Billionaires are panicked.
That’s why they went for Trump. They are scared.
It’s Fear of Missing Out. I’ve been covering technology for five decades, and their reaction now seems second nature to me. But most Americans aren’t tech writers.
So let me explain.
Imagine you’re in a race car, roaring down the road, surrounded by your competitors. Then imagine that, up ahead, the road suddenly narrows to a single lane. After it narrows, there will be no chance to pass. The race will effectively be over.
This sort of thing has been happening since before I was born. IBM was the first one on the mainframe lane. Digital Equipment was the first on the minicomputer lane. The second team getting through the door gets one-tenth of what the first one got, the third must fight for a tenth of that. The 90-9-1 rule is real, folks.
AI is the latest race. Maybe, these billionaires think, the last one. Because what happens after computing becomes faster, and better, than thought? They can’t imagine.
OpenAI started the AI race three years ago, on November 30, 2022, with the launch of ChatGPT. Based on some metrics, they’re still winning. But are they really winning, or are they winning like Apple won 40 years ago? Remember that under Steve Jobs Apple won the Graphic User Interface race, by six years. But it couldn’t capitalize on it because it lacked the infrastructure to do so. That infrastructure later came from Taiwan and, eventually, from China.
The Panic Today
AI software is nothing without the infrastructure to run it. The trillions in investments by today’s Cloud Czars, and their Wannabees, is all about being able to control this software by controlling where it runs. They want to do to OpenAI what IBM wanted to do to Apple, what Microsoft succeeded in doing. The idea is to control the mass market by controlling access to it, getting underneath it. Back in the late 1980s, manufacturing capacity was what data centers are today, that point of control, and money can buy that position, so money (which has no brain) is all rushing there. The revolt led by Cloudflare to Google is all about that access.
But AI isn’t really about data centers. It’s not really about data. In the end, it’s about software. Today’s AI software isn’t true general intelligence, and following the path expecting it to become general intelligence is a false lead, a head fake.
This means the winner of the AI race will be the company with the best software. That’s what the latest nonsense from billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman is all about, forcing people to work for them 168 hours per week. Only new software will win the race. The best software is written by small teams, as we’ve known for two generations. That’s why Google made its first offices feel like college, because when you’re young you’re all-in on your goals, and that’s what great software needs, people who are all-in.
The Ultimate Delusion
Now Bezos, Hoffman, and the rest expect people to go all-in even without those benefits. Why, because China! Because they might win, because they’re slaves to their masters, so you must become slaves to us, so they won’t win, see?
This is the madness of our time. It’s the old American assumption that the other side is going to win, that they have some hidden advantage over us. We thought that way about England, then about Germany, then about Japan, then about Russia, now about China. American leaders have never really believed in their fellow Americans, or in freedom. That’s the story they tell us after the race has been won. While the race is going on, they always believe we’re losing, that the other side is better, that we’re degraded and they’re disciplined. We must whip our people to victory, that’s what we do, they think.
It’s insane. It always has been.
Because there’s no such thing as once and for all. There’s no final battle. The race to AI will be followed by a race to something else, and then to something else. I think the next race will involve DNA as a Programming Language, manipulating the chemicals around life, with the promise of creating Supermen instead of just Super Intelligence.
You can’t whip people into intellectual breakthroughs. It doesn’t work that way and never did. The mind is attached to the body, the body to society, so work-life balance is essential to intellectual success. The billionaires who are panicking today are assholes, working overtime to tear down what works, what makes us special, for their own need to beat the billionaire on the other side of the hedge.
The Bitter Truth
The breakthroughs that created AI weren’t made in a hurry, and they weren’t made by small teams. They were made by free human beings living full and rich human lives, made comfortable by the wealth of the past, invested wisely in building them up to be all they could be.
It’s in the universities these greedy jamokes are tearing down to win their race that the breakthroughs resulting in AGI will be found.
Guess what China is busy building as fast as it possibly can? Great universities.
