Disaster Week for Elon Musk. The man who draws the most attention in the computer world had a very busy week. Elon Musk dealt with negative news at Tesla, fueled concern that AI would wipe out humanity, and introduced yet another divisive tweak to Twitter in addition to launching a rocket. Musk serves as an example of the danger that results from the collision of technology and ego throughout it all. ( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
Earlier today, a SpaceX rocket exploded in the skies over the Gulf of Mexico, detonating itself after the booster failed to separate from the upper portion of the vehicle after launch. Watching the clip, from start to fiery finish, I was struck above all else by the sound of applause—routine during such launches, of course, but marked by a different timbre this week.
SpaceX is one of Elon Musk’s many projects, a private transportation company with ambitions to serve “Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.” As CEO, Musk splits his attention between this lofty mission and his duties as CEO of both Tesla and Twitter, the latter of which he acquired in a frenzy for $44 billion last year.
( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
Through these roles he has secured his spot as one of America’s most transfixing subjects, a polarizing man for a polarized age, whose accomplishments are slopped over with failure. The rocket blew up; Tesla’s profits are down more than 20 percent year over year; Twitter is, well, Twitter. No surprise, then, that Musk has grown to embrace the role of performer, as when he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonighton Monday for a lengthy freak-out about artificial intelligence. In this environment—at least for a man like Musk—value and substance are secondary concerns. What matters is that people are paying attention and reacting.
No wonder then that he promised yesterday that his electric cars would become fully self-driving as soon as this year—an application of AI technology that has already been implicated in a number of deaths—just days after he warned on Tucker that AI is “a danger to the public.”
( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
There is no ideological consistency, just bluster and unyielding demands for attention. My colleague Charlie Warzel has called it the myth of the tech genius: After years of growth and innovation in the tech industry, many people lionize the supposedly great men at the center of it all, without reason.
The myth is not harmless. AI, and especially generative AI, that newer strain you’ve heard about or seen in the likes of ChatGPT and DALL-E, demands scrutiny. Although the technology currently seems more likely to destroy high-school-English assignments than it is to rend our flesh and blood, there are serious risks to contend with: Misinformation is a big one, and so is a flood of “gray goo,” as the writer Matthew Kirschenbaum evocatively put it—endless junk content written and published by AI.
( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
There are also deeper effects of existing AI systems that scholars such as Safiya Noble, Joy Buolamwini, and Virginia Eubanks have called attention to for years: racial bias and automated inequality. Rather than address these problems, Musk is focused elsewhere. He announced during his Carlson appearance that he would develop something called Truth GPT, “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” (I suspect we’re a few years out from that, at least.)
( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
Musk exemplifies the danger at the intersection of technology and ego: There are serious problems to be dealt with, but distractions always seem to take precedence. This has already played out on Twitter, which has mutated under Musk’s stewardship into a broken mess of contradictions without any meaningful oversight. Musk has promised transparency into the platform’s inner workings, but has made consequential decisions behind closed doors. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote:
( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has recklessly pulled down guardrails, such as dramatically downsizing teams dedicated to safety and internal accountability and haphazardly opening up its blue-check verification system to anyone willing to pay a fee (while removing the actual identity-verifying part in the process). Major decisions that affect the user experience are made without clear justification … the company pulled the blue check off The New York Times’ Twitter account, and … labeled NPR “state-affiliated media.” Donald Moynihan, a policy professor at Georgetown University who frequently writes on tech governance, noted on Twitter that policies once used to safeguard users “are now being rewritten in obviously nonsensical ways to fit with the whims of its owner.”
( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
Today, Musk followed through on an earlier promise to remove the blue checks from users who won’t pay a monthly subscription fee to the platform. The little icon was a status marker, sure, but it was also a symbol of some kind of higher order on the social network: Gone with it is the final vestige of the Twitter that once was. Still, there is applause. Musk’s adoring fans treat the pay-to-play scheme as part of the CEO’s supposed free-speech crusade, suggesting that the ability to buy a check mark puts everyone on equal footing—but a privilege that can, must, be bought isn’t much of a privilege at all.
Perhaps there’s no need to eulogize the old Twitter. The platform has always had problems, has always distorted conversations and turned too many people toward their darkest impulses. But it was also, at least, the creation of a community. To the extent that Twitter’s downfall represents the end of the age of social media, it is because the platform has abandoned users in favor of the whims of one man.
( Disaster Week for Elon Musk ).
Still, the social network has its devotees; so will TruthGPT, if and when it launches. Some clapped when the rocket lifted off. Some clapped when it exploded. And somewhere beyond the smoke was Elon Musk, taking it all in.