Musk and Trump and their AI master race
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Eugenics
14 min read
The article directly references Musk's obsession with genetics and reproducing himself, and draws parallels to Trump's rhetoric about 'bad genes.' Understanding the history of eugenics - its scientific origins, political applications, and role in 20th century atrocities - provides crucial context for recognizing these patterns.
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OpenAI
15 min read
The article discusses Musk's founding role in OpenAI, his departure, and the organization's shift from open research to profit-driven development. The full history of OpenAI's founding principles, nonprofit-to-capped-profit transition, and key figures involved illuminates the ideological battles over AI development.
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Lebensborn
12 min read
The article's description of Musk housing women in compounds to produce children with his genetics, combined with references to genetic obsession, echoes this Nazi program designed to increase the 'racially pure' population. This historical context makes the author's implicit comparison explicit and educational.
I was standing at the sink after dinner last night scraping a plate when I started thinking about the new iteration of the word, “scrape.” You see it used all the time to describe how Artificial Intelligence (AI) trains itself by “scraping” information that it collects everywhere it can. Those AI super-data-farms sitting outside cities in the Midwest and South? That’s what they’re doing – scraping data found in news reports, websites and social media posts, magazines, medical and technical journals, even books that are in print and copyrighted by authors. The word “data” in the above sentence means “words.”
I have written tens of millions of words in the nearly 60 years I have been a writer. I use words to form sentences, and I use sentences to form paragraphs, and I use paragraphs to convey information and ideas and descriptions, and in the novels I have written, stories about people’s lives I have made up. It’s what writers do. They live their lives and in doing so, have experiences, see things, meet people, read books and magazines and newspapers, watch the news, go to movies, go places they’ve never been before, return to places they have visited and see and experience those places anew – that’s a woefully incomplete list, but you get my drift – and they sit down and write about all of it.
When AI “scrapes,” it is collecting the words of writers who have written about their experiences and the facts they have found, and in some cases, their feelings and opinions about those facts. AI does not experience the world and write about it. AI collects writing about the world. To the extent that AI rearranges those words, it is writing about writing. If you ask questions of an AI platform, the answers it gives you are the words of writers who have had experiences or gathered facts and written them down. Almost every answer you receive from an AI platform has been stolen from someone who went out and lived a life and wrote down words to describe how they lived it and what they learned.
AI treats numbers differently. Numbers express quantifiable information. AI is able to analyze numbers by “reading” the numbers over and over and looking at the results of manipulating them differently until it is able to come up with an answer presented that amounts to analysis. AI
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