Beware Trump's tetchy tech whisperers bearing gifts

Jonathan Margolis, who a decade ago warned of extreme tech personalities seizing political power, examines the dangers ahead posed by these overwhelmingly right-wing courtiers

- By Jonathan Margolis

Six years ago, long before billions of us started consulting an all-knowing AI chatbot several times a day for everything from holiday ideas to legal advice to psychotherapy, the German born, Trump-supporting Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel appeared on a US podcast.

The host, Ross Douthat, a conservative thinker concerned that tech tycoons were beginning to assume a culturally dominant, almost quasi-religious role, asked Thiel: “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?”

Thiel hesitated for a full five seconds – an age in a conversation – before saying, “Uh... I don’t know. I, I would, I would... yes.”

Thiel’s apparent vacillation over whether human beings are even a viable species could reflect philosophical uncertainty about exactly what “endure” means in this context.

But it’s more often cited as an amber flag warning that tech bros – people, predominantly men, who in a more innocent age were called computer geeks – are more comfortable with the binary, predictable, controllable, engineering-based certainties of machines than they are with the fleshy, dithering, fickle, capricious, slow-witted creatures most of us actually are.

This week, the ultimate dithering, fickle, capricious human being, the current president of the USA, was feted in London at banquets and flypasts by our King and prime minister.

Prominent in Donald Trump’s retinue was a group of courtiers from the tech world, who joined him at this week’s state banquet. Among them were Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Tim Cook of Apple, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft – who, on the morning of the royal banquet, told the BBC he was still trying to find out what to wear. You would think he’d have asked his company’s own rather irritating AI assistant, Copilot.