I find myself in the odd position of disagreeing rather strongly with a recent post by Josh Marshall. Not about any major conclusion, and certainly not about his political analyses (you don't tug on Superman's cape), but we've spent more than a decade here at the blog criticizing tech messiahs in general, and Elon Musk in particular, so I feel fairly comfortable raising some points about these three paragraphs, specifically about how the Tech right is attacking biomedical research for reasons that go far beyond a fixation with artificial intelligence.
First, you have Elon Musk, the belief that AI can and will essentially replace research scientists and the related belief that AI-backed tech has essentially achieved a kind of escape velocity from government-supported science. So AI will soon replace research scientists. I, Elon (or tech generally) own the AI. So there’s no big harm shutting down this research apparatus. And since I own the AI, not only will we cure all the diseases but I’ll own all the cures! What’s not to like? This may seem like hyperbole but it is at most only a hyped up version of what these people think. This informs A LOT of the thinking behind the cuts. The aim of knocking the eggheads off their perch is easy to understand. If there’s also no downside (in terms of lost cures, lost leads in the sciences) why not?
Related to this is something I’ve picked up in discussions with a friend who is a very close and shrewd observer of the tech world. That’s the Silicon Valley class war between the folks with tens or hundreds of millions or more and the working stiffs on salaries of $400,000 or $500,000 a year. That tech “working class” salary point may sound absurd. But it really captures a big part of this. The dynamic is intensified by the ossification of tech. It used to be that the half-a-million-a-year folks might be one great start-up move away from hitting super wealth themselves. That’s not happening anymore. Meanwhile, the Elons and sub-Elons have super wealth and it’s annoying to have to listen to the gripes, the borderline-woke thinking and everything else, from the guys who fuel your wealth. A Thorstein Veblen type could explain it better than I can, but, for present purposes, we’ll settle for this thumbnail version.
Needless to say, government scientists don’t make half a million a year and neither do all but maybe a tiny elite of science grant superstars. But when the tech oligarchs in Elon’s world see these folks with their PhDs and their peer reviews and their long-ass study timelines, they see the uppity salaried techs who run their companies. And they act accordingly.
Rather than being surprising and unexpected, the tech right’s hostility toward biomedical research is a logical consequence of foundational beliefs that have, in some cases, been around for more than 20 years.
The
point about the class struggles of the Valley is true but not
particularly relevant here. More importantly, I'd argue AI plays a secondary role here. It's true that if you asked Musk et al. today why they are cracking down, their answers would almost certainly include artificial intelligence—because in 2025, any question you ask these people will be answered by some combination of LLMs and humanoid robots (here and here for more details on the latter)—but while AI has always been a favorite subject for techno-optimists, it really only became top of mind after the implosions of the previous “next big things,” the metaverse and Web3. The antipathy toward this kind of research goes back way further than that.
Arguably, the defining trait of this crowd is an extraordinary—often straying into delusional—faith in their own ability and rightness. One consequence of this is a general disdain for expertise. They know more about medicine than doctors, more about banking than bankers, more about manufacturing than industrialists,* more about mechanical engineering than actual engineers. We saw an early indication of this with the rise of biohacking and various flaky life-extension theories—the latter also reflecting the reluctance of these men, who saw themselves as all-powerful, to submit to death at some point.
Inevitably, this combination of absolute faith in their own opinions, combined with the tendency to dismiss those of people who knew what they were talking about, led to all manner of flaky ideas and junk science getting a foothold. This came to a head during the pandemic, when Silicon Valley effectively became ground zero for COVID denial and quack cures.
It has been noted elsewhere that COVID was when numerous tech-world figures either became radicalized to the far right or simply decided it was safe to come out with their extreme opinions.
Another related core belief among this group is the idea that these successful tech visionaries are omnicompetent. The term first showed up on our radar when Alon Levy used it to describe Elon Musk, but there are lots of examples to pick from. Perhaps my favorite is when Zuckerberg promised to cure all disease in his child’s lifetime by pledging to match around 1% of the NIH budget.
For a long time, it was part of the popular mythology that whenever these titans decided to disrupt a new field, they would inevitably crush the old, slow-moving competition. If you dug into any of the famous examples, you would find that either the success was greatly exaggerated and/or based on the work of those same experts Silicon Valley so disdains. Possibly the best example is SpaceX, where the accomplishments have been somewhat overstated, and—more to the point—were produced by TRW rocket scientists basically continuing the research they'd been doing for their previous employer.
The idea that an Elon Musk or a Marc Andreessen could step in with no relevant experience and effortlessly fix all of our problems has been around for years, and no matter how many times they fail, their confidence—and that of their followers—is unperturbed. As recently as this year, a writer as intelligent as Noah Smith continued to depict Elon Musk as super-competent, though those arguments have been trailing off as of late.
Musk, in particular, is now entirely in the thrall of the worst of the far right, more likely than not to agree with a Laura Loomer. It's not surprising to see him going after traditional targets like stem-cell researchers, but the idea that the messiahs of Silicon Valley could burn all this down and easily replace it with something far better is a notion we have seen countless times from all of these people and it long preceded the current hype bubble around artificial intelligence.
* "I Think I Know More About Manufacturing Than Anyone Currently Alive On Earth." ElonMusk
This does feel more like a difference in degree and not kind with Josh Marshall. That said, the idea that tech solutions can be pasted everywhere was always a bit nuts and it is strange how we lionize people who took the right risks at the right time, as if they were the causal factor. It's like holding up Jimmy the gambling addict who won big at roulette up as a paragon of business sense.
ReplyDeleteThis omnicompetence thing was prevalent among physicists who saw just about everything scientific as applied physics and claimed that all one had to do was unleash a physics PhD to finally get the field moving. That flowed into computer science rather naturally. I remember discussions about biology and genetics back in the 1970s where CS types were convinced that it was all computing, all about information. It was religious. You couldn't argue with them. I suppose this shows up in the we're-in-a-simulation people who ignore the obvious deduction that there is a non-simulated world somewhere or you're stuck with an infinite stack of simulations.
ReplyDeleteYou and Marshall aren't all that far apart. Those $500K a year CS people working in Silicon Valley know a lot more about computers than the people they work for. They just aren't in the Silicon Valley venture capital circle. They go to the wrong parties. For those who go to the right parties, they're just the experts, peons, so it's easy to ignore them.
But the CS guys got it themselves from pure math people. A friend in grad school who was stat/CS told me about a professor who sign up for a project confident that he could learn everything he needed to know about CS in a week or two.
DeleteHe reached the begging for help stage well before the end of week two.
Marshall's point about classes was valid but I doubt it was a big factor in the rise of the techno-right. I suspect it does, however, help explain why tech visionaries say such stupid things about actual tech.
DeleteBoth of these are from me -- MP
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