Two Years Till We're Cooked: The Death of White Collar Work and Other Human Things
Keen On America
Existential essays: Are we no longer the smartest?
They discuss essays about AI surpassing humans and Noah Smith's arguments that destiny is no longer ours alone.
"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare)
Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video he made on Google's Veo: one glass half-full of water, another half-full of spiders. It's a metaphor for the AI moment. The water represents the tools released in the past two weeks—Anthropic's Claude 4.6, OpenAI's CodeX 5.3—which Keith calls "beyond belief." The spiders represent the fear, which he acknowledges is not irrational. But maybe spiders are the wrong metaphor. Maybe we're the frogs being slowly boiled, not noticing the temperature rise until it's too late.
The trigger was Matt Schumer's viral essay "Something Big is Happening," which got 50 million views by telling engineers to become AI experts immediately or become irrelevant. Keith tested the thesis: he built venturebets.io, a prediction market, in a single day. He automated That Was The Week so completely that his weekly workflow dropped from six hours to under one. But then Dario Amodei and Satya Nadella both said the quiet part loud: in two years, there may be no white-collar jobs left. Keith's response? The glass doesn't contain jobs—it contains the future of life. And he'd rather have time to make videos of spiders crawling out of glasses than spend six hours curating links. The rest of us may not have the luxury of choosing.
About the Guest
Keith Teare is a serial entrepreneur and investor, founder of SignalRank, and author of the newsletter That Was The Week. He co-hosts the weekly tech roundup on Keen On America.
References
Essays discussed:
● Matt Schumer's "Something Big is Happening" went viral with 50 million views, arguing that engineers must become AI experts immediately or face obsolescence.
● Noah Smith published two essays: "The Fall of the Nerds" and "You Are No Longer the Smartest Type of Thing on Earth," arguing that humanity's destiny is now mostly out of our own hands.
● Josh Tyrangiel wrote "America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs" in The Atlantic.
● The Financial Times published "Anthropic's Breakout Moment" on the company's enterprise momentum.
Tools and companies mentioned:
● Claude 4.6 from Anthropic and CodeX 5.3 from OpenAI represent a "step change" in agentic AI—you give tasks, not prompts, and sub-agents complete them autonomously.
● Google Veo is Google's video generation tool, which Keith used to create the glass-half-full-of-spiders metaphor.
● Polymarket and Kalshi are prediction markets that Keith's new venturebets.io aims to match in quality.
People mentioned:
● Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, predicted that white-collar jobs may be gone in two years.
● Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, echoed Amodei's prediction about the end of white-collar work.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Spotify
Chapters:
- (00:00) - The glass half-full of spiders
- (01:30) - Matt Schumer's viral essay
- (03:15) - Every week is the biggest week in AI
- (04:30) - Claude 4.6 and CodeX 5.3: a step change
- (06:00) - Keith builds a prediction market in a day
- (07:45) - Fear is a bad operating system
- (09:30) - What's actually changed with That Was The Week?
- (12:00) - Trusting the algorithm to read for you
- (14:00) - Noah Smith: You're no longer the smartest thing on Earth
- (16:00) - The rabbit vs. the tiger
- (17:30) - Google's quantum computer and parallel universes
- (19:00) - America isn't ready for what AI will do to jobs
- (20:30) - Amodei and Nadella: two years to no white-collar jobs
- (22:00) - What's in the glass is the future of life
- (24:00) - Anthropic's breakout moment
- (26:00) - Claude Code vs. CodeX: Keith switches sides
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