Bill Gates was a college dropout. Steve Jobs quit after one semester. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t finish, either.  So it was no wonder that, when the tech sector rose to prominence, kids believed that dropping out of college and starting a company was de rigueur for success in life. And to be wealthy and lionized.

The Age of Social loved tech ‘luminaries’ such as Zuck and Jack Dorsey and how convenient that their genius could be amplified on the very platforms they created. Tech founders were the rockstars of the computer age.

We know things move faster in the online world, but how did these guys get so rich and powerful in so short an amount of time?

They took shortcuts. And the bro culture helped.

Facebook was funded by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, if you’re wondering why it devolved so quickly into a global surveillance platform.

Twitter and peer-to-peer payment app, Block, founder Jack Dorsey’s Cash App accused of fraud in damning report by activist short seller. “Hindenburg Research, a respected short seller, said Block (formerly known as Square) allowed criminal activity to operate and flourish by taking a “Wild West” approach to compliance, which “made it easy for bad actors to mass-create accounts for identity fraud and other scams, then extract stolen funds quickly,” Fast Company reported, which sent the company’s shares plummeting. Details, details. Funds were even used to pay hit men.

We will also remind you, as the Twitter files disclosed, Twitter was very much working with the government to deplatform, shadowban and suppress certain points of view, and received over $3M from the FBI (qua taxpayer money) to help them track…Americans!  And who was the CEO at that point? Jack Dorsey, who didn’t step down until November 2021.

Then there’s genius Bill Gates, who has his hand in seemingly everything and who managed to get straight As at Harvard even though he never attended classes, but instead ‘studied super hard.’ Hmmm. It turns out that he had friends record all the classes, and as we know, professors tend to test on things they cover in class. Gates certainly seemed to be paying attention to that, so did he possibly ace his courses by studying the videos? As Business Insider reported, “The big exception was organic chemistry where the promised video tapes of the lectures sometimes had no sound or no video,” Gates said on Reddit. “That spooked me and I ended up getting a C+ in the course!”

In other words, he learned how to game the system early on.

The Wall Street Journal did an interesting piece on Sam Altman (The Contradictions of Sam Altman, the AI Crusader Behind ChatGPT ), reporting that “His goal, he said, is to forge a new world order in which machines free people to pursue more creative work. In his vision, universal basic income—the concept of a cash stipend for everyone, no strings attached—helps compensate for jobs replaced by AI.”

Doing the math here, with ChatGPT scraping not only the web but your computer as well, the question is, will your access to UBI be based on your social credit score? With information coming from Big Tech, of course, and we’ve seen where that has taken us, to date: surveillance, blacklisting, etc.

“Some who’ve worked for him, say he’s too commercially minded and immersed in Silicon Valley thinking to lead a technological revolution that is already reshaping business and social life,” the Journal continued, and in case you’re wondering what ‘Silicon Valley thinking” is, consider how many times Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, et al, lied to Congress, while under oath, without any consequences. Why should ethics or anything so mundane as the law apply to them? Or as Third Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels put it, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Transparency and accountability – even honesty – have never been in the tech sector’s DNA.

The Future of Life Institute’s open letter asking for a 6-month pause on training language models “more powerful than” GPT-4. Over 1,000 researchers, technologists, and public figures have already signed it, but according to AI Snake Oil, (that) “misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks” and this one is certainly worth a read. One point explored: is the danger that LLMs will make jobs obsolete? Or is it that it will shift power away from workers and centralize it in the hands of a few companies?

It’s déjà vu all over again. And rule of thumb: beware of anything that Bill Gates wholly embraces (The Age of AI Has Begun)

Generative AIs are just the latest tool in the arsenal to control the conversation. Won’t neural interfaces make it just that much easier and direct?

Here’s a thought. Since LLMs are computer science based, as Sifted observed, “wouldn’t it be great if new large language models had the same guardrails — the equivalent of clinical trials — that are required in medicine?” But tech believes in ‘move fast and break things,’ seemingly no matter the consequences. High time to get over that one, as it seems it never quite works out in the long run.

We’ve always been wary of the overarching tech agenda we’ve witnessed since the age of social and have learned that when a company or vertical is clearly getting a leg up spontaneously and simultaneously across disciplines, it’s time to put your foot down. Onward and forward.