Stay human
The aim of the tech bros is not to make your life better
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the very rich “are different from you and me.” While that quote comes from a short story, his novel, The Great Gatsby, fully embodies that observation.
We don’t live in Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. The very rich are now tech bros, yet another magnitude of different. They want to live forever; they construct escape bunkers; they want to live on Mars.
They have no scruples about hooking us and our children into endless scrolling, causing us to make futile comparisons to unreal and unrealistic images.
They are among the most anti-democratic souls on the planet.
It is not in their nature to reflect on cause and effect. They see an opportunity—not even a problem—that technology can fill. They do not ask if it’s needful. They do not look beyond the techno-marvel of it all.
They are filled with hubris. They do not ask about the human cost, and their anti-humanity chills me to the core.
Let us first turn to Elon Musk, deposed doer of DOGE, CEO of X (formerly Twitter), dabbler in space exploration, desirer of colonizing Mars.
A few months ago, Musk told an interviewer that he envisions X as a kind of collective consciousness.
He said he didn’t want X to be a source of endless dopamine hits, but he was being disingenous. The kind of dreck that fuels outrage and endless clicks and doomscrolling on such a platform encourages addictive behavior.
The interviewer then asked a simple question. “And why is that important, Elon? Collective consciousness, to have on one platform?”
Elon paused, stuttered a bit. It was like watching your computer buffer and sputter, and then said: “Yeah, why is that important?”
The man who wants all thought gathered into one spot had no answer to a fundamental question. It was a delicious emperor-has-no-clothes moment.
Business and leadership guru Simon Sinek says that the real measure of success is knowing your “why.”
Musk had no “why” for his ambition.
After stumbling around a bit, he said, “I guess it’s so we can increase our understanding of the universe.”
And you, Elon Musk, guess that you want to control that. You, who have grand designs for mind and knowledge domination, yet you don’t know why you desire that. Reader, does this not strike fear in your heart?
Let’s turn next to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. When asked about the cost of building artificial intelligence, he responded:
“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is that people always talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs one human to do an inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”
If you needed any more evidence of how unlike the very rich tech bros are from you and me, here is the pièce de rèsistance.
Sam Altman would rather spend $100 million on Chat GPT4 than feed, clothe, and educate any single one of us.
What Sam Altman thinks about the costs of “training” a human life is a universe of difference to the value of a weekend spent singing to my one-month-old granddaughter and playing monster trucks with her big brother.
So let’s ask ourselves: What should the role of technology be in our lives? I joke, more and more often, that it might be time to get out the typewriter and sign up for a landline. It’s easy to forget that those are modes of technology, too, and their appearance disrupted ways of existence, and they also cost people jobs.
They also made communication easier and faster. It’s a human desire to make things better, to innovate.
Did the innovations also make us less human? That seems to be a question worth asking, especially now. Staying human in the face of so much inhumanity can seem insurmountable.
Recently, I visited a friend who was widowed after a long and happy marriage. Her grief is natural and just, and I felt honored that she shared her pain with me. As we ate lunch one day, she wondered aloud: What is this life for? What is it all about?
I could tell her without hesitation that the value of her life was that she loved her husband and her children and her grandchildren. That love has been carried into the world, and there was nothing more important than that.
This treasure of a life, this life right here, right now, of wiping noses and butts and laughing and crying, and sending the kids to school and into lives of their own is worth everything. If the very rich don’t know that, they and their AI know nothing.
Let’s return to Fitzgerald and more thoughts about the very rich. They
“think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
In the face of those who devalue our lives because we aren’t rich tech bros, because we must be fed and attended to in all of our messiness, we must resist what they are selling. We must fight to stay human. It may be the battle of our lives.
Among others, tech giants run on one fuel: greed and power, capitalizing on human behavior: the thrill of a shiny new game, all technology that is.
I remember in the older days when MySpace was the only social media platform. We had to police the computer lab as students were chatting with unknown “people”.
The head of technology asked me what I thought about blogs and bloggers. I told him that I thought it was irresponsible and dangerous for people not to own their own comments.
With bots from who knows what country and the ability of the tech bros to interfere with elections (?) I’m not sure that we are going to retain our democracy.