On the Extraordinary Sunak-Musk Interview
Believe me, I don’t want to write about Elon Musk. Everybody writes about him, and he exuberantly promotes himself at every opportunity, of which there are many. He doesn’t need my help, and I’m sure he doesn’t want it.
Musk theatrically plays to a universal audience, awash in the media limelight, courting adulation and criticism in equal measure. He is one of three people in the world that ride a never-cresting wave of media attention. The other two are Taylor Swift and Donald Trump. That says something about the world, but I’m not in a mood to stroll down that dark alley of the soul.
What I am motivated to do, however, is expound on the extraordinary interaction between Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak, the prime minister of the United Kingdom. The two men took part in a 50-minute interview, with Sunak fawningly posing the questions to Musk, at the conclusion of the AI Safety Summit, the first event of its kind, held last week in Bletchley Park, England.
So, just what is it about the Sunak-Musk interview that warrants our attention? Well, nearly everything.
Let’s start with the venue: a gilded room at London's Lancaster House, described in a Reuters article as “one of the government's most opulent venues, which is often used for diplomatic functions.” That’s not all, though: Lancaster House has also served as a location for several movies and television series, including The King’s Speech, Downton Abbey, The Duchess, The Iron Lady, The Young Victoria, and The Crown. It’s a venue associated with politics and show business, which are increasingly conjoined in these relentlessly performative times.
Before we dig into what Musk and Sunak actually said, let’s first consider the ground rules for this encounter. From a BBC report:
Unusually for an event involving the prime minister, TV cameras were not allowed inside, with Downing Street instead releasing their own footage.
Some reporters were allowed to observe - but told they could not ask questions.
Carefully Staged
This was a carefully stage-managed event; it relegated reporters to mute observers. Did Musk stipulate that condition? Considering Sunak’s deferential posture toward his interviewee, it seems a reasonable assumption.
Now, let’s also consider that Rishi Sunak, who is – I feel compelled to make the point again – the prime minister of the United Kingdom, was reduced to playing the role of obsequious interviewer, assuming a task usually filled by the likes of Joe Rogan. It's worth reflecting on what that says about the power dynamic between tech-industry potentates and the elected politicians and statesman whom many of us still believe exercise the most influence over our lives.
Sunak was embarrassingly obsequious toward Musk, as captured in this excerpt from a report by Matt Chorley, a columnist for The Times (UK):
“Elon burst through the gold doors in black jacket, black T-shirt, black jeans. And brown boots. (A human would have told him that didn’t go.) Sunak skipped along behind, whipping his jacket off quickly, feeling like a big square. “We feel very privileged to have you,” he simpered, rolling up his sleeves.
I couldn’t help thinking: why is the actual prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland sitting here like Gloria Hunniford, hanging on every word of this guy who bought Twitter and drove it towards the ground faster than one of his early rockets?”
Chorley’s editorializing on Musk’s X fiasco aside, he’s making a valid point about the power dynamic on display in the interview between Sunak and Musk. Why is a prime minister, who presumably has better and more important tasks to address on behalf of his electorate, playing servile talk-show host to a celebrity billionaire, even one associated with the heady phenomenon of AI?
The answer, as it turns out, is hiding in plain sight. It’s the considerable cachet of AI, with a secondary pull from Musk’s massive notoriety, that brought Sunak to this unseemly side hustle as celebrity interviewer. Sunak is desperate to position the UK, and the London metropolitan area specifically, as a center of AI activity, believing it will reflect well on him, primarily and most urgently with the UK’s voters and perhaps with posterity in the fullness of time. The whiff of prospective wealth associated with AI has an intoxicating effect, and nearly everybody appears susceptible to its charms.
Selling or Safety?
An interesting aspect of Sunak’s interview with Musk was the tone and thematic emphasis of the former’s questions. The event that had just concluded, the AI Safety Summit, drew leading companies and nations together to devise initial steps on how to manage the risks of cutting-edge AI models. The event’s focus was not on AI’s gaudy commercial prospects, but on how the future course of AI could proceed in a way that reduced the considerable risks associated with its misuse. In keeping with the nature of the event, the concluding interview should have struck a resonant note of care, circumspection, due diligence, responsibility, and security. Sunak had other ideas, as this exchange, reported in the BBC article, attests:
"There is a safety concern, especially with humanoid robots - at least a car can't chase you into a building or up a tree," he (Musk) told the audience.
Mr. Sunak - who is keen to see investment in the UK's growing tech industry - replied: "You're not selling this."
As a reader of that exchange, one has to laugh. It’s funny, but it’s also telling. In taking on this interview, Sunak’s mission was not necessarily to emphasize the need to make AI safe, but to ensure that the UK gets some of the filthy lucre that will inevitably accrue from the technology. Musk, in the day before the interview took place, sensed the ambivalence and hypocrisy of those participating in the AI Safety Summit.
On his X platform, formerly Twitter (how long will we have to append a parenthetic reference to its former identity?), Musk shared a cartoon satirizing the event. As the BBC article explained:
It depicted caricatures representing the UK, European Union, China and the US with speech bubbles reading, "We declare that AI possesses a potentially catastrophic risk to humankind" - while their thought bubbles read "And I cannot wait to develop it".
The contrived theatricality of the Sunak-Musk was matched by the disingenuousness of the event itself; or, if that is too harsh, the dishonesty of at least some of the participants.
A Future of Non-Work
Give Musk credit where it is due: He sees the pretense and absurdity in the elaborate charade. Many of the participants at the event felt compelled to give the appearance of tapping AI’s brakes when they actually want to put their foot to the floor, accelerating as fast as possible toward the shimmering horizon of commercial nirvana.
During the interview, aside from his fevered speculation about AI-powered robots that could chase you up a tree, Musk spoke about the future of human work, or lack thereof. Musk explained that AI is destined to become more intelligent than the smartest human – he was presumably thinking of himself – and that we will arrive at point where humans will be superfluous to gainful employment. You will be able to work, according to Musk, but there will be no need for you to work. Thank you for the kind offer of your services, but the AI-enhanced robots can do without your professional ministrations.
At this point, I envisioned AI cheerleader and Silicon Valley uber VC Marc Andreessen, of the partially eponymous Andreessen Horowitz, indignantly shouting, his face florid with anger: “Regulatory capture!”
After all, as Musk readily conceded, not everybody will welcome the prospect of a life without work. To be sure, the “workless” future will be perceived as an ominous specter by many people who are now gainfully employed. Andreessen and many others in the otherworldly VC community don’t want AI to scare the populace and inhibit the politicians who have been elected to represent the public interest. If that happens, the electorate and the regulation-wielding politicians will fear and actively resist the AI companies in which VCs are frenetically investing. Musk’s comments on the future of non-work could easily be construed as bad for Silicon Valley business.
Occasionally, though, Musk was happy to follow Sunak’s positive AI spin. Even on the subject of AI putting all humans out of work, Musk interpreted the matter sunnily, opining that, “We won't have universal basic income. We'll have universal high income."
Are We Fit for Purpose?
Given that Musk is on record as opposing higher taxes for the rich, a select cohort to which he unquestionably belongs, I’m not sure how a universal basic income, much less a “universal high income” (however defined), can be achieved. Somebody would have to pick up the bill, and too many billionaires remain more inclined to move their money to tax havens offshore than to pay their fair share of taxation. Is Musk assuming that the AI-powered robots, when they’ve tired of chasing us up trees, will volunteer to provide financial redress to the workers they’ve displaced?
At this point, we can only speculate. We don’t know what the future will bring – we never really do – and we can only do our best to anticipate the best and worst possibilities, always hoping for the former and conscientiously anticipating and preparing for the latter.
Still, we should definitely proceed cautiously into a future increasingly defined by AI. The greatest risks do not pertain to AI on its own. In the foreseeable future, perhaps not that long from now, AI will be whatever we want it to be. That’s the problem. More to the point, we’re the problem. The combination of us with AI could be a very big problem.
Anybody who casts aside their rose-colored glasses and looks at the world we’ve made for ourselves cannot help but notice that we have a well-documented history of misusing new technologies for sinister purposes at least as much as we apply them to laudable aims. AI, with its long-term potential to be more resourceful and smarter than the humans who created it, significantly ups the ante. How do we ensure that we limit the enormous damage that malevolent actors might perpetrate with the assistance of AI?
Are we evolved enough – emotionally, ethically, psychologically, intellectually – to handle that responsibility? If you look at the world as it is, rather than as it one might wish it to be, you might find the question unsettling.
More than ever, I think, we need the services of our best skeptics. Hype precedes reality but never accords with it. To be a Panglossian optimist today is to court serious danger. We need to keep that in mind, and to protect against the worst excesses of those motivated exclusively by narrow self-interest.
Nearly everything about the Sunak-Musk exchange was fascinating. That it occurred at all, with a prime minister paying abject obeisance to a multibillionaire, spoke volumes about the nature of power in the digital age. That Sunak, at an event intended to devise practical restrictions on runaway AI, was more focused on shamelessly promoting the technology than on demonstrating responsible custodianship, told a story all its own.