Anyone watching the recent interview between Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist’s editor-in- chief, and Elon Musk, the world’s most petulant rich man, will have been left marvelling at how accountability for your actions isn’t a thing any more. All you have to do is keep denying reality, until the person asking the questions just gives up and moves on to another question.
An instance of this was Musk’s repeated insistence — articulated with a little moue eerily reminiscent of the puckered lips of his erstwhile presidential buddy — that “zero, zee-ro” people died because of his timeshare department Doge’s abrupt shuttering of USAID, with the concomitant halt of funding to a multitude of health programmes.
Suffice to say this is a bald-faced lie, as testified to by countless news reports. And when Musk tweeted that nobody could name one person who had died, New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof posted specific names and cases of people who were victims of Doge’s gleeful hatchet job, including a child named Gbessey Kiadu in Liberia, who died after medication was cut.
There were many moments in the interview where the paucity of Musk’s intellect was exposed. For instance, Musk said his response to the realisation that the threat of AI is unstoppable was to decide to “just enjoy the ride. It just seems like all roads lead to acceleration of AI. You can just sort of be sad about it or join the club, I suppose.”
It doesn’t take a genius to point out how self-serving this message is. As The Economist put it, “the fatalism that Mr Musk draws from AI’s repeated ability to beat expectations risks being infectious. A cynical reading is that this would serve his purpose, because he would be freer to pursue the technology without the oversight it deserves.”
If you’re looking for some hope here, it’s probably the fact that it’s unlikely that egomaniacs like Musk and other AI “leaders” really believe that AI will render humanity obsolete in the next five years. We can draw faint comfort from the sad fact that these men need to always be in charge, so one hopes they’re going to be a little more ready to take on their monsters than Frankenstein was.
Though The Economist describes Musk as a genius, it’s hard to square that with the fuzziness of his logic when interviewed about his beliefs. When asked by The Economist, “Are you anti-Muslim?”, Musk responded haltingly, saying: “Um, if people come to a country with antithetical views, I’m against that. I’m against rape and murder.”
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he is eliding the term Muslim with the terms rape and murder, as if they are, inevitably, the same thing. He thinks he’s saying that he is pro-West, but what he’s actually saying is that he’s against competing views. Which is very ironic, given his self-proclaimed status as St Elon, the patron saint of free speech.
Watching the interview, I couldn’t help but be reminded of an excellent News24 opinion piece by Pierre de Vos about the shameful uproar about Bishops school and the LGBTQI+ Pride flag.
De Vos argues that Bishops’ “old boys hide their discomfort with queer inclusion within a rhetoric of neutrality. Eager to assure everyone that their objection had nothing to do with the fact that they did not see LGBTQI+ people as fully human, the group framed its concern in supposedly ‘neutral’ terms, as a demand for the school not to fly any flag promoting the ‘cause’ of a particular ‘faction’ because this would force the school to ‘align itself in a contested matter’, turning the presence or absence of each banner into a political statement.”
De Vos argues that the old boys’ group’s stance is both hypocritical (given the racist associations of the St George’s flag) and fundamentally at odds with South Africa’s constitutional obligations towards LGBTQI+ equality and dignity.
But what resonated was this part. “While it is a statistical certainty that some Bishops old boys continue to harbour racist attitudes, one would have assumed that they would be clever enough not to want to advertise this to the world. But this assumption may itself be mistaken, based on an untenable assumption that privileged Bishops boys are incapable of mediocrity and stupidity, an assumption which, left unchallenged, would allow such boys to continue to fail upwards their entire lives.”
This really is Musk to a T. His championing of the cause of Western values is revealed when he is confronted by someone actually asking hard questions, rather than a sea of millions of Musk bots, fanboys and fake accounts rhapsodising on cue, as being nothing but a cloak for his ethical mediocrity.