Cross-posted from "What 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 Knew About Tech-Bro Paternalism" by @paywall@rss.ponder.cat in !theatlantic@rss.ponder.cat
Last fall, the consumer-electronics company LG announced new branding for the artificial intelligence powering many of its home appliances. Out: the “smart home.” In: “Affectionate Intelligence.” This “empathetic and caring” AI, as LG describes it, is here to serve. It might switch off your appliances and dim your lights at bedtime. It might, like its sisters Alexa and Siri, select a soundtrack to soothe you to sleep. The technology awaits your summons and then, unquestioningly, answers. It will make subservience environmental. It will surround you with care—and ask for nothing in return.
Affectionate AI, trading the paternalism of typical techspeak for a softer—or, to put it bluntly, more feminine—framing, is pretty transparent as a branding play: It is an act of anxiety management. It aims to assure the consumer that “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” as a recent report from Elon University called it, will be one not of threat but of promise. Yes, AI overall has the potential to become, as Elon Musk said in 2023, the “most disruptive force in history.” It could be, as he put it in 2014, “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” It is a force like “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape,” he suggested in 2018. And yet, AI is coming. It is inevitable. We have, as consumers with human-level intelligence, very little choice in the matter. The people building the future are not asking for our permission; they are expecting our gratitude.
It takes a very specific strain of paternalism to believe that you can create something that both eclipses humanity and serves it at the same time. The belief is ripe for satire. That might be why I’ve lately been thinking back to a comment posted last year to a Subreddit about HBO’s satire Silicon Valley: “It’s a shame this show didn’t last into the AI craze phase.” It really is! Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, a year before Musk, Sam Altman, and a group of fellow engineers founded OpenAI to ensure that, as their mission statement put it, “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The show ended its run in 2019, before AI’s wide adoption. It would have had a field day with some of the events that have transpired since, among them Musk’s rebrand as a T-shirt-clad oligarch and Altman’s bot-based mimicry of the 2013 movie Her.
Silicon Valley reads, at times, more as parody than as satire: Sharp as it is in its specific observations about tech culture, the show sometimes seems like a series of jokes in search of a punch line. It shines, though, when it casts its gaze on the gendered dynamics of tech—when it considers the consequential absurdities of tech’s arrogance.
The show doesn’t spend much time directly tackling artificial intelligence as a moral problem—not until its final few episodes. But it still offers a shrewd parody of AI, as a consumer technology and as a future being foisted on us. That is because Silicon Valley is highly attuned to the way power is exchanged and distributed in the industry, and to tech bros’ hubristic inclination to cast the public in a stereotypically feminine role.
Corporations act; the rest of humanity reacts. They decide; we comply. They are the creators, driven by competition, conquest, and a conviction that the future is theirs to shape. We are the ones who will live with their decisions. Silicon Valley does not explicitly predict a world of AI made “affectionate.” In a certain way, though, it does. It studies the men who make AI. It parodies their paternalism. The feminist philosopher Kate Manne argues that masculinity, at its extreme, is a self-ratifying form of entitlement. Silicon Valley knows that there’s no greater claim to entitlement than an attempt to build the future.
[Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]
The series focuses on the evolving fortunes of the fictional start-up Pied Piper, a company with an aggressively boring product—a data-compression algorithm—and an aggressively ambitious mission. The algorithm could lead, eventually, to the realization of a long-standing dream: a decentralized internet, its data stored not on corporately owned servers but on the individual devices of the network. Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper’s founder and the primary author of that algorithm, is a coder by profession but an idealist by nature. Over the seasons, he battles with billionaires who are driven by ego, pettiness, and greed. But he is not Manichean; he does not hew to Manne’s sense of masculine entitlement. He merely wants to build his tech.
He is surrounded, however, by characters who do fit Manne’s definition, to different degrees. There’s Erlich Bachman, the funder who sold an app he built for a modest profit and who regularly confuses luck with merit; Bertram Gilfoyle, the coder who has turned irony poisoning into a personality; Dinesh Chugtai, the coder who craves women’s company as much as he fears it; Jared Dunn, the business manager whose competence is belied by his meekness. Even as the show pokes fun at the guys’ personal failings, it elevates their efforts. Silicon Valley, throughout, is a David and Goliath story. Pied Piper is a tiny company trying to hold its own against the Googles of the world.
The show, co-created by Mike Judge, can be giddily adolescent about its own bro-ness (many of its jokes refer to penises). But it is also, often, insightful about the absurdities that can arise when men are treated like gods. The show mocks the tech executive who brandishes his Buddhist prayer beads and engages in animal cruelty. It skewers Valley denizens’ conspicuous consumption. (Several B plots revolve around the introduction of the early Tesla roadsters.) Most of all, the show pokes fun at the myopia displayed by men who are, in the Valley and beyond, revered as “visionaries.” All they can see and care about are their own interests. In that sense, the titans of tech are unabashedly masculine. They are callous. They are impetuous. They are reckless.
[Read: Elon Musk can’t stop talking about penises]
Their failings cause chaos, and Silicon Valley spends its seasons writing whiplash into its story line. The show swings, with melodramatic ease, between success and failure. Richard and his growing team—fellow engineers, investors, business managers—seem to move forward, getting a big new round of funding or good publicity. Then, as if on cue, they are brought low again: Defeats are snatched from the jaws of victory. The whiplash can make the show hard to watch. You get invested in the fate of this scrappy start-up. You hope. You feel a bit of preemptive catharsis until the next disappointment comes.
That, in itself, is resonant. AI can hurtle its users along similar swings. It is a product to be marketed and a future to be accepted. It is something to be controlled (OpenAI’s Altman appeared before Congress in 2023 asking for government regulation) and something that must not be contained (OpenAI this year, along with other tech giants, asked the federal government to prevent state-level regulation). Altman’s public comments paint a picture of AI that evokes both Skynet (“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” he said at the 2023 congressional hearing) and—as he said in a 2023 interview—a “magic intelligence in the sky.”
[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]
The dissonance is part of the broader experience of tech—a field that, for the consumer, can feel less affectionate than addling. People adapted to Twitter, coming to rely on it for news and conversation; then Musk bought it, turned it into X, tweaked the algorithms, and, in the process, ruined the platform. People who have made investments in TikTok operate under the assumption that, as has happened before, it could go dark with the push of a button. To depend on technology, to trust it at all, in many instances means to be betrayed by it. And AI makes that vulnerability ever more consequential. Humans are at risk, always, of the machines’ swaggering entitlements. Siri and Alexa and their fellow feminized bots are flourishes of marketing. They perform meekness and cheer—and they are roughly as capable of becoming an “immortal dictator” as their male-coded counterparts.
By the end of Silicon Valley’s run, Pied Piper seems poised for an epic victory. The company has a deal with AT&T to run its algorithm over the larger company’s massive network. It is about to launch on millions of people’s phones. It is about to become a household name. And then: the twist. Pied Piper’s algorithm uses AI to maximize its own efficiency; through a fluke, Richard realizes that the algorithm works too well. It will keep maximizing. It will make its own definitions of efficiency. Pied Piper has created a decentralized network in the name of “freedom”; it has created a machine, you might say, meant to benefit all of humanity. Now that network might mean humanity’s destruction. It could come for the power grid. It could come for the apps installed in self-driving cars. It could come for bank accounts and refrigerators and satellites. It could come for the nuclear codes.
Suddenly, we’re watching not just comedy but also an action-adventure drama. The guys will have to make hard choices on behalf of everyone else. This is an accidental kind of paternalism, a power they neither asked for nor, really, deserve. And the show asks whether they will be wise enough to abandon their ambitions—to sacrifice the trappings of tech-bro success—in favor of more stereotypically feminine goals: protection, self-sacrifice, compassion, care.
I won’t spoil things by saying how the show answers the question. I’ll simply say that, if you haven’t seen the finale, in which all of this plays out, it’s worth watching. Silicon Valley presents a version of the conundrum that real-world coders are navigating as they build machines that have the potential to double as monsters. The stakes are melodramatic. That is the point. Concerns about humanity—even the word humanity—have become so common in discussions of AI that they risk becoming clichés. But humanity is at stake, the show suggests, when human intelligence becomes an option rather than a given. At some point, the twists will have to end. In “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” we will have to find new ways of considering what it means to be human—and what we want to preserve and defend. Coders will have to come to grips with what they’ve created. Is AI a tool or a weapon? Is it a choice, or is it inevitable? Do we want our machines to be affectionate? Or can we settle for ones that leave the work of trying to be good humans to the humans?
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