Yesterday President Trump and a gaggle of tech barons appeared before the press pack on the White House lawn, fresh from a meeting to sign the “White House Accord” on AI. The atmosphere was jovial. Trump was weaving about, patting the arms of David Sacks and Mark Zuckerberg while the executives chuckled and joked to one another. Anthropic boss Dario Amodei was invited by a journalist to give his précis of the meeting. Amodei haltingly stepped forward, adjusted his glasses, and then began rather frantically chopping the air with his hands as he outlined the benefits and hazards of AI. After he finished he seemed to flee, retreating to the outer edges of the crowd. Trump looked on benignly.
An introverted technologist who is somewhat camera shy? There was more to it than that, apparently. According to the online comments on this brief encounter, Amodei had just relived a sort of teenage trauma. “Some adolescent high school power dynamics at play here. Dario has the best model but he’s the anti-social uncool guy not worth listening to, while Zuck and Sacks are playing the hip friends of Trump,” said one wag on X. Some made out that the other executives were smirking at Amodei’s performance in an attempt to toady up to the “jock” Trump. For all his billions and all his cutting-edge tech, it is implied, Amodei cannot escape who he was in high school: a nerd, whose fate is to be dominated by jocks like Trump and their cronies.
This is all rather typical. For quite a number of Americans, high school is the defining experience of their lives. Their position in its social pecking order marks them forever. Anything a high school nerd subsequently does is merely “cope” for his failure to fit in during adolescence, so the theory goes. Some elements of MAGA cast their movement as a revolt of the jocks against the “theater kids.” It is dismaying to see this kind of witless pop-sociology now being applied to AI, a technology which will transform all of our lives. It’s time to graduate.
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