A new age of visionaries
JUNE 4TH, 2016 — POST 152
Bill Gates once famously dreamed of a computer in every home. Reserved for enterprise, military, and scientific applications of extreme complexity up until the 1980s when Gates at Microsoft and Steve Jobs at Apple changed the personal computer and with it the world. The story of their rivalry, of Microsoft’s dominance in personal computing in the 1990s, of Jobs’ return to Apple, all of this is now mythic. We live in a world that was changed by Gates to then be changed again by Jobs, the latter’s contribution the ubiquitous smartphone and the model of a vertically integrated company. The vision that Gates built Microsoft around today feels quaint, realised with surprising rapidity given the climate in which it was first uttered. With Gates consolidating his once-richest-in-the-world fortune to philanthropic enterprises, and Jobs dying from cancer in 2011, and Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page increasingly taking more abstracted roles within their now reconfigured Alphabet, tech (which is more all-encompassing than ever before) is metaphorically changing hands.
The boy-wonder-turned-billionaire model that Steve Jobs minted remains a dominant image in the general public’s relationship to tech. Jobs proved that personality is one of the biggest drivers of product. People weren’t just buying an iPhone but a piece of Jobs, seen publically as the laser-focussed genius. It’s almost impossible even today for Apple, led by Tim Cook since Jobs’ passing, to not have some YouTube of Facebook commenter charge them with something along the lines of “the company isn’t the same since Jobs died”. iTunes becoming bloated? Jobs wouldn’t have let it happen. The camera bulge on the iPhone 6? No way Steve would have allowed it. The Magic Mouse that has to charge whilst laying on its back, rendering the mouse unusable? “Steve Jobs would be spinning in his grave!”.
As far as most people are concerned, names like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai don’t mean much. Mark Zuckerberg, whilst known, is not heralded with the fanfare Jobs was ever since the iPod dropped in 2001. For most people, he’s just the Facebook kid. Even Jeff Bezos, whose enterpreneurial reach extends well beyond Amazon to Blue Origin and The Washington Post, is not exactly a celebrated personality. But there’s one name people do know, one name people celebrate. One name who has been able to drive around 400 000 $1000 preorders for his next consumer product. And whether it’s just because of its distinct yet familiar phonetic profile or not, that name is Elon Musk.
Appearing this week at Recode’s Code Conference (which has also included Bezos and Pichai), Musk gave a 80+ minute interview on stage opposite Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Whilst deflecting suggestions of the cult of personality that might have driven the incredible pre-order response to the recently-announced Tesla Model 3, Musk spent the bulk of the interview in a gear he appears entirely comfortable in: envisaging the new world. Regardless of the trivialising almost “isn’t he wacky?!?” tone with which headlines have spun from various outlets since the interview, there’s something in Musk’s gravity that has his words sticking. Bezos as part of Blue Origin might have felt himself qualified to speak on our multi-planet future. Facebook CTO Mark Schroepfer might have waxed optimistic about artificial intelligence. But Musk’s thoughts on both of these, and on a wide variety of other things, are what’s being traded socially.
One moment specifically cemented Musk as a kind of visionary I’m yet to see in my quarter century of life so far. Where Jobs would hold out a product and scream down your throats “It’s magical!”, Musk’s unhurried manner of speech and his privileging of facts has him peeling back layers so the magic is abudantly plain for everyone to see. The imagistic pyrotechnics of running his favourite version of the “we’re living in a simulation” argument proved popular fodder on social, but one insight during his identification of an unexplored segment of tech was unarguably more illuminating.
To rehash somewhat his point, Musk pointed to some sort of “neural lace” as humanity’s smartest move in regulating the “god”-like power that A.I. could someday possess. Something like a neural lace, a mechanism by which an A.I. layer could be superimposed in the human body above the limbic and nervous layers, Musk sees as the most obvious path to a “benign” future lived in concert with advanced A.I.. However, an extremely basic yet powerful observation led him to this conclusion: we’re fundamentally “output-bound”. Essentially, whilst we are able to very quickly and efficiently receive data through our senses, and process that data with our brains, our capacity to output data — whether written, spoken, or in the manipulation of a machine like a computer — is dramatically more laborious. Things like “retinal implants” or “the internet in your brain” have long been rumoured and hypothesised but Musk’s framing this in terms of a primal limitation of our constitution opens a window to a cyborg future that has an inarguable purpose beyond biopunk aesthetic or “wouldn’t it be cool…”. Furthermore, Musk admits he might have to be the one build it.
We might be done with visionaries that reimagine our immediate surrounds to be swiftly fulfilled by some product or another. The people we have in their place, however, won’t just dream the future, they have the gall to make it.
Watch the full interview below.
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