Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Misreading of Science Fiction
Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer’s Odyssey, or Christopher Nolan’s? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a “historically accurate” version of the The Odyssey—turning epic poetry into atrocious slop—even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.
The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut. An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes, Silicon Valleymillionaires and billionaires who, seeking...
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