Do you ever get the feeling that the people running the world are delulu? That the 1% are living in a completely different universe from the rest of us? You’re not the only one. Even some tech elites are starting to worry about their peers’ grasp on reality. “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis,” Aaron Levie, a co-founder of the enterprise cloud company Box, declared on X last month. His reasoning for this? “They’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI. So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.”
In other words: CEOs are so high up the food chain that they don’t understand the human labour that goes into turning an error-riddled AI creation into something that functions properly in a business context. They are desperate to replace their annoying and expensive human labour with compliant AI models, but grossly overestimate what the technology can do. Meanwhile, the industry is rushing out overhyped AI solutions without properly stress-testing them.
This collective euphoria has resulted in some predictable disasters. In April, an AI coding agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude went berserk and deleted a company called PocketOS’s entire production database, along with backups. Jeremy Crane, PocketOS’s founder, later mused on X that this sort of failure was “inevitable” because the industry is “building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it’s building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe”. To recall Facebook’s old mantra: it’s moving fast and breaking things.
Those things include our brains and grasp on reality. There’s a viral quote floating around the internet that quips: “The dumbest person you know is currently being told ‘You’re absolutely right!’ by ChatGPT.” Our tech overlords designed AI chatbots to be obsequious because it’s good business: having your opinions and feelings constantly validated increases user engagement.
But what else does this constant flattery do? While we’re still figuring that out, early studies aren’t reassuring. Research published in the Lancet Psychiatry in March found chatbots can encourage delusional thinking, particularly in people already vulnerable to developing psychotic symptoms. And a recent study from Stanford computer scientists found LLM “sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making”. There is a pressing need, the study stresses, “to address AI sycophancy as a societal risk”.
Idk, I feel like a true misanthrope would be able to read these 2 sentences and at the very least immediately swear off AI chat bots, if not move to a completely isolated cabin in the woods with no electricity or internet.
It's like the broligarchy birthed a bastard child that's just a composite of humanity's worst qualities. All the traits they projected on to the masses as evidence to justify their antidemocratic savior complex bullshit. Impulsive/poor decision making, superstition, paranoia, narcissism.
They're investors, not inventors, but they're 100% convinced this bullshit is going to be man's greatest and longest lasting contribution to existence, and that their names will go down in history as the technocratic leaders who changed the world... And their own delusions are probably being fueled by the same fucking chat bots, and sharing data between platforms in a never ending sycophantic circle jerk that's spreading exponentially like the dumbest fucking virus to ever exist... I just... 🤦♀️
Tldr: These people don't deserve the title of misanthrope.
Edit: I guess I should add the caveat that in the case destruction of humanity/civilization was always the actual goal of some 4-D misanthropic chess master behind the curtain, then bravo and hats off to them for being a real one, I guess?
I would say that it does represent a type of misanthropy lite in that its source is a lack of faith in humanity based in unaquaintance. The irony is the LLM are only a distillation of human expression, boiled down to something close to absurdity. A distrust of humanity has made them reliant on something grown from its excesses.