The Test

Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening … kinda like using a Chatbot. But worse.

Huang says many outrageous things in the podcast. Like when Klein asks about how kids don’t learn skills when using LLMs, Huang responds:

I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter? […] Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

Outrageous. But he needs to go on and top this statement with an even worse one:

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address. […] It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

So Huang is not the only person making these kinds of strange statements. Marc Andreessen proudly declaring not to have any introspection. Sam Altman talking about how how ChatGPT (and probably a bunch of nannies) basically raises his kid. Satya Nadella “staying informed” about the world by listening to – and talking to – podcasts that Microsoft Copilot generates for him.

This is not how actual people live. These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit. Why would techbros do that? Constantly.

It of course brings to mind the famous quote from William Gibson’s Count Zero:

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

And that is true to a degree: That level of access to money does shift how you see, how you interact with the world. It starts with you having a driver so you never have to park a car or go to the gas/charging station and only increases the more money you have. I would honestly not be surprised if those rich people wouldn’t even know where the washing machine is in their mansion. That’s what the help takes care of.

Money – like software – creates abstraction. Distance to the friction of the world. The ability to never be touched and to never have to touch anyone or anything. To have nobody else’s life, their existence as a person with needs and rights and hopes and feelings, matter. That probably is why rich folks – and those how aspire to that lifestyle – love “AI” so much.

But I think there is another aspect to those statements. They are a test.

Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.

This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.

Everything we say has multiple functions and effects. I am not saying that Jensen Huang intentionally plants these weird-ass statements to test the people around him. I am saying that they do serve as a test though. Because in that interview, Klein could have pushed back on Huang. Really dug into how “I don’t know my address” is not about “some skills are no longer required” but about “I am rich and pay a bunch of women to run my life like my mother used to“. Could have challenged that completely disconnected statement to kinda force Huang to step down from abstraction land down to the real world.

But he didn’t. Because he knows the consequences. If you do challenge those things you will not get those kinds of high-profile interviews. If you don’t take whatever those weird men say seriously you have failed the test. And that has consequences.

It is imperative for us to push back on that. Now we don’t get to talk to Jensen Huang – which might be good for our intellectual and psychological well-being – but we talk to people who might accept those statements and argue based on that. “Jensen Huang said that we don’t need those skills”, “Sam Altman said that Intelligence is something that we can just rent from OpenAI”, “Dario Amodei said AI might kill is all”. Weird and dumb shit that needs to be challenged.

We can’t save those broken men from themselves. We have way bigger tasks in front of us. One of those tasks is pushing back on those claims, pointing out how fucking weird those statements are, how they do not make any lick of sense.

Pointing that out, making that explicit, choosing to fail the test is powerful. It does give others the opportunity to step out of the often dominant “quirky tech bro is so visionary” narrative to realize how fucking weird those guys are. How little they know about life. About how to be a human. And that is power. That is connection. That is what allows us to push back on our lives, our social fabric being steamrolled by a bunch of unpleasant dudes.

The only way to actually win at that test is to fail it. Fail it as hard as you can.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Very well argued. We’ve lived for decades now with crazy stuff from the tech bros that went unchallenged while the media built them up to be Wunderkinder. Like you, I called them out, regularly, for the simple reason that their products tended to be half-baked, the sort of quality you would expect from leaders who had nothing but contempt for their users. Sadly this sycophancy has led us here, when we, as a society, should have called them out from the very beginning.

@blog So if someone drops the CEO of NVIDIA in the middle of the forest, he’ll just languish there, lost forever?

Reply on the Fediverse

Remote Reply

Original Comment URL

Paste the comment URL into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.

Comment URL

Your Profile

Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?

This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.

By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.

Reply on the Fediverse

Remote Reply

Original Comment URL

Paste the comment URL into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.

Comment URL

Your Profile

Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?

This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.

By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.

Reply on the Fediverse

Remote Reply

Original Comment URL

Paste the comment URL into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.

Comment URL

Your Profile

Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?

This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.

By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.

@blog I wonder if his family has an Airtag stitched into all his leather jackets…

Reply on the Fediverse

Remote Reply

Original Comment URL

Paste the comment URL into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.

Comment URL

Your Profile

Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?

This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.

By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.

I’ll never forget once when I was in Aspen (as a journalist, getting free accommodation), and having the sudden flash of realisation as I chatted to a woman in my hotel lobby about her cute dog, that she didn’t see me as a person. Her eyes were completely dead and disengaged. She was giving me the same degree of attention that I, it dawned on me shamefully, might give the guy at the petrol station or the local convenience store, ie, the bare minimum.

When you’re that rich, I think, you just don’t see most people as actual people that you need to think about in any way. Billionaires are not like us.

I had a flatmate from apartheid South Africa. When there she had no idea how tennis shoes are cleaned; she just left them outside her door at night and in the morning they were clean. To her credit, she became an anti-apartheid activist.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.