Elon Musk’s Paranoid Tunnel Vision is a Danger To Us All
The American Dream consists of a rosy picture of an idealistic, self-made innovator who builds a fortune off the strength of their own good ideas and work ethic. We tend to idealize figures like Elon Musk who we perceive as progressive and in working in service of the greater good for espousing buzzwords like “clean energy”.
In America we also tend to view innovation and technological progress as unequivocal positives. However innovation for innovation’s sake is not always beneficial, especially when we look at the motivations behind why innovation is occurring, and in turn, what is being neglected in its favor.
Under our current economic system, constant acceleration of profit is seen as the highest goal. Despite the fact that this type of growth is unsustainable and not often grounded in reality, the business leaders of our society pursue it at all costs while using it as the main metric of success. This leads to the manufacturing of “solutions” to problems that do not even exist and a hunger for growth that treats individual workers as disposable if they cannot consistently promote this type of growth.
Elon Musk is a prime example of the type of tech billionaire and innovator that many Americans laud uncritically. They do this without a deeper analysis as to whether a figure like him is actually beneficial to his workers or humanity in general.
Musk was born in South Africa and is typically characterized as “self-made.” This is not entirely accurate given that his mother is a wealthy model who came from money and fame. As for his father, he owned an emerald mine in Zambia. He cites the fact that he took out student loans as testimony to his self-made status — however someone who takes out student loans knowing that he has family wealth to fall back on is not quite equivalent to someone who makes the same decision without access to a comfortable golden safety net.
Aside from naming his son eccentrically and smoking weed with Joe Rogan, Musk is known for the development of various software companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, amongst other ventures. Musk cites his mission as being grounded in the desire to “change the world and help humanity”. Many billionaires cite similar aims, hiding behind philanthropy and self-professed humane values, yet their track records often show otherwise when we examine their treatment of workers, environmental impact, and personal philosophies.
While Musk claims to have progressive goals, discriminatory union-busting techniques, and harassment of workers who speak out against his company’s ethical breaches bely the unfortunate reality that his ethics and aims are not truly progressive.
Because of his immense wealth, Musk is completely out of touch with the needs of the average person, and just like most other billionaires, his main goal is not to improve humanity, but to improve his bottom line.
Someone who genuinely cares about humans and the environment does not build a hazardous rocket testing site in the middle of a community and wildlife refuge, and then attempt to buy out the residents. Someone who has concern for the wellbeing of others wouldn’t be mad about having to shut his California plant down during a global pandemic in order to protect his workers.
Rather than taking an earnest look at the problems facing the world, Musk operates based on paranoia and an egomaniacal drive for profit.
For example, Musk’s latest venture involves a plan to create chips which can be directly implanted into the human brain in order to solve what he believes is a “bandwidth issue” of the human body. This issue comes from our communication with computers being limited to tools such as keyboards, as opposed to the ability to directly relay information to them straight from our brains.
This is in response to Musk’s fear that humans face an “existential threat” from Artificial Intelligence, which he believes will become too powerful and take control over humans. His response to this perceived threat is to merge the human mind with computer capabilities ASAP.
This is like saying that you fear a competitor might soon be able to hack your servers, so you decide to just give them full access. Surely this will solve the problem!
By giving computers direct input from the human brain, he is merely accelerating and ushering in the possibility of conflict between AI and humanity. AI on its own has no greater capability than what we program and provide it with. It does not have a will nor does it have an ego nor its own desires. But when we combine the human brain with the speed and access of a computer, we are giving more bandwidth to the limitlessness of human greed and foolishness- a danger far greater than that of Artificial Intelligence on its own.
If he fears the power of AI, why is his solution to rush into merging it with the human brain? His own paranoid logic is leading him to quickly create the very situation he fears. It’s just like the pop psychology cliche: we attract what we fear.
Musk’s worldview is filled with paranoid and ridiculous beliefs. For example, he genuinely believes that we are all living in a Matrix-esque simulation. He bases this belief on the notion that the cosmos is so vast and old, it’s likely that other civilizations have existed and become just as advanced as we have, probably to an even greater extent.
While this seems a reasonable and worthy thought experiment, the kind that you might think about the first couple of times you smoke marijuana, Musk makes the jump that these civilizations/entities must have decided to create increasingly realistic games, until they were able to create a false reality that they then decided to impose on other far away civilizations. Because there is a possibility of this happening, he concludes it must have happened, and therefore we must act accordingly.
Musk is projecting his own human desires and proclivities onto theoretical civilizations, and assuming that these creatures are even conceivable to the human brain. He assumes they desire the same type of accelerationism that he does, and that the best thing they could do with their time is to create simulations to enforce on other civilizations, two very uniquely human inclinations: to deceive and to subjugate others.
How can we know that these entities are anything like humans at all? If they are so advanced, how can we assume that we would even be able to comprehend anything about their actions at all? It’s equally likely that any other entities in the cosmos could not care less about us, are too far away to reach us, and/or have no interest in contacting us or influencing our behavior in any way.
Because the cosmos is so vast, Musk reasons, there is room for every possible type of situation we can envision, and more. However with this logic, you can justify any type of worldview you want. You could also say that the universe is created by a giant purple teddy bear who wanted to amuse himself and thus we are all just manifestations of one giant purple teddy bear’s conversation with itself, because statistically, there is room in space for any type of situation you can imagine.
Under this logic, my purple teddy thought experiment is just as reasonable as us living in a giant simulation created by aliens. While it is fun to play around with thought experiments like these, it is another to jump to basing your behavior on them. If I truly based my behavior and philosophy on my purple teddy thought experiment, I would be looked at as insane, even though technically it’s impossible to prove it’s NOT true. Musk’s wealth and class status are what allow him to be taken seriously, regardless of how ridiculous his beliefs are. Scientific and engineering acumen do not necessarily translate into common sense, nor a well balanced, thoughtful mind.
Because Musk projects so many of his own human desires and ego onto the cosmos, he views everything in the universe as a race for technological advancement. This shows us a lot more about his own personal psyche than it does about the nature of the cosmos, or any theoretically advanced civilization.
Gandhi once wrote that one of the 7 blunders of humanity was “science without humanity”. Musk is the perfect encapsulation of this notion. He desires empty advancement for advancement’s sake, rather than solutions to the very real and very pressing problems that plague the globe. For example, 1/10 people globally live in extreme poverty, making less than $2 a day. More than half the world does not have access to safe sanitation, and over 1/4 of the world people experience food insecurity. Almost a 1/4 of Americans are functionally illiterate, and 50% cannot read beyond an 8th grade level. I’m confused as to how Musk is going to make humanity any better without addressing any of these basic problems first. Who is humanity getting better for under Musk’s notion of progress?
Instead of worrying about the bandwidth issue of humans having to type in order to communicate their thoughts to a computer, or the theoretical possibility of AI becoming powerful enough to overtake humanity, it would be nice if the most powerful and wealthy people on earth were invested with solving humanity’s concrete, non-theoretical problems first. Before we worry about communicating with AI, let’s learn to communicate with each other. Before we worry about creating jobs on Mars, let’s worry about creating meaningful employment here on earth.
Before we start anticipating a cold war with AI over a theoretical possibility, or move to space to replicate the same conditions of injustice and manufactured poverty on different planets like Musk and SpaceX want to do, we would do much better to heal the very salient and concrete problems of environmental degradation, global poverty and infectious disease.
To be honest, I am scared of what the future holds given that people who are as out of touch and ego-driven as Musk are the ones with access to the most power and capital, and that many well-meaning people embrace figures like him uncritically because of his rebellious ethos and a few compelling ventures. We allow egomaniacs like Musk to run rampant at the expense of vulnerable populations. We don’t question the methods or soundness of Musk’s ideas due to his social status, even though his technological and scientific innovations are only truly geared towards improving the prospects of other billionaires like him.
We think of figures like Musk as signifying “progress”, but we really need to be redefining progress on our own terms. A self-serving billionaire is about as far from progressive as you can get, and a billionaire can never truly serve the interests of humanity. The idea of becoming a billionaire hinges on the continuous process of exploitation of the labor and resources of others. Our notions of progress need to shift drastically in order to address the great injustices that plague our society- we cannot allow self-serving profiteers to define them for us.
