Dumb and Dumber: Tech CEOs, AI and the End of the World

The end of the world now comes with a keynote address. A technology billionaire explains that humanity must accept their preferred future or perish, while employees nod with the conviction of people who need their salaries. Apparently, accumulating money also confers expertise in civilisation, history and the purpose of existence. Being able to sack everyone who disagrees has somehow become a qualification for deciding what happens to everyone else.

The decision matrix precedes the executive and vastly exceeds their control. Recommendations, predictions, markets and institutions shape what gets rewarded, repeated and believed, including what counts as leadership. Attention and investment can reinforce the same arrangement without sharing a tempo. Each decision changes what becomes possible next; later consequences alter what earlier decisions appear to have meant. The machinery is organising its supposed pilot too. Their figures are up. The philosophical questions have been successfully resolved.

Nihilism supplies a philosophy suitable for an investor presentation. Human limits become defects, obligations become sentimental baggage, and catastrophe acquires the glamour of destiny. Salvation or extinction are the available futures, both apparently requiring more computing power. An advertised future attracts investment; investment makes alternatives harder to pursue; the resulting dependency is presented as evidence that there was never any alternative. It is useful to keep the theological assumptions out of the technical documentation.

Fascism takes shape through this repeated narrowing of the possibilities. Contradictory claims can keep returning people to familiar positions: those threatened, those blamed, those entitled to command. Each recurrence prepares the next response, until obedience feels sensible and disagreement feels dangerous. Correcting the leader’s mistakes is recast as persecution, feeding criticism back into the authority it challenges. Failure supplies another reason to strengthen that authority. An impressive arrangement for someone whose principal qualification is being difficult to correct.

Their power is real. So are the statistical effects of what they amplify and their responsibility for the consequences. Being selected and rewarded by a process does not establish that they understand it. The flattering assumption that their intelligence must somehow be equal to their influence is doing considerable unpaid public relations. Power without responsibility is being advertised as the next stage of civilisation. The novelty is mostly in the presentation.