Great wealth has always signified status, but today tech wealth also signifies having special futuristic insights denied the rest of us, which the Silicon Valley billionaires are all too ready to dispense and we are too ready to receive. Thus the spectacle of the British prime minister fawning over the banal utterances of the world’s richest man as prophecies from an entrepreneurial god who deigns to walk among us. On the same day, a bizarre hi-tech huckster, once no less fawned over, was convicted of a $10bn fraud and faces imprisonment for up to 110 years. This bewildering world has robbed everyone from limelight-seeking political leaders to greedy investors of their senses. There has been a collective loss of our sceptical faculties.
The obstacle to any such scepticism is that amid the hype, banality, self-deception and sometimes outright fraud is the truth that, on occasion, real wealth and technological breakthroughs are being created at dizzying speed. Elon Musk, interviewed in that notorious “fireside chat” by Rishi Sunak after the prime minister had hosted the world’s first AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire last week, owes the bulk of his $200bn-plus fortune to the success of his electric car producer, Tesla. It has sold more than a million Model 3 vehicles, helping to deliver the death knell to the petrol engine and with it the age of fossil fuels.
Musk, a believer in climate change as humanity’s second biggest challenge, after “the existential threat” of artificial intelligence, might have taken the opportunity to challenge Sunak over his new enthusiasm for legacy oil and gas – but this was not an exchange designed for challenge by either man. It was designed to show British voters that Sunak is in the same cosy league as a tech god. There was to be no puncturing of the divine aura in which the supplicant and future-seer wanted to bask.
Musk certainly feels he has earned that aura. Along the way he has founded SpaceX, which has created the cheap reusable rocket that will open up space to human colonisation – from gravity-free manufacturing in space to solar energy captured in the heavens and beamed back to Earth. He cofounded PayPal and believes that tunnels can revolutionise city transport – hence the Boring Company. But he is not above mistakes. He has lost a cool $25bn through buying and diminishing Twitter (now X), and in 2018 was fined and disqualified from being Tesla chairman for three years by the Securities and Exchange Commission over alleged stock price manipulation. He is a very smart engineer who was in the right place at the right time – but no god.
Insane wealth is disorienting. The wealthy do start believing that different rules apply to them, as research from Dacher Keltner of Berkeley University’s Social Interaction Lab demonstrates. When they drive, they are likelier to infringe traffic rules, and in lab tests show themselves generally to be more greedy and more likely to cheat. Rules are for little people. The super-wealthy can even better justify ignoring rules if they are “effective altruists” aiming to give away their wealth for the benefit of humanity now and in the future – the message of the Oxford moral philosopher William MacAskill, adopted by both Musk and, even more, one Sam Bankman-Fried (or SBF). They live in a higher moral universe because they intend to serve humanity by donating it their fortunes.
Bankman-Fried, unlike Musk, created no real wealth. He stole it – at least $10bn. This mathematical nerd and computer game addict had met MacAskill at a lunch when a student at MIT in 2012. MacAskill persuaded him to go after high-earning jobs, with the aim of giving some of the money away as an effective altruist. Thus seven years later SBF would set up the crypto-currency trading platform FTX, allowing speculators to trade in the absurd crypto boom. It was, in effect, a casino in which flows of money were hard to trace – “ripples” in the jargon.
Crypto was the hi-tech fashion of the day: credulous investors begged to invest in FTX. SBF became the US’s youngest billionaire, worth $22bn. If traders’ cash was hard to trace, it could be easily siphoned into a Bankman-Fried affiliate – to be spent on parties, high living in the Bahamas, political donations and intended “effective altruism”. When the tide went out on crypto, it went out on FTX. Bankman-Fried was exposed as a mega-fraudster, but only after being fawned over by Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, ex-president Bill Clinton and ex-prime minister Tony Blair, while dispensing his banal wisdom along the way.
Time needs to be called on all of this. The Bletchley Park summit agreed a voluntary code for AI companies to disclose their models to governments to ensure that they were safe – thus hoping to guard against potential “existential risks”. Worthwhile, but only a baby step. Public research on AI is dwarfed by tech giants whose AI models, once the same scale, are now on average 29 times larger than those produced by government and universities. Experts are divided over whether this new technology will be enormously positive or pose an existential risk to humanity. The public needs a guarantee from these profit-driven companies that it works unambiguously for our benefit.
Voluntarism is not good enough – only this May, Musk himself withdrew X from the EU’s voluntary code of practice on online disinformation and has so run down content-flagging that disinformation is flourishing on his platform. Sunak might have asked Musk about this undermining of the voluntary principle enshrined in the AI safety summit – but compulsion and the EU are toxic, and their mention might have punctured the aura. The initiative launched by the Oxford academic Philip Howard to create an International Panel on the Information Environment modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs to be turbocharged. As Prof Howard says, AI may or may not existentially abolish work or create a dark world of surveillance, but in the meantime junk and fake news flourish – aided and abetted by Musk.
Above all, let’s recognise that tech wealth is partly generated by public agencies as much as derring-do entrepreneurship. Without Nasa and Darpa (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), there would have been no SpaceX or Tesla. Nor can we rely on “effective altruism” to achieve the common good, given all its capacity for abuse: taxation of wealth works incomparably better.
Lastly, human beings have fallen for the likes of Musk and Bank-Friedman for millennia. Instead of uncritically lionising all things technological and mathematical, never forget the lessons of undervalued literature and history – the best antidotes to a confused and credulous present. We have been here before, and the best response has always been tough, collective and societal.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
