GGreat wealth has always meant status, but today tech wealth also means having special insight into the future that we have not been given, which Silicon Valley billionaires give so generously and we gladly receive. Hence the spectacle of a British Prime Minister worshiping a mundane statement from the world's richest man as a prophecy from an entrepreneurial God who walks among us. On the same day, a bizarre tech con man once similarly revered has been convicted of a $10 billion fraud and faces up to 110 years in prison. This bewildering world is robbing everyone of their sanity, from limelight-hungry political leaders to greedy investors. Our capacity for skepticism is collectively lost.
The obstacle to such skepticism is that in the midst of the hype, platitudes, self-deception and sometimes outright fraud, there is the truth that real wealth and innovation are sometimes being created at dizzying speed.Elon Musk, who was interviewed last week in an infamous “fireside chat” by Chancellor Rishi Sunak after the Chancellor hosted the world's first AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, owes much of his fortune of over $200 billion to the success of Tesla, the electric car maker he runs. Tesla has sold more than one million Model 3s and helped bring an end to the era of the gasoline engine and fossil fuels.
Musk, who believes climate change is humanity's second greatest challenge after the “existential threat” of artificial intelligence, could have used the opportunity to challenge Sunak over his newfound enthusiasm for conventional oil and gas. But this wasn't an exchange designed to challenge either party. It was an exchange designed to demonstrate to British voters that Sunak had an equal rapport with the tech gods, without ever tarnishing the divine aura he wanted to project as a supplicant and futurist.
Musk certainly feels that he has earned that aura. Along the way, he founded SpaceX, developing cheap, reusable rockets that open the universe to human colonization, from zero-gravity manufacturing in space to solar energy captured in the heavens and transmitted to Earth. He co-founded PayPal and believes tunnels will revolutionize urban transportation. That's how The Boring Company began. But he's not immune to failure. He lost $25 billion buying and shrinking Twitter (now TwitterX), was fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for alleged stock manipulation in 2018, and was stripped of his Tesla chairmanship for three years. He's a very smart engineer who was in the right place at the right time, but there is no God.
Extraordinary wealth is confusing. As research by Dacher Keltner at the University of Berkeley's Social Interaction Lab shows, the wealthy begin to believe that different rules apply to them. When driving a car, they are more likely to break traffic rules, and lab tests have shown that they are generally more likely to be greedy and cheat. The rules are for ordinary people. The super-rich can further justify ignoring the rules if they are “effective altruists” who aim to donate their wealth for the benefit of present and future humanity. This is the message of Oxford moral philosopher William MacAskill and is adopted by Musk and, by extension, Sam Bankman Freed (SBF). They live in a higher moral world because they intend to serve humanity by donating their wealth.
Unlike Musk, Bankman Freed didn't make any real wealth; he stole at least $10 billion. The math nerd and computer game addict met MacAskill over lunch while he was an MIT student in 2012. MacAskill convinced him to take a high-paying job with the goal of donating some of his money as an effective altruist. Seven years later, SBF launched FTX, a cryptocurrency trading platform that allows speculators to trade in the absurd cryptocurrency boom. It was essentially a casino where the money was hard to track. The technical term is “ripples.”
Crypto was the tech craze of the time, and gullible investors begged to invest in FTX. SBF became America's youngest billionaire, with $22 billion in assets. If traders' cash was hard to trace, it could easily be diverted to Bankman Freed's affiliates and spent on parties, lavish living in the Bahamas, political donations, and deliberate “effective altruism.” As the crypto tide went out, so did FTX. Bankman Freed was exposed as a massive con man, but only after having kowtowing to Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, former president Bill Clinton, and former prime minister Tony Blair, imparting mundane wisdom in the process.
For all this, it must be said that the time has come. At the Bletchley Park summit, voluntary rules were agreed upon for AI companies to open their models to governments to ensure their safety. This will hopefully prevent potential “existential risks”. Worthwhile, it is still only a first step. Public research on AI is far dwarfed by the fact that AI models from tech giants of similar size are now on average 29 times larger than models created by governments and universities. Experts are divided on whether this new technology will be highly beneficial for humanity or pose an existential risk. The public needs assurances from these for-profit companies that it will clearly work for our benefit.
Voluntariness alone is not enough. In May this year, Musk himself withdrew X from the EU's voluntary code of conduct on online disinformation and greatly reduced content flagging, allowing disinformation to flourish on his platform. Sunak may have questioned Musk about undermining the voluntary principles enshrined in the AI Safety Summit, but coercion and the EU are harmful and mentioning them may have spoiled the atmosphere. Efforts launched by Oxford University's Philip Howard to establish an international panel on the information environment modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change need to be accelerated. AI may existentially abolish jobs or create a dark world of surveillance, as Professor Howard says, but in the meantime junk and fake news are thriving with Musk's aid and abetment.
Above all, let’s recognize that tech wealth is created as much by public institutions as by courageous entrepreneurship. Without NASA and DARPA, there would be no SpaceX or Tesla. Nor can we rely on “effective altruism” to achieve the public good, given how it can be misused. Taxing wealth is far more effective.
Finally, humanity has been fooled by people like Musk and Bunk Friedman for millennia. Instead of uncritically praising all things technology and mathematics, we should never forget the undervalued lessons of literature and history: they are the best antidote to our confused and gullible present. We have been in similar situations before, and the best response has always been a tough, collective and social one.
