<https://www.profgalloway.com/techno-narcissism/> Scott Galloway@profgalloway I’m at Founders Forum in the Cotswolds … which they assure me is somewhere outside of London. There are a lot of Teslas and recycled Mason jars as … we’re making the world a better place. As at any gathering of the tech elite in 2023, the content could best be described as AI and the Seven Dwarves. The youth and vision toggles between inspiring moments and bouts of techno-narcissism. It’s understandable. If you tell a thirtysomething male he is Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you. The tech innovator class has an Achilles tendon that runs from their heels to their necks: They believe their press. Making a dent in the universe is so aughts. Today, membership in the Soho House of tech requires you to birth the leverage point that will alter the universe. Jack Dorsey brought low-cost credit card transactions to millions of small vendors. But he’s still not our personal Jesus, so he renamed his company Block and pushed into crypto, because bitcoin would bring “world peace.” Side note: If anybody knows @jack’s brand of edibles, Whatsapp me. Elon Musk made a great electric car, then a better rocket … and recently appointed himself Noah to shepherd humanity to an interplanetary future. When techno-narcissism meets technology that is genuinely disruptive (vs. crypto or a headset), the hype cycle makes the jump to lightspeed. Late last year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 1 million users in five days. Six months later, Congress asked its CEO if his product was going to destroy humanity. In contrast, it took Facebook 10 months to get to a million users, and it was 14 years before the CEO was hauled before Congress for damaging humanity. The claims are extreme, positive and negative: Solutionists pen think pieces on “Why AI Will Save the World,” while catastrophists warn us of “the risks of extinction.” These are two covers of the same song: techno-narcissism. It’s exhausting. But AI is a huge breakthrough, and the stakes are genuinely high. Existential Egos It’s notable today that many of the outspoken prophets of AI doom are the same people who birthed AI. Specifically, taking up all the oxygen in the AI conversation with dystopian visions of sentient AI eliminating humanity isn’t helpful. It only serves the interests of the developers of nonsentient AI, in several ways. At the simplest level, it gets attention. If you are a semifamous computer engineer who aspires to be more famous, nothing beats telling every reporter in earshot: “I’ve invented something that could destroy the world.” Partisans complain about the media’s left or right bias, but the real bias is toward spectacle. If it bleeds it leads, and nothing bleeds like the end of the world with a tortured genius at the center of the plot. Land Grab AI fearmongering is also a business strategy for the incumbents, who’d like the government to suppress nascent competition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress we need an entire new federal agency to scrutinize AI models, and said he’d be happy to help them define what kinds of companies and products should get licenses (i.e., compete with OpenAI). “Licensing regimes are the death of competition in most places they operate,” says antitrust scholar and former White House senior adviser Tim Wu (total gangster). Similar to cheap capital and regulatory capture, catastrophism is an attempt to commit infanticide on emerging competition. Real Risks Granted, we should not ignore the dangers of AI, but the real risks are the existing incentives and amorality in tech and our ongoing inability to regulate it. The techno-catastrophists want to create a narrative that the shit coming down the pike is not the result of their actions, but the inevitable cost of progress. Just as the devil’s trick was convincing us he didn’t exist, the technologist’s sleight of hand is to absolve himself of guilt for the damage the next generation of tech leaders will levy on society [...]