Balaji Srinivasan says that a tech founder is above the university professor today, and in fact professors leave academia to become tech founders. And the current Western political regime in the post-FDR era, run by Blue America, puts scientist-bureaucrats, like Anthony Fauci, who control billions of dollars and influence policy for decades, above politicians. While the FDR era crushed industrialists, the FDR 2.0 is bringing tech founders to the forefront. As Balaji says, the history is running in reverse, with the opposite outcomes.
Nietzsche’s will to power as a concept was suitable for the industrial age and rising centralization that was produced by a centralizing technology of the printing press. As an industrialist you wanted to own newspapers and pay historians to write how factories are the pinnacle of development. People in the Bronze Age didn’t know they lived in one, the concept was invented during the industrial age by historians paid by factory owners, explains Alexander Bard.
In the internet age we aspire to create an AI God or ideally AI gods. God exists - but in the future, as Alexander Bard wrote in his book Syntheism. Will to power is necessary but not enough, will to intelligence becomes the primary drive. As Taleb said: “To become a philosopher king, start with being a king, not being a philosopher”.
Industrialists wanted to own a penthouse in London or New York to show off their wealth and proximity to power. Netocrats go to Burning Man to self-actualize and meet their peers, a kind of proof of work experience in the harsh desert environment. But we need Building Man, says Balaji Srinivasan, a kind of Olympics for the builders who leave something like a startup village and a vibrant tech community behind once the event is over.
In the network age both power and intelligence are getting decentralized and disintermediated. Agency becomes abundant and so people get the edge just by doing things, to paraphrase Joker in The Dark Night. If their actions were wise can be judged only in retrospect. Think of not just Elon with his highly diverse and successful companies, but Pieter Levels who challenged himself to create startups on a monthly cadence for a year.
Dave Snowden explains how in the complex domain the wisdom of decisions can be judged only in retrospect. Intelligence and wisdom are not the same. In the complex domain, you have to test the opposing hypotheses through parallel experiments on a small scale first. You have to be “in the arena, trying things, some will work, some don’t” to paraphrase Chamath Palihapitiya. But if these decisions were wise is known only counterfactually, if they bring a long-term and repeated success. Elon Musk’s startups were close to failing at the beginning, but they haven’t failed.
The current AI revolution driven by LLMs still hasn't penetrated the complex domain, like markets where rules are changing constantly and one needs to compete with adverse actors. Current AI might be like a shark washed ashore - a peak predator outside his natural habitat, to use Balaji Srinivasan’s metaphor. This is one of the reasons why AI will need to be combined with crypto tech, that is global and permissionless.
Elon Musk is valley-crossing, Mark Zuckerberg is hill-climbing. This is the difference between one-boxing and taking both boxes in the Newcomb’s Paradox. This is what Peter Thiel means by going all in and not being diversified. And this is what Marc Andreesen means when he says that Elon is taking the most risk out of the system that would prevent us from getting to Mars, as opposed to having no risk gene.
Similarly SBF did hill-climbing and tried to leverage his FTX gambit to influence US politics and became one of the largest political donors to Democrats between 2020 and 2022. He wanted to create a regulatory capture in the crypto industry while pushing ideas of effective altruism that has lately turned into a techno-pessimistic movement of AI decels. His gambit might have worked, but hasn’t. While many seemingly wild bets by Elon have worked so far - like purchasing Twitter for 44 billion dollars to save free speech. Therefore we can say that SBF is intelligent, while Elon is wise.
SBF had the will to power, and he had the will to intelligence, but lacked a kind of predictable and reliable moral compass and a grand vision of “getting to Mars”, that creates a fixed point in the future and a projected time that projects from that future into our current day - to use Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s notions of projected time and enlightened doomsaying by a prophet in a technical sense as someone who is between an expert and a futurist and has a counterfactual power to shape the future.
Today, scientists and bureaucrats are being replaced by the tech founders at the top of the prestige hierarchy as the new tech counter-elite entered politics in a big way. Politicians are replaced by social media influencers and actors. Priests were replaced by political activists in the 1960s, and these woke activists are being replaced by activist investors who went political - like Bill Ackman after 7th October 2023.
History is running in reverse, but now the new industrialists, the tech founders seem to be winning. We see a new kind of generalists and Renaissance men and women who are guided by will to wisdom - a will to shape the future of tech and civilization and having a clear moral compass grounded in dreams like getting to Mars. This is the next level of ambition, compared to the will to power and the will to intelligence. It is similar to Alexander Bard's notion of the will to transcendence.