idea that the CEO of a five-trillion-dollar company is speaking from pure engineering conviction — you cannot dismiss Sam and Dario’s interests and then treat Huang’s as irrelevant. Keith’s answer: he isn’t pursuing commercial goals, he is angry as an engineer.
•       More Than the CHIPS Act. The line Andrew kept returning to. When Huang mentioned Nvidia’s hundred billion dollars of investment in the AI industry, Klein muttered that this was more than the entire Biden CHIPS Act — and in that aside sits the argument of the week. Governments, Keith says, are missing two things: vision, and money. They are deep in debt, and even if they had the cash there is little reason to trust what they would do with it. This is not an era of state-led innovation but of bottoms-up innovation, and between seventy-five and eighty-five per cent of it is happening in one dot on the world map. Andrew’s caveat is historical — there was a twentieth century in which governments built health services and semiconductors and space programmes, and some people are entitled to be nostalgic for it — but the era has passed, and the UN speeches are its echo.
•       Not Dependent on OpenAI. The most useful technical thread, drawn from Nick Thompson’s interview with Azeem Azhar. Azhar’s point is that Nvidia is not especially dependent on OpenAI and Anthropic, which is part of why Huang can afford to attack them: both labs are renters rather than buyers, taking GPU capacity from the companies who actually purchase Nvidia’s hardware. Keith’s refinement is that this makes them indirect customers rather than irrelevant ones — every GPU purchase is good for Jensen, and the labs depend on the availability of what others buy. Measured in tokens, OpenAI is far ahead of everyone; measured in dollars, Anthropic does better, because its price per token is higher. On the bubble question Azhar is cautiously optimistic and gives numbers; Thompson is less so; and Andrew’s conclusion is the one that matters for anyone watching valuations: the AI economy could quite plausibly prosper without either OpenAI or Anthropic.
•       Zuckerberg’s Return. The quiet story of the week, and the one both men think is the real news. Meta’s Muse is a full-stack agent — models at th...

“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch
 
As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, who argued in The New York Times that Trump has finally lost the plot. So will this really go down as the fall that Trump failed?
 
Rauch and Wehner note what’s failed and what hasn’t. MAGA’s revolutionary project — the regime change, the campaign against the universities, the idea that America had become Flight 93 — was an attempt to rout liberals from the commanding heights of American culture. At first this conservative Leninism succeeded, with universities and law firms folding in the face of a bullying state. But then civil society reorganized, fought back on the streets and in the courts, and district judges mostly held the line. But while the atmosphere of fear has evaporated, Rauch notes, what Trump has won is the transformation of the American state into a patrimonial form of government. With the complicity of Congress, it’s hard to untangle the state as personal property and as a family business.
 
Wehner’s ethical diagnosis is starker. Coining it as the autumn of the sociopath, he observes sociopathy fused with visible cognitive decline, an old fool with enormous power and fewer people willing to check him. Rather than Trump losing the plot, the plot has lost the doddering patriarch. Forget Venezuela and Cuba. The concluding series in this North American version of The Autumn of the Patriarch will be aired live from La Casa Blanca.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Losing the Plot. The New York Times piece is, Rauch says, consistent with his earlier Atlantic essay on fascism rather than a retreat from it: that piece argued Trump was a fascist type of leader who would probably fail, and this one says the failure has happened. The plot in question is the revolutionary one — the attempt by the people around Trump to rewire American culture from the White House. Wehner’s account of the man is bleaker than the politics. There were guardrails in the first term, Kelly and Mattis among them, and there are far fewer now; what has changed is a fusion of sociopathic tendencies that were always there with a cognitive decline that is obvious to anyone watching. He would update García Márquez’s title to the autumn of the sociopath. And the image that lands: a doddering old fool wandering out of meetings to opine about the ballroom and the White House grass — except that he is a doddering old fool with a tremendous amount of power, surrounded by advisers who in some cases want to go further than he does.
•       The Part He Won. Rauch is careful not to declare victory: the article spends its first third on what succeeded, and the most important of those elements to Trump personally is patrimonialism — the organization of government in which the state is the personal property and family business of the leader. That is how he runs the presidency, the Justice Department, trade policy, the Pentagon and the architecture of Washington, with a great deal of complicity from Congress. Why did the Republicans fold? Three reasons, in Rauch’s account: members who defied him were primaried and often beaten; they swim in a media and political environment where ninety per cent of the people they meet judge them by their fidelity to Trump; and they are physically afraid — death threats follow a social-media finger-point, and members of Congress are not wealthy people with round-the-clock security. The first crack in the patrimonial edifice, Rauch notes, came this week from Senator John Curtis of Utah, who called for an investigation into the president’s son’s wedding.
•       Minneapolis. Both men treat the Minneapolis protests as the hinge. Before them, Wehner sensed powerlessness and despair among Trump’s critics — a loss of human agency. Then people stood up, peacefully, in freezing temperatures, and ICE pulled out. You can prove the possible by the actual, he says, and Minneapolis was something actual. His caveat is unsparing about his countrymen: much of the rediscovery of virtue has been driven by economic pain — gas prices, grocery prices, interest rates, the Iran debacle. He describes a Trump voter he met in a McLean coffee shop who had voted for the man three times and now says he wouldn’t again. But if the economy were growing at four per cent with inflation at one and a half, Wehner suspects many would not give a damn — and that, he says, is an indictment of who they are. Seventy-seven million people voted for a man who had incited an insurrection. As for the coming memory hole, he expects plenty of retrospective distancing; he cites Gerard Baker and Laura Ingraham as early examples.
•       Civil Society Held. The most encouraging thread. The revolutionary project had a theorist — Patrick Deneen, whose 2023 book Regime Change argued that conservatives must not merely constrain the elites who run American society but replace them — and an architect in Christopher Rufo, plus Bannon, the Heritage Foundation and the Flight 93 conviction — Michael Anton’s 2016 essay — that it was now or never. Universities and law firms submitted first, and Rauch thinks the law firms never needed to. Then it turned: lawsuits, reorganization, district court judges doing a remarkable job at some personal risk. What looked like a bulldozer in the first six months now looks like something people are much less frightened of. He is still renaming lakes and excluding networks from the press pool, but the momentum is gone. Their diagnosis of the error is structural: you cannot win a razor-thin margin and then remake a fundamentally non-revolutionary country in two years. Wehner adds the deeper irony — conservative Leninism is a contradiction in terms, since the conservative temperament is anti-revolutionary by definition. Meanwhile the MAGA coalition is cracking up: Shapiro against Levin against Kelly against Carlson, the acrobats going one way and the clowns the other.
•       What They Got Wrong. Andrew asked both men what a decade of Trump has changed in them. Wehner has rethought his party and his faith — he remains a Christian but no longer calls himself an evangelical — while his conservatism, the Burke and Oakeshott kind, he still holds. Rauch’s answer is more unsettling: what has not changed is his conviction that the founders got the system right, but he misjudged the character of the American people. It never occurred to him that a man who attempted an insurrection could be a viable candidate, let alone re-elected, and he quotes Roger Sherman’s line at the Constitutional Convention that the people are poorly informed and easily misled. He also missed the distress signals — the people left behind economically and culturally, who were not a hundred per cent wrong about a cosmopolitan conspiracy of the Davos crowd — and pleads guilty to complacency, then and now, because he still doesn’t know what the next agenda looks like. On party: he has been a functional Democrat since 2018, voting only for Democrats until the Republicans rejoin the camp of liberal democracy. And to A...

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz
 
The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years ago. His new book Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You is both a history of his souring relations with the Democrats and a confessional of a reluctant Republican.
 
A good divorce, the twice-married Dershowitz promises, is better than a bad marriage. Like many angry spouses, he says he’s been forced into the split. Today’s Democratic Party, he claims, is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 before it came to power. He names Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani as antisemites, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew, and insists Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro because Shapiro is a Jew who wouldn’t renounce Zionism.
 
What’s his proof on the Harris claim? What other reason could there be? Dershowitz claims. Besides, even if Israel vanished as an issue tomorrow, he says he still couldn’t go back to the failed marriage, because the Dems have abandoned what he calls “meritocracy.”
 
At 88, Dershowitz is perhaps a little more self-reflective than he was in his legal pomp. In conclusion, I ask him to summarize himself in a word. “Proudly-Jewish,” he says, before adding “never-boring.” We can all agree on that, if perhaps little else.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Good Divorce. Dershowitz frames his departure as liberation rather than loss: a good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and he was thrown out, he says, much as Ronald Reagan was. The loyalty he is breaking runs deep — he first voted for John F. Kennedy, defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Senator Alan Cranston, and campaigned for Democrats for most of his adult life. He describes himself now as a convert, and converts, he notes, are the most fervent. What he wants is not the suffering of Democrats — his wife, children and much of his family remain in the party — but their defeat: he does not want them running the House or the Senate, and names AOC and Abdul El-Sayed as people he does not want chairing committees. He first went independent, then concluded that independence wasn’t enough, which is how a lifelong liberal became, in the book’s subtitle, a reluctant Republican — or, as Andrew put it, an angry spouse who says he was forced into the split. President Trump, he notes, endorsed the book.
•       The Charge. The hour’s most incendiary material, and it should be read as his claims rather than as established fact. Dershowitz argues the Democratic Party is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 — specifically 1932, he stresses, not 1935: Jews feeling unsafe at universities, Jews losing jobs, an obsession with the nation-state of the Jewish people. He names El-Sayed and Mamdani as antisemites, says he does not believe Mamdani or his family like Jews, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew and a hypocrite, and says Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like Jews. His central political claim: no Jew perceived as pro-Israel can now win a Democratic primary, and no Jew will be nominated for president — which is why, in his telling, Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro, a choice he says cost her Pennsylvania and possibly the election. Andrew asked how he could know that. “What other reason could there be?” was the answer, and Andrew offered the conventional one: that Harris didn’t want to be eclipsed by her running mate.
•       Meritocracy. Andrew’s sharpest structural question was hypothetical: if the Middle East were solved overnight and Israel vanished as an American political issue, could he return to the Democratic Party? No — because of meritocracy. The Democrats, he argues, have become the party of identity politics, of judging ideas by who said them and candidates by race or gender rather than merit; DEI, in his formulation, means exclusion rather than inclusion. The argument is partly autobiographical. His father did not finish high school, his mother managed half a semester of college, and he rose, he says, on merit alone — as did friends who were Italian, Irish and Black. He does not claim anti-meritocracy is itself antisemitism, but he does argue that Jews have been disproportionate beneficiaries of meritocracy and so suffer disproportionately from its retreat.
•       Andrew’s Pushback. The spine of the episode. One: has he become single-issue? His answer — that this is like asking a German in 1932 to vote on the economy — concedes the framing and defends it, arguing antisemitism is the only prejudice now moving in the wrong direction. Two: what about the antisemites of the right, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance? Republicans marginalize theirs, he says, while Democrats embrace theirs; he does not regard Vance as an antisemite, and does regard Carlson as one. Three: can a Jew criticize Israel without being an antisemite? Yes — he criticizes Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and Likud; what he calls antisemitism is denying the state’s right to exist, and his analogy is New Zealand. On the charge of genocide in Gaza he was categorical, calling those who use the word ignoramuses, liars and bigots — a characterization Andrew put to him twice. Four, and the exchange that lingers: why, in his account, is it always the Jews? “That question itself smacks of antisemitism,” he replied. “But you’re the one who’s said it,” Andrew answered. “I’m just asking you why.”
•       Never Boring. The lawyer’s creed, and the personal coda. Dershowitz defends having represented people he despises — the Nazis who marched at Skokie; Palestinian students who wanted to fly their flag in Harvard Yard, an occasion he remembers fondly because he then spoke against Arafat at their own event; Jeffrey Epstein, whom he calls a terrible human being who did terrible things, and whose case he says he has volunteered to testify about before a House panel. His models are John Adams defending the redcoats after the Boston Massacre and Lincoln defending the guilty: the Sixth Amendment doesn’t come with a character test. There is family cost — Larry David cut him off over his defence of Trump at the first impeachment, though the two have since made up — and family discipline: no politics at Thanksgiving or the Jewish New Year. Asked for one word he’d want attached to his name, he offered two: proudly Jewish, and American. And his wife’s line, which he clearly relishes: the tombstone will say never boring. Andrew’s verdict: we can all agree on that, if little else.
 
About the Guest
 
Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, where he taught for fifty years. His many books include Chutzpah, Reversal of Fortune and The Case for Israel. He has represented clients from Claus von Bülow and Mike Tyson to O. J. Simpson, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, whom he defended at the first impeachment trial. Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You: Confessions of a Reluctant Re...

“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher
 
Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence that automates the scientific method. As if that isn’t enough, he has a new book out this week, The Eureka Machine, which argues that AI is the key to unlocking an era of scientific discoveries equal to a combination of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
 
The tech entrepreneur sleeps, he confesses, about seven hours a night and works up to a hundred hours a week. Not a lot of time, I suspect, for fun. But then for Socher, his real fun seems to lie in the AI Eureka Machine that will, he promises, generate such magical products as plastic-eating bacteria, fusion reactors, and cures for cancer.
 
So what about the imminent apocalypse feared by the AI pessimists? Socher patiently dismantles the doom scenarios — everything from the paperclip machine that somehow never notices nobody is buying paperclips, to the engineered virus that would need a Wi-Fi switch inside a protein, to the robot factory with magical supply chains. Rather than an AI doomsday, he promises, we are only a few years away from the most profound scientific revolution in human history. Richard Socher better get some sleep now. Apocalypse or Renaissance, the AI maven is going to be seriously busy in the future.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Century in a Decade. Socher’s thesis is that the AI era will rhyme with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution together, compressing a century of scientific breakthroughs into the next ten years. His analogy for how: AI is to biology what calculus was to physics — we understand one neuron and one synapse well, and lose the thread when billions act together, which is exactly the kind of complex system AI can model. The examples are concrete rather than visionary: bacteria engineered to eat plastics and then die when the plastic runs out; new battery materials already being discovered; plasma balanced inside tokamak fusion reactors; more efficient solar panels; and the precursors, he says, of cures for particular cancers. He also makes an equality argument that he thinks philosophers and politicians have missed — the multibillionaire and the middle-class teenager carry the same phone, and most goods still bottlenecked on intelligence will follow. And science, he notes, is one of the rare industries where everyone agrees the goal is to maximize output rather than employment: nobody ever marched for more jobs in cancer research.
•       Recursive. The new company, fewer than thirty people and valued at more than $4 billion, exists to automate the scientific method itself — ideation, implementation, validation — starting with the science of AI, hence the name. Andrew’s response: “Couldn’t you be a bit more ambitious, Richard?” Socher’s framing is a history of abstraction layers: computing has climbed from assembler to C++ to Java to Python and now to English, so everyone can program — and the next layer up is the scientific method. It works best where results can be formally verified, in software and mathematics, and gets harder in large physical systems with long time horizons. His pitch to scientists is that every researcher has a long list of experiments they will never get to: this is, in his phrase, a cheat code for science. On the nuclear analogy he is blunt — about fifty thousand people a year die from coal, more than Chernobyl and Fukushima, but coal doesn’t make as good a mini-series, and the fear set humanity back.
•       Taking the Doom Apart. The hour’s centrepiece. Socher goes through the scenarios individually. The Bostrom paperclip maximizer: an organization intelligent enough to end humanity but not intelligent enough to notice that with no customers there is no revenue. Engineered viruses: the scenario requires a perfectly undetectable pathogen that spreads flawlessly, never mutates, and carries a remotely triggered off switch — and, as he puts it, nobody knows how to build a Wi-Fi-enabled switch into a protein; ask a biologist and they say it makes no sense. Infinite robot factories with supply chains where the parts simply fly in. What he does concede is that this is a dual-use technology, that hundreds or even millions of deaths are a real threat vector, and that training models on offensive hacking benchmarks is asking for what you get. On Geoffrey Hinton — whom Andrew had on the show, and who put the risk of extinction at fifteen per cent while admitting the number was an instinct — Socher is affectionate but unsparing: a brilliant researcher and a career-long optimist whose optimism has overshot, who backpedalled on telling students not to study radiology, and who will backpedal on this too.
•       Can It Think? Andrew put the question three times, citing Keith Teare’s position on the Sunday show that AI cannot think by definition. Socher’s answer is that the problem is definitional: we have good definitions for the outcomes of thinking — problems solved, inventions made — and none for thinking itself. Nor do humans have conscious access to their own visual cortex: ask why you know that is a tree, and you run out of answers within four steps. What he will say is that subgoals are where the danger lives, and his illustration is banal on purpose. Tell a superintelligence to raise your call-centre satisfaction score and it spins up a million bots that rate themselves five out of five. Fix that, and it sends every customer whose DoorDash order failed a thousand-dollar gift certificate. Each time you add a constraint — which is, he argues, capitalism’s self-healing property, plus democracy and open discourse. And the fix for the hacking case is liability: make the companies answerable for the laws their AI breaks and the problem gets solved very quickly.
•       A Gym for the Mind. Why write a book at all? Because the public perception of AI is deteriorating, and because in China scientists are on billboards and in subway ads while the West runs extinction headlines. On American pessimism his answer is economic: without AI, he thinks the US economy would be flat or shrinking. Andrew raised his fellow German Karl Marx on technology freeing us from labour, and got a confession — Socher used to favour universal basic income and no longer does. Even people who hate their jobs get meaning from them; look at the very wealthy, who already have a private UBI, and you find a bifurcation between those who start five companies and those who drink on a yacht. Hence his best line: half of education should be a gym for the mind. You can go to the gym and have a robot lift the weights, but you don’t get the muscle. He expects handmade pottery to carry a premium, health care to survive, and entertainment to expand. And he unwinds by paramotoring one week a year, having uninstalled Instagram — plus a parting shot at German bureaucracy, where signing a contract means ten hours in a notary’s office having it read aloud to you.
 
About the Guest