Episode 2124: Jeremy Kahn's Survival Guide for our AI Future

Keen On

In episode 2022, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I violently disagreed about the current AI boom. Keith, the eternal techno-optimist, thinks AI is about to radically change everything; as the perennial techno-pessimist, I argued that much of the current Wall St AI insanity is a 21st version of 17th century Dutch tulip mania. But if we were to split the baby and come up with a more carefully reasoned & reasonable analysis of the current AI boom, we would probably morph into Jeremy Kahn, the AI editor of Fortune. Kahn’s new book, Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future, is a extremely nuanced and well researched analysis of current & future realities of the AI revolution. And Kahn himself, in contrast with Keith or I, is neither an ideological techno-optimist or pessimist and, in my conversation with him, offers about as fair & balanced an interpretation of AI as you can get in our surreally manichaean times.

Jeremy Kahn is Fortune's AI Editor, spearheading the publication's coverage of artificial intelligence. He is the author of Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future (Simon & Schuster, July 2024), and he is the lead author of Fortune's Eye on AI newsletter. Before rejoining Fortune in 2019, he spent eight years at Bloomberg as a technology reporter and a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets magazine. His writing has also appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Boston Globe, and Portfolio. From 2007 to 2011, he reported from New Delhi, India. Prior to moving to India, he was the managing editor of the New Republic. He began his career at Fortune in New York, where he worked from 1997 to 2004. He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics. He is currently based in London. Follow all of Jeremy's stories here.

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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