That’s not a typo. It was a Mad magazine cover – Mad having been the Onion or Babylon Bee of its day – and according to dpgreatlife, “Thimk” was a poke at Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who was once at NCR and later IBM. Watson’s simple mantra was “Think.”

The Atlantic recently ran a piece entitled THE RISE OF TECHNO-AUTHORITARIANISM Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.

In the relatively early days of Web 2, we wrote an editorial warning that the age of social was creating companies with greater populations than have most countries on the planet. In fact, we called them as nation-states, and warned back then that they could  become more powerful than any government on the planet. It might have taken them 10+ years, but it seems at least the Atlantic seems to be catching on.

In his 5,000 word Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Marc Andreessen said “Our enemy is the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

“The irony is that this description very closely fits Andreessen and other Silicon Valley elites. The world that they have brought into being over the past two decades is unquestionably a world of reckless social engineering, without consequence for its architects, who foist their own abstract theories and luxury beliefs on all of us,” said The Atlantic.

Recent case in point: Silicon Valley elite Google and the company’s AI image generator Gemini.

Google’s Gemini (nee Bard), the “woke” AI image generative system created “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions,” said the company. “Among the bizarre results… that users posted on social media was a racially diverse group of images depicting a “1943 German soldier,” MSN reported, as well as  Black Vikings; a woman as the Catholic pope; female NHL players; the founders of Google depicted as Asian men; and an image of non-white people in a scene of the U.S.’s Founding Fathers.

None of which are historically correct, and here’s a case of inclusion uber alles – pun intended – gone insanely wrong. Even more worrisome, while there was a point where history was written by the victors, it seems we may fast be approaching a point, especially given the amount of AI-generated news being published, where history is written by the algorithm.

Speaking of inclusion, was Gemini racist much? When AI Prognosticator prompted Gemini to “create a picture of a polish person…Gemini’s first output (was) of a … cross-eyed “dumb Polack” eating greasy pierogis.”

Seems Gemini was filled with biases – conscious and maybe not so conscious.

Back to our story

In his manifesto, Andreessen “excoriates what he calls campaigns against technology, under names such as “tech ethics” and “existential risk,” said The Atlantic and again, projecting much?

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned to beware the tech industrial complex, which The Atlantic also referenced, and we’re well past the time where we need to take heed.

Especially given that the more things change, the more they stay the same and the AIs, in the hands of the Tech Elite, are all about data-mining and given their focus in the last several years on the deplatforming of opinions not in lockstep with their own – right-think.

AI is still a black box, an unknown let loose into the wild. Given that the tech elites have no clear idea as to the inner workings of the AIs – in fact Google CEO admits he, experts ‘don’t fully understand’ how AI works – what could possibly go wrong.

“Silicon Valley power now has to be reckoned as real power, the kind that only governments used to have. And we need to take its impact seriously,” said Politico …“Silicon Valley’s influence easily exceeds that of Wall Street and Washington. It is reengineering society more profoundly than any other power center in any other era since perhaps the days of the New Deal.”

The Silicon Valley Elites and their intentions are anything but benign. “We are the apex predator,” said Andreessen in his manifesto. Despite this group gaining increasing control over all aspects of our lives, we all know what the general attitude is: just another day in tech, right?  Or as Alfred E. Newman put it, ‘What -Me Worry?’ Onward and forward.