We love our computer people

Back when he was funnier, Bill Burr had a bit on Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he points out the absurdity of ugly broke fat people criticizing Great Men for succumbing to temptations they’ll never face.

For Arnold, it was freakish natural athleticism and charisma, and an extremely busted maid.

But imagine a different situation:

Imagine that your whole life, you’ve been recognizably different from other people. Certain categories of understanding come to you shockingly easy.

Other categories of understanding (people, emotions, aesthetics, humor) are elusive —but you’re obviously blindingly smart. Are you really too dumb for these problems? (Or are these problems — perhaps — too dumb for you?)

Anyway, fairly early on in life you realize that the types of thinking you are good at are worth an enormous amount of money.

There are all sorts of people who love you just the way you are, and they all have money — and they’ll give you more than you know how to spend just to phone in the kind of work you’re good at.

They’ll let you wear what you want, come in when you feel like it — they’ll even pay people just to absorb and manage your emotional volatility so that you’ll keep working for them, solving the kind of puzzles you love to solve.

But you’re not just smart, you’re also a man of extraordinary will and vision:

You don’t want the life of comfortable corporate tech gentry: you want to change the world. So you start deploying your brilliant, unique brain to enormously risky, world-changing projects.

All the stupid people tell you that you’re crazy, and give you their reasons why it can’t be done. But you work your ass off, you think in ways they can’t think, and you prove them all wrong — and make more money than they could earn in ten lifetimes.

Then you do it again, in a completely different domain. And again. And again.

Your world is increasingly bifurcated:

1. You can see things nobody else can see in the world of things and systems — even very bright and knowledgeable people. These things are worth a billion bazillion dollars.

2. You can’t see things that pretty much everybody else can see, mostly in the world of people and motives and emotions. These things mainly just make your girlfriend mad and your personal life frustrating and confusing. But a billion bazillion dollars buys a lot of latitude here.

It would be easy, under the circumstances, to conclude that the things you aren’t good at don’t matter — and maybe don’t even exist. What if all these tangled emotional and spiritual problems are actually just really complicated engineering problems for which the solution is Moar Compute?

(For such a person, AI is an irresistible eschaton: the prospect of autistic systems-thinking so powerful that it overpowers and consumes all these fiddly human domains. Maybe if we turn the whole planet into computronium we’ll be able to calculate a gorillion-variable vector sum that explains why I feel lonely and sad inside.)

But inevitably, your ambitions in the world of things and systems reach the scale where you’re forced to engage with the messy, vibey, human world of politics.

Many point out to you that you are missing some basic intuitions about how other people work — but you’ve “managed people” (squads of .999th percentile genius autists) to great success before. How different could that be from ruling a nation?

All of these people telling you it won’t work are verifiably dumber and poorer than you, and you’ve spent your whole life making them feel silly for doubting you. Why should this be any different? Where are you supposed to find humility in this situation?

Of course I’m talking about Elon in particular here, but it’s true in varying degrees of the whole class of people he represents.

They’re getting things wrong, in painfully obvious ways — like Arnold, they are banging the maid for reasons inscrutable to mortals — but they’re also up against a level of epistemic temptation I’ve never had to face.

I’ve never tried something that everybody else said was crazy, and made a billion dollars — let alone pulling it off half a dozen times. I think about how little patience I have when ankle-biters are being dumb and wrong in my replies — how patient would I be if my genius had been vindicated that thoroughly, concretely, and consistently over the course of my lifetime?

We love our computer people — but you can’t put them in charge.

I think much of what this class of people wants for the country is wrongheaded and destructive, for reasons outside the domain of their genius.

For the last century or so, society has done an excellent job developing and incentivizing this type of person. The low-hanging fruit of engineering problems has been picked, and now all the questions we have left are questions that will always escape this type of person: questions of rule, questions of beauty, meaning, belief, etc.

We live in the wake and twilight of their enormous success: the reason we face this set of problems is that their peculiar genius has solved so many others.

And while it looks like they lack the intellectual flexibility and humility to withdraw or defer to others, how could they be expected to? Are they supposed to be preternaturally wise and humble too? On how many domains are we entitled to demand superhuman performance?

There’s probably no convincing them of what needs to be done — they’ll have to be proven wrong and dislodged, at significant cost. But there’s an element of tragic inevitability to it. Hard to see how it could be otherwise.

Elon’s “America Party” silliness, alongside the Trump Administration’s disappointing decision to close the book on Epstein and Diddy, is a reminder that we can’t wait around for the Big Boys to figure everything out. They don’t have the answers.

There isn’t going to be a Based Billionaire — the qualities that made them billionaires are exactly the qualities that make them deaf to this moment’s demands. If there is a solution to our predicament, we’re going to have to build it ourselves.

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EXIT News

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