The 'Techlash' and that Musk interview

David has written a lot about the era he calls Creatures vs Machines, and indeed has a book coming out on exactly this next year. It’s a topic that runs through Full Moon’s thinking – the exact nature of the relationship that we choose, or do not choose to have, with technology in the 21^st century.

This is all about polarisation. If you are a leader in any organisation that depends on technology – you are going to have to deal with the noise around this topic. Musk may be the most powerful agent of that polarisation which makes an extensive interview with him highly relevant and a signpost of the times.

Last month, the Economist published an hour and a half video interview with Elon Musk. We’d not normally choose to focus on just one piece of ‘content’ but  - if you have not seen it – we’d recommend you watch, in its entirety and probably not on the beach. Given he is the richest man in the world and carries immense power along several vectors, we believe it is one of the most important interviews of our fevered times. The good news is that the Economist has published it for free, here on You Tube.

Musk reasons about machines with precision and about people by analogy. It becomes clear, he does not really care about the latter.

I am not going to replay a thorough analysis of the whole thing - that’s been well worked already by the Economist itself in an editorial and no doubt elsewhere too.

I better admit some bias here upfront, though regular readers may not be surprised. It was the Economist back in 1993 that played a big role in making me want to set up a company to explore what became ‘digital’. So I have a semi reverential regard for it as a truthful and reliable source of news and analysis. I do not remotely agree with everything it says. But I trust it. I also have an in built bias against Musk for a variety of reasons to do with politics, and the way he conducts himself through social media, more than business. So bear these two things in mind. That said, I did try really hard to approach the interview from a neutral perspective – after all he is, as I have said, a massively consequential human right now. Broadly, I was able to be objective for about the first half of the interview. Then things fell apart.

I think that was deliberate in a way. Zanny Minton-Beddoes, the Economist’s Editor in Chief does a brilliant and (when she needs to be) feisty job of interviewing him. She keeps the more obviously controversial stuff to the second half. That does a good job of keeping everything on the rails until late in the day. The interaction between these two is in itself absorbing, no matter your political point of view.

So rather than a detailed summary, I am going to offer some things to look out for - from my admittedly biased perspective. I think these points really matter because of who he is, the weight he carries, and what above all he is trying to do.

AI and Robots

• He is very confident that AI will be greater than the sum of human intelligence in 5 years and far greater in 10 years. “There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human perhaps.” The perhaps is telling. He talks about the coming of abundance but cannot or does not relate that to ordinary humans or how it works. He thinks it will be “incredible”, and accepts there are some risks.
• He wants AI to be “maximally truth seeking and curious. This will foster humanity”. Bracingly – he thinks it is unlikely humans will be in control in 10 years time. He draws an analogy with dogs - “Labradors are pretty happy creatures in my experience”. He has decided this is inevitable – better to enjoy the ride.
• “The future is going to be very very different from the past”. His thinking on value is thought provoking but confused. If AI upends everything about economics because robots and AI create infinite value, exactly how do his shareholders expect to make money from their assets in him? Apparently money won’t matter in 2036.
• He is thoughtful on China and why they will lead AI at some stage, and especially insightful on the importance of the lead China has in electricity production and why that matters.
• Regarding regulation: “all roads lead to an acceleration of AI” – therefore he has engaged with other AI leaders to meet and discuss (“easy quick thing we can do”). He makes a decent but flawed and self-interested argument that all the competitors have an incentive to keep the others honest. He imagines companies will tell on each other to governments to limit the release of dangerous models (although in practice that’s just the US and Chinese governments). He thinks this needs to happen immediately.
• And jobs?  “AI will be able to do any job better than any person can do that job”. He draws a weird comparison with gardening….”you don’t have to garden….you can grow vegetables that are imperfect or get just better ones from the store”. Someone needs to tell him that jobs and gardening are not the same to the average human. He deflects the concerned narrative about job losses at mass, by talking about jobs that have disappeared in the past.
• So how will people live? There’s going to be a universal high income. Minton-Beddoes says that’s not appealing – people will have no agency. Musk reacts “oh they have agency in a small way”. A small way?? Then she asks where the money is coming from? “The treasury should issue checks…it…doesn’t matter…things that were relevant in the past will not be relevant in the future…”, because of ‘abundance’. Which begs the question, where are the physical resources and materials for abundance coming from? Oh, and in the future taxation becomes irrelevant. That’s handy for those with capital.

Space X, Mars, Starlink, Ukraine etc…

He envisages a growing civilisation on Mars, the Moon and elsewhere….but this cannot be enabled by a structure he does not control. That explains the extraordinary corporate set up of Space X (see Tim O’Reilley’s take down of this here).  It’s a “5 – 10 years or longer horizon…” that shareholders generally won’t tolerate.

A discussion of Starlink’s role in Ukraine is fascinating. It shows clearly the range of power he has in his pocket. I cannot think of a businessperson or industrialist with quite that level of geo political reach from the past. Troublingly, he evades any moral take on the war and dismisses any notion of Russia’s guilt for starting it.

Doge

They discuss Doge, and especially the USAID shut down (this was the biggest single funder of healthcare systems in Africa). Musk totally denies that the way it was done caused a lot of suffering…four times he says ‘zero’ people died as a result. Minton-Beddoes, drawing on people reporting directly from Africa challenges this. It’s OK says Musk, NGOs stepped in, and anyway it was not shut down, just moved to the State dept. and the claims are “false and nonsense”.

Apparently all charities did was to “come up with a sad story that sounds sympathetic in order to get the funding restored”…but chillingly “zero point zero died because of Doge”. Anyway, according to Musk, NGOs are rich enough to step in. Gates and Bezos’ ex wife should do this. It’s not clear if he thinks they actually did, or should have done so. Whatever, someone else should take any blame.

Well, a friend of mine runs a small and innovative NGO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they lost 45% of their funding overnight which crippled the operation. His surname is neither Gates not Bezos.

That Musk shows no interest in human consequences – remember his labrador take on AI - is quite remarkable, even if he has his “zero” facts right, and he has been challenged on this vigorously.

Politics, the Far Right and Europe

Ironically, when she presses him initially on Doge he says “I think I got a little too involved in politics”. That reflection does not seem to dog him in the last section of the interview where he lays into the UK (“civil war is inevitable…..at some point there will be a reckoning – obviously this is the trend”) and Europe (“Europeans are asleep at the switch and do not realise the magnitude of the (immigration) problem”). He admits he has not been in the UK recently. She points out that London is safer than most US cities and that violent crime is coming down. He claims there are many parts of Britain which are not safe...but denies there are far more such places in the US.

He believes the 'far right' is normal people. She challenges him on his responsibility given he has 240m followers - “how do you support vile people, neo nazis?”. “I’m a popular guy” he quips and in Europe “I hope I’m having a big impact”.

Nettled, he then attacks the media. The 240m means “a lot more people like me, and a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realise…the shoe is on the other foot, they hate you far more than they hate me… do you even know that? – you probably don’t.”

Musk says he cares about three things politically - safe cities, secure borders and sensible spending. Frankly she demolishes him by pointing out that, on two out of these three, Europe unequivocally is in a better place.

So what to make of it all? Again - go watch, judge for yourself. Don’t take my words for it.

He is undeniably smart, driven, strategic, charismatic in a peculiar way. He has a very high level of confidence in his intellect - “I’m very good at predicting the future - my batting average is very high for a human….I can see into the future with a higher probability of success than most people”.

Yet he appears to be a man with little or no empathy for other humans. It’s hard to know if he ever had it, or has become distanced by extreme wealth and power. Or perhaps it’s a consequence of his faith in his own powers of foresight. In love with technology, he cannot be bothered to think through the human implications of all that he believes about the future. And if the change he predicts is even half way true, that job urgently needs doing now, not in 10 years time. Before we travel to Mars.

If the backlash against ‘big tech’ and AI in the US is real - and polls suggest it is – it can’t be long before the mismatch between technology disruption, and the empathy levels of those funding and driving it, become a subject of heated debate and perhaps political action.

There is also a barely concealed viciousness to Musk. Minton-Beddoes is tough but fair – polite yet doing a legitimate job of holding his feet to the fire. You can see it in the aggressive way he repeats ‘zero’ to the accusation of Doge responsibility for deaths, and in the way he damns the media. But most of all, his subsequent tweets post publication. According to him, Zanny Minton-Beddoes is a “Traitor To The West, plain and simple.” “Anyone who does not support remigration is a traitor” Musk also wrote on X in late July. Well in that case, count me in as a traitor too.

It is deeply troubling that public discourse about important issues has descended to this level, though he is not alone in this. Use of the word traitor to describe a legitimate political stance against what is by any standard an extreme proposed measure is incendiary and intended to whip up hatred society wide. And attacking journalists because you don't like their attention is a classic authoritarian play.

The contemporary fusion of socially disruptive technology, capital and politics is woven all through this fascinating hour and a half. You may well disagree with my – hard to conceal – views on Musk, but my colleague David is surely on to something when he describes the coming era as one defined by the debate around Creatures vs Machines. Musk is enamoured with the latter. I think we need to pay much more attention to the former, and I do not think I am alone.