Crowning Our Engineer Kings: Jensen Huang for President?

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, the 10th of August, 2026 Saturdays are our day with Keith Teare of That Was The Week. To summarize, tech news of the week hasn't been a huge week. I was really struck with an interesting piece in the New York Times, an op-ed by Stephen Witt on Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. The title of the piece was, He's the Most Powerful Engineer on Earth. Here's why he thinks AI is going great. Witt was on the show, my show last year, his book, The Thinking Machine, which is I think the authoritative book on Hwang and Nvidia won the FT Business Book of the Year last week.

Witt is in some ways ambivalent and critical of Hwang because he thinks that he doesn't quite understand everything about AI, which is a debatable issue. But what really struck me about the Witt piece was how engineers have become, for better or worse, all powerful in the world today. There was another important influential book brought out last year by Dan Wang, a Canadian-Chinese journalist called Breakneck, China's Quest to Engineering the Future, in which he broke America and China down as America is a society ruled by lawyers and China a society ruled by engineers. And I wonder whether Witt's prominence, his wealth, his power, not Witt, Huang. Witt notes that Trump has been very influenced by Huang. Whether that reflects the increasing power of engineers in our society. Keith, you often talk about, I don't know if you call it the engineering ethic, but the ways in which engineers look at the world. Huang is clearly a remarkably brilliant engineer. I mean, even Witt, who's somewhat critical of him, acknowledges that he's brilliant. Is there in your mind, is there an engineering ethic, a way of looking at the world, which perhaps Jensen Huang epitomizes?

Keith Teare (2:55)

I think there is a way engineers look at the world, although I wouldn't call it an ethic because that implies value judgments, which I think engineers are very widely spread across the spectrum of value judgments. So I don't think it's an ethic, but I think it's accepting the responsibility to make something work is an engineering ethos, if you will, probably more than an ethic. That's their job. You know, when you, and that goes way back. I don't even think that's new, whether it was Stevenson's steam engine, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or AI. I think engineers in general are trained and have the task of making things work.

Usually for good, but that's an open question. There are some engineers who are quite happy to do, make things work for bad ends as well.

Andrew Keen (3:52)

Your editorial this week focuses on, you don't call it the ethic of engineering, but the principle of engineering. You focus on a really interesting, I thought, interview on the Ezra Klein show between Klein and Arvind Narayanan, who's a Princeton computer scientist and expert on AI. Does Narayanan, in your view, represent, if not the ethic of engineering, the logic of the engineer when it comes to making sense of AI?

Keith Teare (4:26)

Yeah, absolutely. I thought it was a great interview. And I think Ezra Klein, actually, if you look at his interviews over the last three weeks, is double-clicking on the whole discussion around AI and potential problems with AI. And he isn't happy just to talk to people that reinforce his own instincts. He's talking across the spectrum. And this was the most recent one.

Of course, he talked to Jensen Huang prior to that.

Andrew Keen (5:01)

And we've talked about that. And that was another, I thought, really interesting interview, in which Huang was very clear, very articulate about his sense that it was the frontier AI companies who had the responsibility. I'm not sure if it was a moral or a business, a combination of moral and business responsibility, not to bring their products to market if they were dangerous.

Keith Teare (5:24)

Yeah, I mean, I think the best thing about this interview is that Arvind is definitive. I mean, I thought Jensen Huang was as well, but this is, if anything, even more definitive. In drawing a line between computer code and electronics hardware and organic consciousness, and just saying, you know, you can't really cross that line. There's no conversation to be had.

This is something built by engineers, can be controlled by engineers, and it is engineers who have the job to do it. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't political or social dimensions to it, that engineers have, you know, no expertise in discussing. Of course, there are. But at root, he makes very clear that he believes, at least, that this is still a very early stage technology that is largely an engineering set of tasks.