A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat. Yet it is hard not to be sceptical
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskJoe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks, talks fast—and interrupts frequently. By his pool is a giant throne, from the set of “Game of Thrones”.
This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them. Some think the transformation wrought by big tech has not lived up to the excitement—and wealth—that it generated. As Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, a payments firm, and mentor to many of these iconoclasts once remarked, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds. The most well known is Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor. The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.
There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution.
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