Etiquette School
Anthropic’s profits are turning a corner, OpenAI won a suit but left Sam’s reputation in tatters. Meta is laying off 8000 people. Resentment builds against big tech, the haves and have nots, and the extreme discrepancies the new world order highlights.
You could say there has always been a billionaire’s club. The Vanderbilts and Astors, the Pullman’s and Stanford’s. Ford, Hershey, Post. And of course, media moguls Mr. Turner and Mr. Rupert to name a few. Let’s not forget big money and the influence wealth in big finance brings.
Having lived through several big tech waves — print to digital -> the web. Mobile, Social, Cloud. This time, the shift to AI feels different. It feels ‘brittle’ in the words of one CEO we spoke with of late. It all feels a bit brittle.
There is something wrong when billionaires invade a city like Venice and make a show of having ‘bubble fights’ on their yachts. There is something different about the extreme water gluttony AI and its data centers bring to water-fragile ecosystems, all while driving up energy costs for every day citizens trying to earn a living. Is it right to buy up acres and acres of adjacent properties so that owners ‘own’ huge swaths of real estate in equally fragile ecosystems like Lake Tahoe or Kauai. Mr. Turner conserved land. Mr. Zuckerburg builds compounds.
People are worried about job displacement and whether their university education is worth anything and in what fields. They are concerned about utility costs and access to water. Yet the tech bros now go to etiquette school to learn how to eat caviar and stop saying ‘hey’ in their salutations.
As my colleague Grant Hunter says, “imagine what a liberal arts education sprinkled around their tech degrees could have taught them.” Critical thinking, empathy, and other soft skills anyone? Something else besides eating caviar and understanding wine (which I love by the way.) Why are special classes for any of this required. They say it’s to earn trust. Hmm. Trust can come from giving back.
This isn’t about socialism. It is not about jealousy or something wrong with the American dream. That dream and achieving it is a beautiful thing. It would simply be nice to see equal emphasis on giving back and dealing with the consequences of what this technology brings. Job displacement, retraining, environmental impact. Sure Mr. Bezos is giving to climate change. But wouldn’t it be better to find ways not to cause it in the first place by sucking the planet dry with data center infrastructure in towns where they cannot be responsibly built?
I wonder if we can align this next tech wave better with the impact it will have. Billionaires almost always come from ‘big infrastructure’ -> shipping, building, energy, roads, railroads, and now tech and the businesses built off its back. It would be nice to see more big tech focus on the impact their tech has — mental health with children on social media, the dopamine effect of cellphones, the water consumption of AI, or the job loss that’s real with new waves yet to come.
New technological waves — whether the agriculture age, the industrial age, the internet age and now the AI age have natural consequences. It would be nice if those profiting from it have more direct impact on the things they cause rather than the euphemistic — I pledge to give all my money away before I die. That’s good but what about fixing the problems we’re causing today?