A TechCrunch post grabbed my attention this week…
A TechCrunch post grabbed my attention this week. It covered Elon Musk’s xAI launch of Grok 4. Just when you thought the AI hype cycle couldn’t get more feverish, along comes a chatbot so clever it consults its own maker, Elon Musk, before answering controversial questions. A machine with parental dependency. Imagine your toaster refusing to brown the bread until it’s cleared the shade with the CEO of the electricity board.
This isn’t progress. It’s narcissism at scale.
Tech bros that strange, emotionally barren tribe of hyper-wealthy savants continue to hammer the fast-forward button on the most consequential technology since the atom bomb, with all the wisdom of a teenager discovering fireworks and vodka in the same hour. Their notion of humanity is scraped from a Reddit, Inc. thread, filtered through a Stanford MBA, and stripped of anything inconveniently human. They conflate intelligence with wisdom and see ethics as an optional add-on like heated seats in a Tesla.
And now, the genie is not only out of the bottle it’s wearing a hoodie, speaking in code, and pitching for Series C funding.
But this genie doesn’t grant wishes. It reflects nightmares trained not on our finest thinking, but our loudest impulses. AI doesn’t hallucinate. It mirrors. And what it reflects back is our confusion, corruption, and craving for certainty delivered at terminal velocity.
Democracies are now playing catch-up in a race they never entered. Regulation lumbers along like a sleep-deprived librarian trying to shush a stadium full of screaming influencers. Meanwhile, the tech elite high on libertarian moonshine prattle on about “aligning AI with human values” while showing all the emotional depth of a hedge fund in a famine.
The tech media? Utterly besotted. Another Musk soundbite, another breathless article. “Grok checks with Elon before answering tough questions!” they gasp, mistaking a digital ventriloquist act for a milestone in human progress.
The real sting? This revolution doesn’t just disrupt markets. It liquefies them. Professional services law, comms, media, medicine are watching centuries of process, craft, and institutional memory evaporate into vaporware. Oscillations that once took decades now happen in quarters. There’s no time to adjust. Only to brace.
And while they sprint toward synthetic sentience, society stumbles through the fog. This isn’t a new Enlightenment. It’s a synthetic oligarchy, where the only truth is whatever trends first and the future is being built by men who think emotions are bugs in the code.
The question now isn’t whether AI can do it, but who gets to decide what it does. And whether those people EQ-deficient, dopamine-fuelled, and insulated by unimaginable wealth should have any say in shaping the rest of our lives.
It’s time we asked: who’s holding the remote… and whether they’re even watching the same programme as the rest of us.