Pylimitics

I just found Dario Amodei’s apologia The Adolescence of Technology, from back in January. It’s quite long; Claude must have used tons of tokens writing it for him. Amodei can, of course, afford it.

His essay is chock full of hand waving dismissals of reservations reasonable people might have about large language models (and the business bullshit swirling around them), as well as heartfelt entreaties begging for control and, by extension, the lion’s share of all that scammy money.

He attempts to “honestly” present the counterarguments and warnings about what he’s engaged in, while at the same time admitting that he has no idea at all what the effects of his ploy might be.

Amodei goes on (and on) about AI and how he thinks it will (maybe) be a good thing in the end, and why we should leave him and his company alone to do what he thinks best. But the essay probably says more about Amodei himself than about his erstwhile subject.

At one point, not even halfway through, he invokes Bill Joy’s 2000 essay Why the future doesn’t need us, and even tosses a bone, saying Joy “writes with a deep sense of compassion and humanity that I admire.” Evidently Amodei’s admiration is the kind you feel when observing something that you are not capable of yourself.

It seems to me that Amodei had several motives in offering his essay. The first is, of course, pumping his company and his brand, which he wants us to believe is “the thoughtful, concerned, mature player in the LLM game.” Sure, he’s all in with the TECSCREAL delusions of the tech bros, but if his work costs you your job (it cost me mine just last week) and, conceivably, your life, he wants you to know it’s not his fault. He’s the good eugenicist/greedhead/scammer.

Another motive seems to be a plea to be left alone because he and his crew are just so damned smart that any attempt to regulate, restrict, or even examine what they’re up to is tantamount to stupid meddling. They’ve thought of everything and tried more things than the rest of us could ever think of, so just leave them alone. Of course, as I already mentioned, he freely admits he has no idea at all what the effects of his ploy might be.

Like all the tech bros, self-aggrandizement seems to be a constant motive for Amodei. He really, really wants us to recognize that he is much smarter than we are and he is simply correct, so shut up. Paul Krugman defined this tendency brilliantly, calling it “billionaire brain”:

that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework.

I don’t know whether Amodei is a billionaire yet, but he’s already there in his mind and attitude.

Since I’ve spent quite a few paragraphs bashing him, I should mention here that I don’t think terribly ill of our lad Dario. As far as I can tell, he really is less odious than many other tech bros in his circle. Sam Altman is, according to people who know him pretty well, a lying sack of shit. Elon Musk seems to have experienced a massive mental and ethical lapse a handful of years ago, and shows no signs of recovering. Peter Thiel has somehow morphed into (or always was) a cartoon supervillain. As for Mark Zuckerberg, well, that’s a guy who never hid his contempt for contemporaries all the way back in college (“They trust me — dumb fucks“).

I have no solutions to whatever flaw in ourselves (but not our stars) leads to the social, economic, and organizational elevation of despicable people. I don’t even understand it. It seems like it’s more pronounced today, but then, this is the only day I’m living in. I think it would make a fair bargain to let these depraved, nefarious, reprehensible blackguards keep their lives and money in return for just leaving the rest of us alone permanently. They won’t, of course, but wishes are still free. As for Amodei’s long and tedious essay, reading that was not free; I’m never getting back the time that wasted.