On the hubris of techies
It would be funny if it weren't so irritating and destructive
There must be a high involved in coding that’s just fucking awesome. It must be like cocaine or ketamine but, like, times a thousand! A common side effect of both of these drugs (and others) is “delusions of grandeur,” and I can think of no industry where this delusion is more constant than in tech. Of course, many in this industry are also using copious amounts of those drugs, but still, I think there’s something baked into the work itself that makes techies into perplexing narcissists. Coding seems really hard to me, and boring, so I’ll never know firsthand what it feels like to do it successfully, but I’m definitely curious because boy, does it seem to make some people lose their grip on reality.
Now, you might say, arrogance is not specific to the tech industry. People (especially dudes) feeling an oversized sense of their own capabilities, especially in industries that get lots of funding and/or power, is nothing new. Cops, Hollywood producers, politicians, all these people can end up lacking in the humility department. You take a job that not a lot of people are good at or willing to do, pair it with some toxic masculinity and a little smidge of required brashness to get the job done right, and you’ve got a recipe for an inflated ego. But what absolutely blows my mind about techies is their completely baffling sense of what their talents amount to. These people make the insane leap that because they’re good at solving technological problems they believe they can solve social problems too.
WHY WOULD THAT BE THE CASE? Why do they think these skills are transferrable? Say what you will about the cop, the politician, the Hollywood producer, etc… they might be guilty of some mansplaining here and there, but they don’t typically believe they’re god’s gift to completely different industries. Someone who wins Top Chef doesn’t assume they’re a good farmer. People who perform heart surgeries don’t assume they’re good therapists. But Bill Gates thinks he’s the guy to restructure our education system. And Elon Musk… well, look, I mean, let’s not go there.
I remember talking to a friend of mine in San Francisco who worked at Google, who was proudly and earnestly telling me about Google’s little pet project to solve the houselessness problem in San Francisco. Isn’t it great that this huge tech company is spending their massive resources on such an important issue?
“Why would I want Google working on that?” I asked.
They were totally perplexed.
“Because it’s a huge issue!” And then they proceeded to explain to me that there were houseless people in San Francisco, as if that’s what I was confused about.
“Yeah. I know,” I said. “But why would Google assume they should be the ones to solve houselessness in San Francisco? How about they just pay their taxes instead, or donate money to non-profits that have been working on this issue for decades?”
This person’s face glitched out like an emotional manifestation of an error message. They literally could not understand what I was talking about. The Silicon Valley model is that there’s really only one way to contribute positively to society and that’s to launch a new product of some kind. Google employs the best and the brightest, right? So surely it’s Google’s people who will be the ones to solve really hard problems!
When lockdown started in March 2020 I, along with a lot of other musicians, started getting creative about performance. I knew that people were gathering in zoom rooms with their families, their co-workers, their friends, etc… so I started offering my fans a deal where I’d perform a couple songs for their zoom room for a fee, half of which I’d donate to a different charity each week. A crypto hedge fund manager acquaintance of mine saw my idea and decided to start a whole company based around it. He hired a team and got to work on it like a start-up. He then had the audacity to have his new staff member reach out to me to see if I wanted to be on their “roster” which would involve me giving the company 50% of my pay. After angrily creating a google doc where I showed musicians how to do this extremely simple thing on their own and publishing it online while posting “You don’t actually need a company to do this for you” I reached out to him. “Why are you doing this?” I asked him.
He was, again, perplexed. Obviously this was helpful to society. He saw a problem (musicians losing gigs) and saw my approach to solving at least my version of it (performing on Zoom) so naturally the next step was to launch his own company where he could employ his friends and create an industry around this idea.
I was like, “Dude. Theaters, music venues, promoters, artists, non-profits that work in the performance entertainment industry are all on the brink of collapse. How about you just donate to them? Maybe they’re the ones that should be empowered and funded to make the pivot to the digital space if that’s what the industry needs to do?”
He then proceeded to explain to me how creating profitable businesses on the free market is better for everyone, an idea he felt was extremely smart and new and one that he specifically, as a wealthy person, had a deep understanding of. To strengthen his point, he cited a blog post by a wealthy computer scientist entitled “How To Make Wealth” that, apart from laying out the practical reasons (it’ll make you rich) that young enterprising techies should create start-ups rather than getting jobs, had a whole section about the societal good that comes from a few people getting rich. This portion relied on ideas that are essentially the main tenets of Neoliberal economics that would be covered in any Microeconomics 101 Day One lecture. But this guy, a computer scientist, not an economist, was presenting these ideas as if they were super new and important, and this crypto hedge fund guy had clung to this blog post as evidence that he’s doing the lord’s work by getting rich.
I gently informed him that I have a degree in Economics, that I actually wrote my thesis on the social impact of various funding models on social problems, and therefore, didn’t really need to read random blog posts by computer scientists to inform myself on the philosophical issues about what wealth means and what societal good can come from the the innovation fueled by the free market.
To his credit, he acknowledged and said he appreciated my perspective, but it didn’t stop him from pursuing this business idea.
These examples speak to what I think are the main false premises that underpin this start-up, tech approach to solving problems. They are…
The reason a particular problem isn’t solved (be it poverty, the housing crisis, or climate change) is because we haven’t figured out how to solve it yet. In reality, most societal problems already have clear solutions. The issue is executing those solutions, not finding them.
Which leads to the second premise that is soooooo sneaky in this capitalist hegemony we live in that people don’t even realize it’s a premise they’re relying on.
The only solutions that will have massive impacts must either make or require lots and lots and lots of money. In fact, I’d argue that many of the most impactful solutions to our societal problems are annoyingly low tech and obvious.
For instance, Denver recently ran a pilot program where they, get this, gave rent money to houseless people, and, dude, you’ll never believe this but, IT WORKED! Wild! I wonder how many Google engineers they needed to consult to come up with that crazy complex and totally novel plan.
Honestly, I suspect we actually had all the tech we needed to solve climate change 30 years ago. Sure, we’ve got more fancy tools now that might end up being useful, but at what cost? The volcanic power of the free market does occasionally spit out some pretty remarkable stuff now and then, but in the explosive spewing of molten plastic ends up leveling whole civilizations in the process.
Techies think they’re these thought leaders, but they’re really operating from just the most naive, out-of-touch interpretation of Neoliberalism that there is. I was privileged to learn Microecon from a Marxist (the amazing, late, Steve Resnick) who laid out the insanity of Neoliberal ideology so beautifully. Here’s how it goes folks:
Premise 1: People are inherently selfish.
Premise 2: The free market will naturally direct production toward low costs and high profits.
Conclusion: Everyone adhering to their selfish nature and pursuing their own self-interest will result in the best outcomes for all of humanity.
Didn’t quite follow that line of logic? That’s because it doesn’t quite add up. But with enough calculus, economists can quickly convince you that the reason it doesn’t make sense is similar to why quantum mechanics doesn’t make sense: you’re just not smart enough, ok? Leave it to fancy men with expensive equipment.
Ok, so this has turned into quite the diatribe on the free market, so let’s get back to the hubris of techies, which I feel must be thoroughly addressed before I can go deeper into my AI rants.
It’s hilarious, though deeply depressing to me, that the rare moment of Silicon Valley’s humility has come in the form of deference to… not policy-makers, not researchers in various fields, not activists who have been lobbying their leaders for decades about solutions they know will work, no. The deference is to the large language models this industry has just created. Open AI CEO, Sam Altman, has said in interviews that he’s certain that Chat GPT (whatever number they’re on now) will be able to tell us all how to cure cancer and solve climate change. And for this, he needs to raise $7 trillion. Leaving aside whether investing this money will actually result in a “smarter” AI (it won’t, more on that later) what brilliant, mind-blowing solution to climate change could this AI tell us that we don’t already know? We know what to do! It’s just that companies don’t want to do it, and activists haven’t figured out how to make their politicians make companies do it. The technological problem is not the issue here. Ask any young person and they can probably give you 10 actionable ideas that would make a measurable impact on reducing carbon and making human life on this planet more sustainable.
It’s stuff like…
stop producing plastics and
protect more wilderness and
subsidize workers in industries that need to stop existing and
create large-scale public transit that relies on clean(er) energy and
incentivize companies to create reusable packaging and
re-green large portions of cities and
a bunch of other stuff that a lot of smart people have figured out
But the problem with these solutions is that they’re not that flashy and they will most likely hinder “economic growth.” That’s why we’re not doing them. I’m reminded of Greta Thunberg’s brilliant, famous speech to the UN:
Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?
I love you Greta!
There’s no brilliant answer that we’re waiting for from AI, and the belief that there is one betrays an astoundingly immature spirituality: that there’s someone else out there, some adult, some hand to hold, some wiser entity who will, at some point, make it all make sense, tell us how we fit into the grand drama of it all, and wrap it all up in a nice bow. The harm that comes from our inability to look at ourselves as the only possible source of this wisdom is, in fact, the only spiritual teaching that I put any stock in. It reminds me of Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy when Arthur Dent finally got the chance to ask the question, “What is the meaning of life?” and the answer was “42.”
I kinda do wanna be in the room when Sam Altman asks GPT 5000 how to solve climate change. If it responds with “End Capitalism” will they just assume it’s a glitch and change the answer the way they’ve changed any other disturbing answer that Chat GPT delivers? Or will it be the ultimate instance of that phenomenon where a woman says something in a meeting and then a dude repeats it and everyone agrees with him? Let’s hope that is what GPT 12 million spews out, and let’s hope the ego-stroke-i-ness that comes from having developed a piece of tech that said the obvious thing will be enough to make these techies take it seriously.
Technology might be related to or even required for solving problems like climate change, but that doesn’t mean the tech CEO’s or engineers, brilliant as they may be at making cool gadgets, possess the relevant expertise or talents to tackle sociological or political problems. Perhaps some of these people could read a social science text or two before feeding it to their robot. And perhaps this $7 trillion could be spent elsewhere in the meantime.
In debaucherous camaraderie,
🪶Rachel Lark
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loved this <3