Tag Archives: Elon Musk

Since He Obviously Can’t, Someone Has to Get a Grip on Elon Musk

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Bill Gates says Elon Musk was 'super mean to me' after Tesla stock feud | Fox Business

For what it’s worth, I would never count as a fan boy of Elon Musk. Even before this past year of reckless behavior — business and social media-wise — the guy was too much of a preening gadfly for my tastes. That said there is no question — none — that in terms of what he has created he is one of the most consequential characters of our era, and in a way that is unequivocally beneficial to human progress.

But good god man, get some help.

Not that he’s ever out of the news, (like The Great Orange Carbunkle Musk needs hourly affirmation that he still is everything he thinks he is), but with the new book from venerable biographer Walter Isaacson the chattering classes are again talking Elon with a vengeance. In particular, long time tech reporter-turned-podcaster, Kara Swisher, who has known Musk for several decades, interviewed him often and now with her typical bulldozer-like bluntness is declaring Musk a deplorable train wreck of a human being, and more critically, one the government urgently needs to get a grip on.

The first news out of the Isaacson book was that Musk ‘”turned off” his Starlink low-orbit internet satellite network over Crimea out of concern that Ukraine might use it to coordinate missile attacks on Russian facilities … and thereby set off… WWIII. That news was semi-voided when Isaacson corrected himself, saying he misunderstood a “nuance” of the story, namely that Musk simply didn’t turn it on. (The technical term for turning the system on and off is called “geo-fencing”, which acts kind of like those invisible dog barriers people dig around their yards.)

Whether he turned it off or didn’t turn it on, the very serious point is that this is one un-elected, demonstrably erratic billionaire with an endless number of financial conflicts of interest with outright American enemies (Russia) and serious rivals (China) deciding — on his own — how to fight naked aggression.

That ain’t right folks, and the story could get far more calamitous if China, where Musk’s Tesla car operation has both an enormous facility and consumer market, decides to invade Taiwan.

Swisher and her podcast partner, Scott Galloway, freely concede Musk’s entrepreneurial genius. Unlike say, the aforementioned Orange Carbunkle, who has never created anything of universal social value — thinking Trump University, Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump ties or Trump mugshot t-shirts here — the electric car revolution, SpaceX and Starlink — are bona fide Henry Ford-level leaps forward in substantive human endeavors.

Unfortunately, with virulent anti-Semite Henry Ford in mind, Swisher and Galloway and others make the complaint about Isaacson’s book, (which I have not read), that while genius-level entrepreneurial functioning is often wrapped up in mercurial personalities, that is no reason to excuse the truly ugly, shameless descent Musk has taken in MAGA-like posturing.

If you missed his recent insinuation that the Anti-Defamation League was responsible for the shocking decline in X/Twitter’s stock valuation, it was rancid and straight from every crackpot anti-semitic fever swamp you can think of.

Those Jews, y’know, always jacking with the honest, hard-workin’ Aryans.

The action item to this rant is that clearly Congress has to get full control of Musk vis a vis his numerous defense contracts. Serious professionals with serious oversight need to make military decisions, not a guy who has no qualms about acting out like a raging 15 year-old at the slightest imagined provocation.

The other point Swisher and Galloway got in to on the same recent podcast was the overall tenor of Isaacson’s book — which Swisher had read and panned with a “meh.” Their point being that Isaacson, a genial, avuncular character with an impressive pedigree in professional journalism, never dares make a call — the call — on Musk.

To which Galloway correctly sniffs, “It all feels like upscale access journalism.” Adding that if Isaacson — who wrote the most prominent biography of Apple’s Steve Jobs, (a genius who was often an asshole but never a public racist) — did drop the hammer on Musk, his chances of access to his next high-profile subject would evaporate in an instant.

He spent months with Musk and Musk’s friends, family and foes and still, Swisher complains, the book left her — a very tough interviewer with a long history with Musk — demanding to know, “Ok, Walter, what do YOU actually think of this guy. Your opinion has value. What is it?”

Isaacson BTW is booked as a guest on an upcoming Swisher podcast.

Resistance to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Futile. Because It Delivers Comfort, Status and Cash.

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On the same day that Elon Musk, an allegedly busy, future-oriented industrial magnate, found time to weigh in in support of a racist cartoonist, I came across a new piece by one of my favorite bona fide Smart People.

In The New York Times, columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein writes, “In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.

” ‘I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism’, Chiang told me. ‘And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two’. …

“Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

“One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation.”

“Regulation” of course is a hotter-than-usual topic because of the MAGA-hyped train wreck in Ohio. (By the way, is anyone else laughing at old school, Reagan-loving de-regulators like Joe Scarborough now fulminating about too much de-regulation?)

But Klein — and sci-fi writer Chiang’s — point about capitalism, i.e. profit-making and shareholder value being the true driving force behind the inevitable and (very) fast approaching world of Artificial Intelligence can’t be over-stated. His piece gets into the recent bungles by Microsoft and Google introducing their competing larval-stage AI-driven search/chatbot features.

You may have followed the simultaneously comical and eery conversation between a human reporter and Microsoft’s HAL-9000-style creation “Bing” in which … well, here’s how Klein describes it: “Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince [reporter Kevin] Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.”

“No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.“

Google and Microsoft will correct their embarrassing spring training mistakes and soldier on, injecting AI into every aspect of privacy-invading/personal data mining and monetizing any sci fi writer could ever imagine. Reaping, as they mature, even vaster fortunes with which to buy off regulatory legislation and invest in the next AI levels up. And who can argue it will play out otherwise? At this point in our evolution capitalism is the vastly predominant engine of human endeavour.

The truly unsettling concept within Klein and Chiang’s critic (one shared by others too numerous to mention) is that resistance to unimpeded AI is for all intents and purposes futile. Why? Because capitalism’s foundational design is to give us what we want, or at least — with the benefit of knowing everything about us on a deep individual level — give us what we believe we want.

Whatever intrusions or controls AI might inflict on us will be assuaged by some new mre sophisticated/cooler/status-lending level of AI-derived convenience, comfort, entertainment … or cost savings. It will be irresistible, in other words.

It’d be different if AI were presented to us as some kind of Bond villain. Were that the case we’d all press the delete key and rally ’round anyone who could nuke the psychopath’s lair. But what is far … far … more likely to happen given the sophistication of advertising and marketing on a user base capitalist systems know at a granular level, is that AI will make so many things so much easier. “Hey! Look! I just got a notification for a condo rental in Cabo! That’s wild. I was just telling to my sister how much I wanted to go there!”

I haven’t taken a survey but I have to think we’re down into single digits in terms of people who are going to rally against convenience … and cash in pocket.

A Handful of Things I Could Not Care Less About

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I don’t have to make a list of even a fraction of the truly, deeply serious things going on in the world. Everyone’s aware of Russia terrorizing Ukraine, the American West drying up, sequoias on fire, Trumpist grifters and idiots running for office, the daily mass shootings and on and on. All of it, really bad stuff.

But lately I’ve been amazed, or I should say re-amazed at stories we are all just as aware of … that I could not care less about … but still clog our common bandwidth. So as a therapeutic exercise, here’s a handful that bewilder/annoy me most.

1:  Elon Musk v. Twitter: I accept that 2022’s professional media and pundit class has an umbilical attachment to Twitter. The platform’s offal doesn’t so much drip into their veins as it gushes in a way that makes everything require immediate attention and a “take” to sustain their relevancy. So when you add the world’s richest man, (who is an attention addict) and Twitter itself, god help the rest of us who couldn’t give a flying [bleep.]. Will he or won’t he … buy Twitter? Be sued by Twitter? Tweet again this morning? Not only don’t I care, I don’t need to know … which is why I don’t care. Nothing about it matters to me or 99% of the people I know. But Musk is rich, and because he’s rich he’s famous … and it includes Twitter right there in the headline. So everyone who thinks they’re someone has to talk about it. 

2:  Any and all, including the latest, super-hero movie:  Ok, great, they put butts back in theater seats. So, being, you know, a business, Hollywood can’t snort enough of comic book heroes and villains. And it’s true, the paychecks for them for otherwise serious actors covers a lot of arty work they might want to do later. But Martin Scorsese (another old guy, like me) is dead-on right. These Marvel etc. movies are basically numbingly formulaic theme park rides designed as much to avoid pissing off Chinese censors as entertaining movie fans. That said, I red-lined the whole  AvengerThorWakandaDr.StrangeSpidey universe years ago. Mainly because, in case you haven’t noticed, they’re all the same damn movie. So yeah ok, I’m a crank. But I did finally see the new “Top Gun” sequel … and sat looking around the theater wondering if everyone else noticed it was basically another re-fitting of the latest generation “Star Wars” movies? Only with 50 wide-screen Tom Cruise Superstar close-ups. Don’t care! Won’t be back! The Seven Story Archetypes have been reduced to two … or maybe one.

3:  Foodie “journalism.” I like to eat. Believe me. You don’t get a body like this nibbling raw roots. But I don’t believe I’ve ever read an entire food “review”, if that’s what they’re called. I don’t doubt the talent of the myriad “celebrity chefs” regularly populating food-specific websites, so-called “lifestyle” publications and piling up atop each other on cable TV like pastrami on Katz Deli rye. But once you’ve worked inside the sausage factory of modern media and understand how absolutely essential restaurant advertising is to the aforementioned “journalism” you quickly learn to dismiss the hyperventilated excitement over so-and-so’s latest “award-winning” concept or the succulence of their Matsusaka beef. “Food journalism” is – to me, a crank, I think I mentioned that – a pervasive form of fan boy/girl PR flackery no different than the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that sad collection of cat ladies and ponces who once staged the Golden Globes … solely for the checks they got from agents and TV networks.

4:  The personal pro-noun thing.  Because I want to be careful about this, I’m saying up front that anybody and everybody has the right to be called or “identify” as anything they want. I certainly don’t care. “He”, “she”, “it”, “non-binary humanoid #7”, whatever works for you. Go for it. Personally, I’m trying to get friends and family accustomed to “Hey, Serpent King” when asking me to pass the salt and pepper. My interest here is that this, which is attached to the “trans” rights movement, has become, “a thing”, as the kids say. In my liberal news bubble, sites like The Daily Beast, Salon, Jezebel crank out a story or three a day with some kind of trans or identifying angle. And it strikes me, a relic of the civil rights era, where blacks composed fully 13% of the population, as remarkable given that the trans community represents something between 1% and 5%. (Although, perhaps as proff of it’s “thing-ness”  the number of adolescents identifying as “non-binary” has doubled in recent years.) In our hyper-personalized social media world, where everyone can curate an arresting, distinctive image for themselves, being anything other than merely “he” or “she” can seem irresistibly appealing. Again, I see no harm. But I just can’t help but wonder if come 2040 there won’t be a lot of looking back and seeing this pronoun revolution as “a ‘20s thing.”

5: The crypto frenzy. Not being particularly astute with money and investing, (I was the guy snorting when Google debuted at something like $100 a share), it’s not surprising I don’t get Bitcoin, Dogecoin and all the other Scamcoins currently out on the market. Not only does the whole enterprise walk and talk like a Ponzi scheme where “profits” depend on the chumps dragged in after the big boys, but I don’t understand what problem the whole concept is trying to solve. Regulated and insured banking?  

Dividend-possible investing? But never mind me, when the likes of (Nobel Prize winning economist) Paul Krugman regularly rail against the underlying concept and the abundant frauds, and bona fide smart guys like Ezra Klein flat out admit, “I don’t get it”, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s all just another variation on tulips and collateralized debt obligations. The only real fascination I have is the psychology of crypto’s true believers. FWIW here is a link to a very educational conversation between Klein and crypto expert Dan Olson. And here’s a recent column by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic. And a sample from Krugman.

Lying in political ads is legal. Really.

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Guest column by Noel Holston

Athens, Georgia — Throughout the day, and especially around evening news time, Atlanta’s commercial television stations are bombarding viewers in the greater metro area with paid political advertising. The primaries for Georgia governor, U.S. Senate and other races are just three weeks away.

One spot in particular jumps out. Former President Donald Trump, in a voice-over, endorses David Perdue for Georgia governor over incumbent Brian Kemp. Trump derides Kemp for refusing to find him the votes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 and for failing to exercise his supposed authority to simply throw out the ballots.

This is, of course, a bald-faced lie — indeed, part of the “Big Lie” that is even now being investigated by a U.S. House select committee.

Mainstream media ads also amplify The Big Lie.

Even as a grand jury convenes in Atlanta to determine whether Trump criminally interfered in the election when he phoned Kemp and pressured him to alter election results.

Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, both Republicans who themselves had voted for Trump, simply declined to exercise powers that didn’t have. They refused to ignore recounts and facts. They refused to cheat.

But still the ad runs and runs, with Trump kvetching about what was “stolen” from him and his supporters.

How can this be? How can these TV stations keep showing attack ads that make claims that their own news anchors, both local guys and their respective network counterparts, routinely mention only with the modifiers “false” or “baseless”? Is there no “truth in advertising” requirement?

Short answer: No.

At least not where political advertising is concerned.

I emailed my concern about this a couple of days ago to WXIA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Atlanta that I most often watch for news. What can I say? I have a crush on Andrea Mitchell.

A WXIA representative got back to me this afternoon. Here’s the reply. I’m guessing you did not know this:

“The Federal Communications Commission’s political broadcast rules actually prohibit television stations from refusing or altering political advertising from any legally qualified candidate,” WXIA’s spokesperson said.

“More specifically, the FCC says that a person who has publicly announced his or her intention to run for nomination or office, is qualified to run under the appropriate federal, state or local laws to run and has met all of the other necessary qualifications to run for and hold the office they are seeking, is permitted to purchase political advertising time within 45 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general or special election in which that person is a candidate.

“Additionally, television stations cannot censor or alter the content of political ads being run in any way. The ads must be run in their original form — even if their content differs from the ordinary program content that the station would regularly air.

“A station is also prohibited from rejecting a political ad from a candidate, despite its content. As a result, broadcast stations are not responsible for the content of those particular political ads, even if the content may be demonstrably false or defamatory in nature.” (bold italics mine)

So, even if Trump accused Brian Kemp of sheep shagging or Kemp said Trump and Perdue are having an affair, the Atlanta stations would be obligated to televise their ads uncut. And so, in similar situations, would all other federally licensed commercial TV stations in other parts of the country, including yours.

And we worry what Elon Musk is going to do with Twitter.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.