Hi ,
Microsoft made more than $25 billion in profit in the first three months of the year. Microsoft is currently cutting over 9,100 jobs across the world and axing numerous projects at the studios they own, including several in the UK. The obvious question is: why? In a new memo from Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella, he doesn't know either – he calls the decision he made an "enigma".
Maybe he didn't even make the decision. Maybe he didn't write the memo! In a Bloomberg piece from this May, he talks about how much of his life is actually led by Microsoft's AI Copilot which, he says, summarises all his messages, describes episodes of podcasts without him having to listen to them, preps for his meetings, researches his talking points, and maybe writes vague memos about the mysteries of firing workers who reaped you record profits. Another Microsoft executive recalls Nadella saying that everything Microsoft has built over 50 years doesn't matter anymore and that they need to "burn the ships" to invest in AI. A CEO of a massive, era-defining company talking like this should prompt widespread alarm, but that doesn't seem to be happening – and that's the problem in a nutshell. Why are the billionaires who lead our society burning the ships?
We talk a lot about how bad inequality is for everyone and the influence of the richest over society has always been a deeply toxic thing, but we're also seeing a growing gap between the rich and the ultra-rich – both in terms of their skyrocketing wealth and the cultural gap between a common-or-garden millionaire and someone like Elon Musk. At its most visible, this cultural gap is producing deep nihilism amongst tech workers or AI dependency to the point that AI-induced psychosis is becoming a serious concern amongst venture capitalists.
But ship burning also manifests in the UK. Since Thatcher handed over large sections of our society to private interests in the 80s, many institutions have no knowledge or interest in common good. This has trained a generation of CEOs and executives who themselves have no relationship with their employees or the product their company creates.
The result is privatised utilities that hike bills to pay themselves and dump sewage in our rivers, an endless housing crisis, and outsourcing and consultancy companies that make huge and often harmful decisions without democratic input. For example a former McKinsey consultant with no engineering or tech company experience wrote the UK's AI strategy which concluded mass deregulation of AI could somehow create £400bn in growth without ever explaining how. This disinterest has spread across our media, political system, and economy.
In short, it has always been a problem that a small number of rich people hold enormous power over our society. A growing problem is that they don't really know or care about anything. And some, like Ancient Romans drinking from lead pipes, might be driving themselves mad with AI. |
