Here’s a similar post by Ed Zitron (Titled: Make Fun of Them). He gives a few examples of complete nonsensical stuff that some big Tech CEOs have said, and goes on to argue that more people, especially those who cover tech in media for a living, need to be far more critical of tech CEOs and not just basically go “oh wow thats so cool” to everything they say.
The issue I feel, is we live in a society that equates money with importance. This guy over here made lots of money so he must be smart right? No, no it doesn’t.
The headline should be Stop Talking to Technology Executives, Tax Them.
I think the root issue is more around the belief that US companies operate off of meritocracy.
I.E. only the most qualified and competent people make it to the top.
Or even more basically:
- what’s good for business is generally not what’s good for society.
US companies operate off of the Peter Principle, psychopathic willingness and ability to exploit others, and a merciless drive for profit.
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This myth needs to die hard. Inheriting off daddy’s blood emerald mine allows you to start businesses and buy people to make them work. This takes zero intelligence — it takes capital which was not earned. It continues to make money through the labor of shady accountants who know how to keep you from paying taxes, the labor of H1-B visa holder slaves, non-unionized assembly line workers, etc. who you crush and exploit for more capital to keep repeating the same unethical and dumb shit.
What should cure people of it fast is listening to real estate investment podcasts. These people are often dumb as rocks. They copy each others homework, happen to know the right people, and most importantly, have no ethics. You don’t have to be smart to make a fortune in real estate, and you can potentially even do it with zero starting cash, but you do have to forget about ethics.
Toothpaste is for brushing your teeth, not filling the nail holes in the patchy drywall that is our economy! :-)
US culture conflates money with all kinds of things: intelligence, importance, respectability, work ethic, maturity, creativity, “good genes”, even godliness. Many people just can’t see the very clear truth that to be super-rich you usually just need to be a lucky asshole.
Start Talking To Technology Executives About How Much They Will Be Taxed
The issue I feel, is we live in a society that equates money with importance.
A guy who can command hundreds of billions is important by way of how much pull he can exert on the overall economy. If Altman says we’re going to build a thousand new datacenters that consume a gigawatt of power a year each, and he’s breaking ground on the project next week, commodities brokers can’t just blink past it.
The headline should be Stop Talking to Technology Executives, Tax Them.
Who is the headline talking to? Unless this is a media journal exclusively consumed by Congresscritters, you’re just preaching to the choir. Nobody wants to tax the Tech Billionaires because nobody wants to get tech billionaire money plowed into a rival’s campaign.
But I like money
It’s not even an unwillingness to admit ignorance: it’s the lack of awareness that there’s already a conversation.
This is the take-home point. They aren’t unaware there’s already a conversation. Their hubris compels them to believe they can answer these questions better than whatever the liberal establishment has come up with.
Yup. I also liked this, but I’m trying hard not to just quote the whole thing back, because it’s all good.
Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own. I can’t think of a better argument for a humanities requirement than a billionaire being asked “how do we know what is real?” and responding with “cryptographic signatures.”
These people suffer from a severe lack of imagination. Raised to pursue success along a solitary economic metric, they ignore all arts and sciences extraneous to that pursuit. They treat the world outside their interests like a children’s game they’re not really into. Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own.
That’s the startling thing about these tech guys: they are utterly oblivious to life outside of their extremely narrow little domain, and they occupy that domain largely because they never had the imagination or curiosity to look past it. The Silicon Valley milieu they grew up in told them that success consisted in this one thing, and they just swallowed the story and dedicated their lives to it without ever pausing to question, investigate or think for themselves. They buy into ideologies without ever exploring alternatives. They condemn the humanities with no understanding of them, and no interest in learning. They constantly attempt to solve philosophical, existential or cultural problems with technology, because they don’t even notice that they’re not engineering problems. These are dull people, the sort who’d stockpile art as an investment and status symbol without ever looking at it for more than a few seconds. They’re rich financially but in other ways everyone can see how impoverished they are except them.
In the past the people who knew about tech were promoting new things and the people who didn’t were skeptical.
With AI the people with less technical knowledge are gung ho and the ones who understand are skeptical.
That was an awesome piece. We need more people willing to speak out about all the obvious bullshit like this, but more importantly we need this kind of critical thinking to reach the people who are uncritically driving the continued use of these crappy-ass tools that are burning the planet. I’m thinking about CEOs (who will only do anything if it helps their bottom line), but also about your boomer co-workers who think ChatGPT is the fucking messiah and remind you about it every chance they get.
The gibberish from Altman is clearly done in bad faith.
When defining AGI in negotiations with Microsoft, there was no faux-philosophy or other types of word salad. They defined anything that gave them $100B per annum in revenue as AGI, philosophy and technology be damned.
What was the last non-gibberish thing Altman has said?
I feel like he has been playing the “you can only speak in gibberish” improv game for as long as I can remember.
All the tech CEOs are playing this game, even in the established companies. When was the last time Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai spoke non-bullshit?
Altman is the Rasputin of Silicon Valley though, he is on a whole different level of hallucinatory nonsense that powerful people at the top are enamored by.
Unfortunately, you can’t just politely ignore people with an eleven-to-thirteen-digit line of credit. That much of a hand in the consumption habits of the richest country on earth commands attention whether you like what they’re saying or not.
The real question is whether you’re going to be a WaPo-style hack stenographer who shows up at these events and whispers “These people are fairy wizards who can do real God-magic and transform the universe into a Science Fantasy wonderland!” Or you come at it from the Ed Zitron / Molly White / Riley Quinn / Any Sane Person at the Financial Times perspective, tearing into the actual balance sheets and analyzing the runways of these bloated economy leeches, and guestimating what future impact their continued operation will have on the rest of the domestic and global economies.
Tech Execs have to be taken seriously but not literally. When Zuck says he wants a trillion dollar spending line on datacenters to supercharge humanity, you have to read that with the same gravitas as a weather forecaster predicting a Cat-5 hurricane making landfall.
You nailed it. Attention accrues to them because of their money and the power it gives them, not the other way around. Without his money and control of OpenAI, Altman would be - along with Elon Musk - just another dork posting on Reddit during his shift at the electronics store, and would get the attendant amount of public attention. He’s no smarter or dumber than the average guy, but we don’t devote news articles to whatever the average guy thinks about something he heard on a podcast during his commute.
This was a delightful read, especially since I agree with the premise fully. Those people need to shut the fuck up.
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err, you sound like an FBI agent trying to provoke people into saying wild shit…
Na, let’s not talk about casually bombing media outlets, it only normalizes things further in a dark way.
