False Assumptions 🤖
Three Things #158: February 23, 2025
I just wrapped up a few days back in one of my favorite places, New Zealand. During the trip I made a point of connecting with entrepreneurs and builders and looking for ways to invest in and support their work. It was a whirlwind few days and I met a ton of people and heard a lot of stories.
My primary motivation for visiting New Zealand was to get outside my comfort zone, and outside the crypto bro echo chamber, and interface with people who see and understand the world very differently than I do. That happened again and again. Here are a few themes that came up in multiple conversations this past week, some of which surprised me—and most of which had very little to do with New Zealand specifically.
Thing #1: Elon Musk is Evil 👺
I touched upon this topic a little bit when I wrote about the election a few weeks ago. I talked about Trump Derangement Syndrome, and I suggested that it seems a lot of people have Elon Derangement Syndrome (EDS) as well. I think that has only been amplified in the intervening weeks. There’s been a ton of negative press coverage of DOGE and of Elon’s efforts to increase government transparency and efficiency.
Of course I can understand why people who are direct stakeholders, such as those who have been laid off, would be upset about what’s going on. But I really don’t understand why people in general are upset—other than the reason being EDS. I also don’t fully understand why so much of the coverage has been negative, but I find it even more interesting that people on the other side of the planet, thousands of miles away, are also experiencing EDS. This in spite of the fact that they’re far beyond Elon’s reach, and that his work in Washington should have no direct impact in places like New Zealand!
Let me get a few things straight upfront: I generally like Elon. He’s obviously not perfect, and he’s done a few things lately (like influencing German politics) that make me uncomfortable. But he has built and done more than any other person alive, and has built as much or more than any person who ever lived. He’s created several important companies and products that are socially and economically valuable. And most of the criticism I see levied at Elon comes from people who aren’t builders, who have never built anything before, and who don’t appreciate how hard it is or why building is so important and so valuable.
While I don’t personally like Trump, I do support his work to dismantle the deep state, and I support Elon’s work to uncover corruption and inefficiency and to make the government more efficient. It seems clear to me that the United States federal government is way too big, does too many things, employs too many people, and is horrendously inefficient. Addressing these inefficiencies, and reducing waste and corruption, benefits everyone.
And this sort of work can’t be done surgically, without breaking some eggs, and without making a lot of people angry—especially those who are invested in the status quo. I also genuinely believe that Elon’s heart is in the right place and that he’s going about this for mostly the right reasons, namely, to make the USA a better country and to make life better for Americans in general. I think the vast majority of news coverage I’ve seen of his work is overblown and dishonest, selective with the facts, and intentionally misleading.
Having said all of that, I do also see the other side of the coin. The recent Time Magazine cover got it right: Trump is president but Elon is the most powerful man in the world right now. One reason is because a lot more people respect Elon than respect Trump (including me). Another reason is that Trump is all bluster and couldn’t strategize his way out of a paper bag, whereas Elon is well on his way to sending people to Mars. Elon is an execution machine. World leaders, and wealthy, influential people more generally see and respect that.
The flipside of believing in Elon’s work is recognizing that it might not be a good idea to put so much power into one man’s hands, even those of a man as capable as Elon. It’s true that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Elon might not need to wield power to make himself wealthier, since he’s already the wealthiest man on earth, but that doesn’t make him truly incorruptible. There are risks associated with centralizing so much power into the hands of one person. Time will tell how he handles it, and I think it’s critical that he be held accountable. As long as he continues to do good on behalf of all Americans, I think he should be allowed, and encouraged, to continue that work. If the situation were to change, it’s important that Americans have accountability mechanisms to reign him in.
Coming back to my Kiwi friends: my instinct tells me that they dislike Musk for the same reason that many Americans do. Sadly, many people today simply dislike billionaires. They naively tend to bucket them all together, and imagine that, in order to be that wealthy, someone must be a truly bad person who exploits their employees, swindles their partners in deals, etc. In other words, that in order to become a billionaire, a person must be and/or do evil.
It’s certainly possible that Elon has taken advantage of people throughout the course of his career. I’ve heard a lot of people say that he lies, cheats, and steals constantly. Maybe that’s true, but I’ve not seen any evidence of it. The accounts I’ve read of people who have worked with him are nearly all positive. Even people who parted ways with him on less than positive terms generally have good things to say about him.
I’m willing to be proven wrong on this one, but I think my friends are wrong here. There are such things as benevolent billionaires—I don’t personally know Elon, but I do know several of these and I know for a fact that they exist. I really don’t think Elon (or most other billionaires) are evil, and I think the root cause of a lot of this feeling is jealousy and misunderstanding, and an overall sense of frustration with the state of the economy, which is understandable.
I really hope that, as a society, we can get past this collective distaste of wealth and understand that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a person becoming filthy rich if they do so by creating far more wealth for humans at large. The alternative is far, far scarier and there’s something very wrong with a world where this is not possible. We should be celebrating our Elons and counting our lucky stars that we live in a time and a place where they can exist.
Which brings us to the next thing.
Thing #2: Big Tech is Evil 👹
This is another theme I’ve heard repeated a few times in a few places, and it’s something else that a few people mentioned this week. There’s enormous mistrust of big tech companies and a feeling that they’re exploiting all of us, and that they’re out of control.
I certainly empathize partially with this perspective. In theory, as consumers in a free market economy we have a choice which products and services we choose to use. No one is forcing us to use any particular software or application. But the reality is that life today without any products from Google or Facebook is quite difficult. It seems like all of my friends are constantly on Instagram, and if I never open it, I miss everything. Conversations largely happen on Whatsapp. Lots of schools and other communities use Facebook as a primary communication channel. And that’s just Facebook, to say nothing of X, LinkedIn, Amazon, or the other tech giants and their respective offerings. To opt out of these apps and services is to effectively shut off a large part of your social life.
What’s more, we know that these companies do spy on us, profit from our data, and that by and large they don’t respect or care about our privacy. They leak information to the government illegally, without search warrants. These things are all really bad things. I’ve written about them before, and I’m not here to defend big tech.
But—there’s a big but. In spite of all of these things, and in spite of the exploitation, these apps and services have also made our lives much better. Both things are true.
Perhaps the best, easiest example is Apple, which has the simplest, cleanest business model: because Apple manufactures and sells high quality hardware, it’s not forced to profit from our data like the other tech giants. But it’s not just Apple. As much as I like to bitch and moan about all of these companies and their tech products, I do enjoy using many of the products, for all of their flaws, and I do see value in them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t use them. It’s not all exploitation. There are paid, private alternatives to most of them, but I and many others still often choose to use the free versions for various reasons (momentum, network effects, laziness, frugality).
There’s also a feeling that these companies exploit not only their users, but everyone else involved in the value chain, including their employees. A very common, naive refrain that you hear again and again is, if the people running these companies are billionaires, and if the companies earn billions in profits, why can’t they afford to share more of these profits with their employees? And by extension, because they don’t, these companies must be evil.
I sympathize with this point, too, but I don’t think the world is so black and white. For one thing, most people don’t understand accounting, and even companies with revenues in the billions are not very profitable, or in some cases, aren’t profitable at all. The most obvious example is Uber, which just reported a profit for the first time in its 15 years. Good companies often plow the vast majority of their revenues back into product, as Amazon famously did, in order to stay competitive. And if they don’t, their competitors will. The tech industry is dog eat dog, and if a company isn’t competitive, it won’t last very long. Investors and analysts demand profits and growth, and will abandon a company that doesn’t deliver them. Unfortunately, competitiveness means not only charging the most you can for your product, it also means reducing costs and paying as little as you can get away with. This is simply how capitalism works. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we’ve got so far, it’s still far better than the alternative, and if you don’t like it, blame capitalism, not your scapegoat company du jour. Or, you know, start a co-op, a DAO, or some other structure and try to compete, rather than complaining
As for those employees, they also have a choice. No one is forcing them to work at these companies, for these wages. My country and New Zealand are both free countries, and the people who work at these companies do so by choice. They’re free to work elsewhere. Indeed, competitors very often offer higher wages to tempt employees over. I don’t think the fact that they’re bound by the rules of capitalism inherently makes these companies evil, and it’s a real shame that so many people think so. They might think they’d prefer the alternative, but they’re wrong.
The key thing here is: companies do precisely what they can get away with. Consumers also have a great deal of leverage in capitalism. If you as a consumer aren’t satisfied with how a company treats its employees, or its customers, you’re free to choose not to use it, to be vocal about it, or to organize a boycott. You’re also free to start a better, fairer competitor. These sorts of actions actually tend to work pretty well, and taking action is much more socially useful (and more difficult) than complaining!
Thing #3: AI is Scary 🧟♂️
This is another theme that came up again and again in conversations over the last few days. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why AI seems scary. I’ve written about this topic before, and about the fact that fear of AI, or something like it, is as old as human civilization itself. But when I think of scary AI, I think of something like Skynet from Terminator, or Omnius from the Dune prequels: fantastic, fictional depictions of what rogue, killer AI might look like, written in a time when we had no idea what the real thing might look like.
That’s no longer the case. AI is much less mysterious today than it was a generation or two ago. And it’s always the case that the scariest things are the most unfamiliar. The more familiar something becomes, the less scary it seems. AI isn’t totally unscary yet—it’s not yet quite that familiar—but it’s familiar enough, at least to me, that it doesn’t feel so scary anymore. LLMs are cool and useful, but I don’t exactly have nightmares of them taking over the world or sending killer robots after us.
Whether and to what extent we should be afraid of AI, and what we should do about that today, is a big topic and won’t fit in the space allocated here. The point is that, while I of course can’t completely rule out the possibility that AI turns scary later, for now I think we need to give it the benefit of the doubt.
There are two reasons for this. The first and more obvious reason is that AI can, and I believe will, do a lot of good. It’s already beginning. It’s making companies more efficient. It’s designing better products. It’s helping connect people. It’s saving money, and helping educate people. I see these things happening everywhere, including at home and in New Zealand.
And all that is just the tip of the iceberg. Like any powerful, general purpose, paradigm-shifting technology, it can and will do a lot of good, and it should be given the opportunity to do so. To the extent that AI does do bad—more on this next—I believe this will be more than outweighed by the good it does.
The second reason, which is a little more nuanced, is that, to the extent that AI becomes scary, it will be for the same reason that other tools and technologies are scary. Namely, it will have very little to do with the technology itself, and a lot to do with the way in which it’s used. I don’t personally believe that guns in and of themselves are scary, but the way people use them is. It certainly doesn’t mean that guns shouldn’t exist, or even that people shouldn’t have access to them, because they can be used for lots of good, constructive purposes.
On the contrary, it means that we should put in place certain safeguards, that people should be trained on how to use them safely, etc.—and the same is true of AI. Different places can and should take different approaches on this: nearly all guns are legal at home, but New Zealand decided to restrict access to many types of guns in 2019. I expect we’ll see varying approaches to regulating AI in the coming years, although it’s worth pointing out that owing to its digital nature AI will be far harder to regulate than guns.
In any case, the reflexive belief that “AI is scary and dangerous” is outmoded and unhelpful. It’s also totally unrealistic. The toothpaste is out of the tube and can’t be put back, especially now that we have powerful open models like DeepSeek. I think this fear is closely related to the previous one: that big tech companies have too much money and too much power, and that AI will both make them wealthier and more powerful. Also, that their centralized, unaccountable control of AI is scary.
I agree with the latter point, but the right response isn’t more stifling regulation. The right response isn’t to shut down innovation, it’s to open up competition, especially of the open variety (open source, open weights) to compete with the proprietary incumbents: a truly open Linux to “Open” AI/ChatGPT’s Microsoft Windows. It warms my heart to see this happening, and I believe that this ship, too, has sailed: closed AI is doomed to fall behind open AI for all the same reasons that openness always eventually wins in software.
AI is scary. It should be because it contains awesome potential. Our response should be, let’s harness that awesome potential for good. A world with lots of good AIs, and lots of good people and organizations using AI for good, won’t be a scary one, regardless of the actions of the few with ill intent.
You should travel to Ukraine next and ask around about Trump there