Episode 2197: Keith and Andrew on why, in our AI Age, Specialists will be the New Proletariat

Keen On

Earlier this week, I interviewed the Australian AI expert Toby Walsh about Google’s new NotebookLM, a seemingly magical AI product that creates believable conversation between bots. Today, on our weekly That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I agreed that this is going to profoundly change the way we not only produce media, but also how we imagine “trust” and “truth” in our synthetic media age. Referencing an optimistic essay by @Every CEO Dan Shipper entitled “Generalists Own the Future”, we agreed that products like NotebookLM will create what Shipper calls a “wicked environment” for generalists to create their own unique content. GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 and the other LLMs means that we all have “10,000 Ph.D.’s available at our fingertips.” While that’s exciting news for know-nothing generalists like Keith and I, it’s less good news for all those narrow Ph.Ds beavering away in research libraries In the age of AI, these types of narrow specialists are the new proletariat. Luddites will, of course, encourage them to unite, telling them that they nothing to lose but their (irrelevant) specialization. But, in they want to survive in our synthetic media age, they might be better off turning in their library cards and downloading NotebookLM.

Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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