No Mercy / No Malice: Techno-Narcissism

As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/techno-narcissism/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Northwest Registered Agent. Your business identity is everything that makes your business legitimate and professional. With Northwest Registered Agent, you don't just form a business, you start a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. That includes registered agent service, a business address, operating agreement, domain, website, professional email, phone number, and built-in privacy. In other words, your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/aplewatchseries12.

• 1:19Scott Galloway?

  I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. The hype around AI is a shouting match between techno-solutionists and techno-catastrophists. In fact, both are flavors of the same bullshit techno-narcissism. Techno-narcissism, as read by George Hahn.

• 1:50George Hahn?

  I'm at Founder's Forum in the Cotswolds, which they assure me is somewhere outside of London. There are a lot of Teslas and recycled mason jars as "we're making the world a better place." As at any gathering of the tech elite in 2023, the content could best be described as "AI and the Seven Dwarfs." The youth envisioned toggles between inspiring moments and bouts of techno-narcissism. It's understandable. If you tell a 30-something male he is Jesus Christ, he's inclined to believe you.

• 2:26George Hahn?

  The tech innovator class has an Achilles tendon that runs from their heels to their necks. They believe their press. Making a dent in the universe is so aughts. Today, membership in the Soho House of Tech requires you to birth the leverage point that will alter the universe. Jack Dorsey brought low-cost credit card transactions to millions of small vendors, but he's still not our personal Jesus, so he renamed his company Block and pushed into crypto because Bitcoin would bring world peace.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  It may sound a little bit ridiculous, but like you fix that foundational level and everything above it improves. My hope is definitely peace.

• 3:10George Hahn?

  Side note: if anybody knows Jack's brand of edibles, WhatsApp me. Elon Musk made a great electric car, then a better rocket, and recently appointed himself Noah to shepherd humanity to an interplanetary future. When techno-narcissism meets technology that is genuinely disruptive versus crypto or a headset, the hype cycle makes the jump to light speed. Late last year, OpenAI's ChatGPT reached 1 million users in five days. Six months later, Congress asked its CEO if his product was going to destroy humanity.

• 3:52George Hahn?

  In contrast, it took Facebook 10 months to get to a million users, and it was 14 years before the CEO was hauled before Congress for damaging humanity. The claims are extreme, positive and negative. Solutionists pen think pieces on "why AI will save the world," while catastrophists warn us of "the risks of extinction."

• 4:19George Hahn?

  These are two covers of the same song: techno-narcissism. It's exhausting. But AI is a huge breakthrough, and the stakes are genuinely high. It's notable today that many of the outspoken prophets of AI doom are the same people who birthed AI.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  My worst fears are that we cause significant— we, the field, the technology, the industry—cause significant harm to the world. If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.

• 4:49George Hahn?

  Specifically taking up all the oxygen in the AI conversation with dystopian visions of sentient AI eliminating humanity isn't helpful. It only serves the interests of the developers of non-sentient AI in several ways. At the simplest level, it gets attention. If you are a semi-famous computer engineer who aspires to be more famous, nothing beats telling every reporter in earshot, quote, "I've invented something that could destroy the world," unquote. Partisans complain about the media's left- or right-bias, but the real bias is towards spectacle. If it bleeds, it leads, and nothing bleeds like the end of the world with a tortured

• 5:32George Hahn?

  genius at the center of the plot. AI fear-mongering is also a business strategy for the incumbents, who'd like the government to suppress nascent competition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress, "We need an entire new federal agency to scrutinize AI models," and said he'd be happy to help them define what kinds of companies and products should get licenses, i.e., compete with OpenAI. "Licensing regimes are the death of competition in most places they operate," says antitrust scholar and former White House senior advisor Tim Wu. Total gangster.

• 6:16George Hahn?

  Similar to cheap capital and regulatory capture, catastrophism is an attempt to commit infanticide on emerging competition.

• 6:26George Hahn?

  Granted, we should not ignore the dangers of AI, but the real risks are the existing incentives and amorality in tech and our ongoing inability to regulate it. The techno catastrophists want to create a narrative that the shit coming down the pike is not the result of their actions, but the inevitable cost of progress. Just as the devil's trick was convincing us he didn't exist, the technologist's sleight of hand is to absolve himself of guilt for the damage the next generation of tech leaders will levy on society.

• 7:01George Hahn?

  This has been social media's go-to for years, obfuscating their complicity in teen depression or misinformation behind a facade of technical complexity. It's effective. Dr. Frankenstein, having lost control of Frank, should have warned, quote, "I'm worried Frank is unstable and unstoppable." No, you're hurting me! So when his monster began tossing children into lakes, he could shrug his shoulders and claim, "I told you so." To be clear, the monster is in fact a non-domesticated animal. It's unpredictable. The techno-solutionists promising the end of poverty and more avocado toast if we would just get out of their way are not to be trusted either.

• 7:45George Hahn?

  AI sentience is a stretch, but there are plausible paths to horrific outcomes. Even dumb computer viruses have caused billions of dollars in damage. My first thought after witnessing all the hate manifest around a light beer was that we'll likely see AI-generated deepfakes of woke commercials produced by brands for other brands to inspire boycotts by extremists. As Sacha Baron Cohen said, quote, "Democracy is dependent on shared truths, and autocracy on shared lies."

• 8:22George Hahn?

  AI, like the products of many of our big tech firms, could widen and illuminate the path to autocracy. On a more pedestrian level, we're going to witness a tsunami of increasingly sophisticated scams. The first AI-driven externality of tectonic proportions will be the disinformation apocalypse leading up to the 2024 presidential election and in other NATO country elections as the war in Ukraine continues. Vladimir Putin's grip strength is weakening. His historic miscalculation in Ukraine has left him just one get-out-of-jail-free card: Trump's reelection. The former president has made it clear

• 9:06George Hahn?

  he would force Ukraine to bend the knee to Putin if he gets back in the White House.

• 9:11Speaker 05

  Do you want Ukraine to win this war?

• 9:13Speaker 06

  I don't think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it.

• 9:21George Hahn?

  Putin has generative AI at his disposal. Expect his fancy-bear operation to compile lists of every pro-Biden voice on the internet and undermine their credibility with smears and whisper campaigns. Also, a barrage of deepfake videos of Biden falling down, mumbling, and generally looking like someone who's, wait for it, going to be 86 the final year of his term. Side note: President Biden will go down as one of the great presidents, and it's ridiculous he's running again. Yes, I'm ageist. So is biology. But I digress. Anyway, expect information-space chaos. There's more.

• 10:05George Hahn?

  AI has shortcomings and limitations that are causing human harm and economic costs already. Both the catastrophists and the solutionists want you to focus on sentient killer robots because the actual AI in your phone and at your bank has shortcomings they'd rather not be blamed for.

• 10:26George Hahn?

  AI systems are already responsible for a Keystone Cops record of blunders. Starting with the cops themselves, the deployment of AI to direct policing and incarceration has been shown to perpetuate and deepen racial and economic inequities. Other examples seem lighthearted and then insidious. For example, a commercially available resume screening AI places the greatest weight on two candidate characteristics: the name Jared and whether they played high school lacrosse. These systems are nearly impenetrable. It required an audit to suss out the model's obsession with Jared.

• 11:10George Hahn?

  Who knows what names or hobbies the AI was putting into the no pile? Amazon scientists spent years trying to develop a custom AI resume screener but abandoned it when they couldn't engineer out the system's inherent bias toward male applicants, an artifact of the male-dominated dataset the system had been trained on: Amazon's own employee base.

• 11:36George Hahn?

  AI-driving directions plot courses into lakes, and systems for assessing skin cancer risk return false positives when there's a ruler in the photo.

• 11:48George Hahn?

  Generative AI systems, like ChatGPT or Midjourney, have problems too. Ask an image-generating AI for a picture of an architect, and you'll almost certainly get a white man. Ask for social worker, and the systems are likely to produce a woman of color. Plus, they make stuff up. Two lawyers recently had to go before a federal judge and apologize for submitting a brief with fake citations they'd unwittingly included after asking ChatGPT to find cases. It's easy to dismiss such an error as a lazy or foolish mistake, and it was, but we are all sometimes lazy and/or foolish.

• 12:31George Hahn?

  And technology is supposed to improve our quality of life versus nudge us into professional suicide. Over the long term, productivity enhancements create jobs. In 1760, when Richard Arkwright invented cotton spinning machinery, there were 2,700 weavers in England and another 5,200 using spinning wheels. 7,900 total. 27 years later, 320,000 total workers had jobs in the industry, a 4,400% increase. However, the path to job creation is job destruction,

• 13:15George Hahn?

  sometimes societally disruptive job destruction. Those 2,700 hand weavers found themselves out of work and possessing an expired skill set. A world of automated trucks and warehouses is a better world, except for truck drivers and warehouse workers.

• 13:35George Hahn?

  Automation has already eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs, and it's projected to get rid of hundreds of millions of other jobs by the end of the decade. If we don't want to add fuel to the fire of demagoguery and deaths of despair, we need to create safety nets and opportunities for the people whose jobs are displaced by AI.

• 13:57George Hahn?

  The previous sentence seems obvious, and yet...

• 14:01George Hahn?

  My greatest fear about AI, however, is that it is social media 2.0, meaning it accelerates our echo chamber partisanship and further segregates us from one another.

• 14:14George Hahn?

  AI life coaches, friends, and girlfriends are all in the works. Disclosure? We're working on an AI prof G, which means it will likely start raining frogs soon.

• 14:27George Hahn?

  The humanization of technology walks hand in hand with the dehumanization of humanity. Less talking, less touching, less mating. Then affixed to our faces a one-pound hunk of glass, steel, and semiconductor chips, and you have crossed the chasm to a devolution in the species. Maybe this is supposed to happen because we're getting too powerful and other species are punching back. Shit, I don't know.

• 14:59George Hahn?

  In sum, AI is here and generating real value and promise. It's imperfect and hard to get right. We don't know how to get AI systems to do exactly what we want them to do, and in many cases, we don't understand how they do what they're doing. Bad actors are ready, willing, and able to leverage AI to speedball their criminal conduct, and many projects with the best intentions will backfire. AI, similar to other innovations, will have a dark side. What's true of kids is true of tech. Bigger kids, bigger problems. And this kid, at two years old, is seven feet tall.

• 15:41George Hahn?

  The good news, I believe, is that we can do this. We haven't had a nuclear detonation against a human target in 80 years, not because the fear of nuclear holocaust created a moral panic, but because we did the work. World leaders reached across geographic and societal divides to shape agreements that diffused tensions and risks when nukes and bioweapons became feasible, in no small part thanks to huge public pressure organized and pushed forward by activists. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that de-risked US-Russian conflict throughout the

• 16:20George Hahn?

  90s wasn't just an agreement, but an investment that cost half a billion dollars per year. All but four of the world's nations have signed the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Blinding laser weapons, though devastatingly effective, are banned, so are mustard gas, bacteriological weapons, and cluster bombs. Our species' superpower, cooperation, isn't focused solely on weapons. In the 1970s, the world spent $300 million, 1.1 billion dollars today, to successfully

• 16:59George Hahn?

  eradicate smallpox, which killed millions over thousands of years. Across domains, we come together to solve hard problems when we have the requisite vision and will.

• 17:14George Hahn?

  Technology changes our lives, but typically not in the ways we anticipate. The future isn't going to look like Terminator or The Jetsons. Real outcomes are never the extremes of the futurists. They are messy, multifaceted, and by the time they work their way through the digestive tract of society, more boring than anticipated. And our efforts to get the best from technology and reduce its harms are not clean or simple. We aren't going to wish a regulatory body into existence, nor should we trust seemingly earnest tech leaders to get this one right. I believe that the threat of AI does not come from the AI itself,

• 17:56George Hahn?

  but that amoral tech executives and befuddled elected leaders are unable to create incentives and deterrence that further the well-being of society. We don't need an AI pause. We need better business models. And more perp walks. Life is so rich.

• 18:32Speaker 07

  We just moved into our new house and I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about Blinds.com.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Customers who shop at Blinds.com experience excellent customer service, from consultation to installation. Side effects include increased privacy and better sleep. Talk to your partner today and see if Blinds.com is right for you. Visit Blinds.com to order your free samples.

• 19:02Speaker 08

  When you shop pickup at Kroger, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries selected just for you. Our associates are committed to getting every detail right, carefully handpicking your items, checking for quality and freshness, and packing your order with care. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.