<https://www.profgalloway.com/techno-narcissism/>
Scott Galloway@profgalloway
I’m at Founders Forum in the Cotswolds … which they assure me is somewhere
outside of London. There are a lot of Teslas and recycled Mason jars as … we’re
making the world a better place. As at any gathering of the tech elite in 2023,
the content could best be described as AI and the Seven Dwarves. The youth and
vision toggles between inspiring moments and bouts of techno-narcissism. It’s
understandable. If you tell a thirtysomething male he is Jesus Christ, he’s
inclined to believe you.
The tech innovator class has an Achilles tendon that runs from their heels to
their necks: They believe their press. Making a dent in the universe is so
aughts. Today, membership in the Soho House of tech requires you to birth the
leverage point that will alter the universe. Jack Dorsey brought low-cost
credit card transactions to millions of small vendors. But he’s still not our
personal Jesus, so he renamed his company Block and pushed into crypto, because
bitcoin would bring “world peace.” Side note: If anybody knows @jack’s brand of
edibles, Whatsapp me. Elon Musk made a great electric car, then a better rocket
… and recently appointed himself Noah to shepherd humanity to an interplanetary
future.
When techno-narcissism meets technology that is genuinely disruptive (vs.
crypto or a headset), the hype cycle makes the jump to lightspeed. Late last
year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 1 million users in five days. Six months later,
Congress asked its CEO if his product was going to destroy humanity. In
contrast, it took Facebook 10 months to get to a million users, and it was 14
years before the CEO was hauled before Congress for damaging humanity.
The claims are extreme, positive and negative: Solutionists pen think pieces on
“Why AI Will Save the World,” while catastrophists warn us of “the risks of
extinction.” These are two covers of the same song: techno-narcissism. It’s
exhausting. But AI is a huge breakthrough, and the stakes are genuinely high.
Existential Egos
It’s notable today that many of the outspoken prophets of AI doom are the same
people who birthed AI. Specifically, taking up all the oxygen in the AI
conversation with dystopian visions of sentient AI eliminating humanity isn’t
helpful. It only serves the interests of the developers of nonsentient AI, in
several ways. At the simplest level, it gets attention. If you are a semifamous
computer engineer who aspires to be more famous, nothing beats telling every
reporter in earshot: “I’ve invented something that could destroy the world.”
Partisans complain about the media’s left or right bias, but the real bias is
toward spectacle. If it bleeds it leads, and nothing bleeds like the end of the
world with a tortured genius at the center of the plot.
Land Grab
AI fearmongering is also a business strategy for the incumbents, who’d like the
government to suppress nascent competition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress
we need an entire new federal agency to scrutinize AI models, and said he’d be
happy to help them define what kinds of companies and products should get
licenses (i.e., compete with OpenAI). “Licensing regimes are the death of
competition in most places they operate,” says antitrust scholar and former
White House senior adviser Tim Wu (total gangster). Similar to cheap capital
and regulatory capture, catastrophism is an attempt to commit infanticide on
emerging competition.
Real Risks
Granted, we should not ignore the dangers of AI, but the real risks are the
existing incentives and amorality in tech and our ongoing inability to regulate
it. The techno-catastrophists want to create a narrative that the shit coming
down the pike is not the result of their actions, but the inevitable cost of
progress. Just as the devil’s trick was convincing us he didn’t exist, the
technologist’s sleight of hand is to absolve himself of guilt for the damage
the next generation of tech leaders will levy on society
[...]
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