I think it’s fair to say, we fucked up, somewhere.

Arguments rage as to where exactly we’ve gone wrong, as a species. Some people blame Reaganomics, some people think that the activation of the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 split us off into a new, much stupider timeline, and at least one deranged children’s author would have you believe that everything is going to hell because some people piss in the wrong toilets.

Whatever the reasons, I don’t think you’d get much pushback if you blamed computers. Things might have been going wrong, but even in a world where nobody can agree on anything anymore, the closest you’ll get to a consensus is that whatever has led us here, computers have made it worse.

Maybe not even the computers themselves. Tech companies have made things worse, if we’re honest, due in large part to the fact that they’re run by a very specific demographic - one that I’m going to call “stupid assholes that have somehow ended up in charge.”

 Some of this is down to parents and teachers. Starting in the 1980s, everyone began telling kids that computers were going to be important, and this idea metastasized into the belief that being good with computers made a person smart.

 This isn't true. Computer programming is comparable to language (they're literally called programming languages) or, more poetically, I’m told that programming is like music. This is significant, because languages and music are two areas that have been shown to have no direct correlation with I.Q. scores.

 Some people are just naturally good at music, or picking up a language. Those people might also be dumb as a fucking hammer in any practical scenario. And some people are good at programming, which they were told made them extremely smart, based on no real evidence at all.

 This problem gets a lot worse when you factor in what's sometimes called Engineer's Disease - the tendency to assume that if you're proficient with one difficult, complex subject, you must be automatically good at everything else. Which  isn't true. If you don't understand why, wait until your car breaks down and then take it to an ophthalmologist.

 Nobody ever seems to have explained this stuff to our current crop of stupid, rich assholes. Consider the three most prominent tech billionaires of the modern era - Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

 Between the three of them, their most successful ideas can be boiled down to "What if rating the fuckability of girls, but as a website?", "what if shopping, but internet?" and "if I give this electric car company enough money they might let me say I'm their Fuhrer. I mean 'founder'."

 (He means Fuhrer.)

 None of these are good or original ideas, but these men grew up in an era when knowing about computers meant everyone thought you were smart, so they were told that they were special genius boys, and then their extremely generic ideas became the ones that took off, and now they have more money than most countries so clearly they really WERE smart and special all along.

 Except they're not. And they know they're not. Look into Mark Zuckerburg's eyes.

 Actually, don't do that. You'll hear a weird kind of white noise and lose all feeling in your genitals for about a week, during which time cats will hiss at you reflexively.

 But get a pair of those eclipse-viewing glasses or a big bronze shield and look at Mark Zuckerburg. Hell, you could even use a hand mirror, as that’s the most common way to view an arsehole. Either way, you can’t tell me that's not a man who is panicking on some deep level. That's a man who knows he doesn't have any good ideas - never did - and who is desperately flailing to justify his own existence. He must be smart. Everyone said he was. He must be. He just has to prove he's smarter than everyone else.

 Which he can't. Because he isn't.

 It's the same panic that underpins Musk's ketamine-addled rambling. He throws out buzzwords and references to popular science-fiction, but he's not a scientist or an inventor, despite his claims. He's actually a surprisingly thick racist, trying to cover it with a surface-level sheen of techno-babble and sweat that varies in its ratio on any given day.

 Jeff Bezos has infinite money and can do whatever he wants with his life, and his only desires seem to be to have big muscles and a rocket ship and also maybe be friends with Katy Perry, which would be cute if he weren't sixty-fucking-two. These are not the hallmarks of a deep thinker.

My suspicion is that all of these men, and a lot of others like them, are wrestling with the sinking feeling that they’re nowhere near as clever as their success or public images would suggest.

Everyone deals with Impostor Syndrome to some degree - the feeling that you don’t deserve what you have and that you’re only pretending to know what you’re doing in life - but in the case of tech oligarchs, so much of their reputation is tied to being the smartest people in the room, even when they’re often nowhere near. If there is a cure for impostor syndrome, it’s probably to work really hard at something until you are quantifiably top-tier at it, but these are pampered, spoiled man-babies and they’re not going to do that. They’re not going to take their boundless free time and money and, say, go and study for a degree. Why would they need to? They’re already too smart to be taught anything. They have to be. What else could explain their success?

The nagging sense that that last question - “what else could explain my success, if not my brilliance?” - might not be rhetorical feels like it explains a lot about these assholes.

I think it might also explain a lot about A.I.

The problem with Artificial Intelligence isn’t that it’s a supercomputer that’s poised to go rogue and terminate the humans. It’s that it actually doesn’t know anything in the first place, which could be argued as the most basic facet of intelligence. It’s a regurgitation machine, endlessly recombining existing material that it’s been force-fed, like a suppurating goose liver of bland nonsense.

If your own best ideas are “hot or not? the website” or “shopping” or “buy a car company”, you might not notice that parroting something else isn’t the same as actually thinking. You might not see any problem with endlessly repackaging existing concepts in a pointless echo chamber of creative stagnation. A.I.’s ideas are just as good as anyone else’s (ie: yours) because nobody ever has an original or creative idea - you’re a special genius and you’ve never had one, which must logically mean that it can’t be done.

Mark Andreesen, the Conehead billionaire, referred to Pixar as “a software company.” A.I. company head Mikey Shulman (a grown adult who deliberately calls himself Mikey and, I’m now forced to assume, must wear a baseball cap with a little propeller on it) said that nobody actually likes playing music, so it’s better if an algorithm does it.

These people are absolutely devoid of even the most basic spark of human creativity, so they really can’t see what’s wrong with inserting a machine where the human spirit used to be.

My more paranoid theory, however, is that this runs deeper.

Putting aside, if it’s even possible, that A.I. is a cancer on human creativity, there’s also the glaring problem that it’s just wrong, a lot of the time. Any given L.L.M. makes up facts, because it doesn’t know what a fact is to begin with. I’m starting to wonder if special genius tech bros aren’t secretly rooting for this.

It should be obvious that the public getting facts from a faulty online bullshit generator would be a catastrophe for society, but what if you weren’t “the public” ? What if you were rich and important and better than everyone else?

What if the only thing that defined you was how smart you were, even though you were actually just some fuckwit who was online at the right moment? How would you become smarter than everyone else, as your position demands, without actually attempting to educate yourself or put any work in?

You can’t make yourself smarter (or rather, it seems like a hassle so you’re not going to bother) so is there a way to make everyone else dumber?

What if you start pushing a machine that answers everyone’s questions for them? A machine that actively encourages users to stop thinking for themselves, and which is also sometimes lying to them with indeterminate frequency? What if you could build one giant machine that distracted everybody, made them measurably stupider, and smothered objective truth in the bargain?

If you could build a machine like that - and get enough people to use it - your wealth and privilege would give you access to the thing that the unwashed masses can’t ever have: Objective, well-sourced facts. You could make it so that you’re the only person in the world who actually knows what’s going on, and it’s not because you’re smart - it’s because you’ve clogged every avenue of information with so much bullshit that nobody else can get their bearings any more.

Knowledge, famously, is power. But acquiring knowledge is difficult. What if you’re a rich, stupid asshole and you want to find a shortcut? You could consolidate power not by increasing your own knowledge, but by sabotaging everyone else’s stockpile of knowledge until you’re one of the few people who actually knows anything.

You could have your machine spread disinformation about germ theory and diseases, for example, until knowing the truth - that washing your hands is advisable and vaccinations are effective - would become a superpower.

You could give people endless reams of content - not art, not literature, just content - until you raise a generation that can’t read or write, at which point basic literacy becomes a vital skill. You could have your machine create an infinite trove of algorithmic music, so that nobody ever has to learn an instrument or make anything for themselves.

In this bleak, A.I. dominated future, the most impressive human being in any room would be someone who has read a handful of books, probably not understood them very well, and who can string together three chords on a guitar. You might recognise this as the worst fucking guy at every party in your twenties.

You might also recognise “the worst fucking guy at every party in your twenties” as being the exact type of person who now seems to be running the world.

No wonder these rich, stupid assholes are pimping A.I.; it’s a way to diminish everyone else until their empty brains and laminated personalities make them look like the coolest, cleverest people in the room.

These are men who don’t know much and who can’t be creative. And if they can’t have those things, they’ll burn the world down to make sure nobody else can, either.

Because maybe then they’ll be special.