If this blog has a main area of focus, it’s the strange state of our collective relationship with technology as an idea rather than a reality. I developed a deep respect for the power of “Tech” as a socio-ideological construct when I was covering Tesla, a company which has leveraged the unspoken power of “Tech” as an idea to defy everything we know about the auto industry. As the Tesla phenomenon birthed the broader Musk Industries phenomenon, which now (lucratively) applies “tech” ideology to everything from brain implants to tunnel-based transit to social media, it has become increasingly clear that the unspoken ideology of “Tech” was the real story all along.

Mapping and taxonomizing the full “Tech” ideology is well beyond the scope of a mere blog post, if only because it builds on (and bleeds into) complex, long-running traditions of “progress,” and modernism.” Perhaps the simplest way to think of it is a kind of neo-modernism, a return to the old American faith that unfettered technological development will lead us into a future that is simultaneously dazzling in its futurist high-tech “progress” and utterly familiar in its core social and economic structure. Think Popular Science magazine covers, reworked with smartphone-era orthodoxies about adoption s-curves, “disruption,” and a gut-level antipathy to regulation and government.

But although today’s tech titans share a core belief in technology as a world-shaping engine of progress with their midcentury predecessors, it’s the differences that are most instructive. Indeed, one of the most critical distinctions between midcentury technologists and today’s tech tycoons is the theme of the just-released film Oppenheimer: the inventor’s sense of responsibility for their creations. Given Silicon Valley’s recent allergy to any form of accountability, a film about the tortured creator of the atom bomb would surely prompt a bit of introspection from today’s would-be Oppenheimers of AI… right?

LOL, yeah right. Posting just days before announcing WorldCoin, a breathtakingly hubristic project to collect the biometric data of every human being alive in exchange for cryptocurrency, Sam Altman of OpenAI reveals that he thought Oppenheimer was going to be a movie that “would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists!” Who could have guessed that the story of the creation of the atomic bomb might be more ethically nuanced than your typical Hollywood feel-good, inspirational romp? Not the guy going around telling everyone that the AI he is creating carries very real risks of human extinction!

Nor is Altman anywhere close to alone in his profound inability to grasp the basic point of Oppenheimer. While the high priest of modern “Tech” ideology, Elon Musk, contributed little more than a grunt-length cosign of Altman’s bizarre take, his former head of Tesla Autopilot echoed the sentiment in even more depressing terms.

Even setting aside the sheer cultural desolation of the suggestion that a Chris Nolan-directed period piece about one of the most ethically-charged scientific inventions in history should have been more like a comic book movie, there’s a lot to unpack here. Like Altman and Musk, Karpathy sees the figure of Oppenheimer (and presumably anyone who contributed to the invention of the bomb), as comic book-level superheroes whose pure scientific achievement makes them worthy of adulation. For them, the moral and ethical ambiguity that forms the very heart of Oppenheimer’s story is a distraction instead of the entire point.

To be clear: there is absolutely room to debate the ethics and morality of the atomic bomb, and though I personally tend to reject the idea that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, I think it’s a reasonable enough position (with the benefit of hindsight) to be worthy of public debate. But whatever you might think of that highly counterfactual-dependent debate, it doesn’t erase the most important fact: as the guy leading the development of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer had massive personal doubts about the morality of his creation. No inventor can ever understand the full implications of their creation at the moment of invention, and indeed they may never resolve the moral conflicts they unleash; what matters is that they at least wrestle with them.

The anti-Oppenheimers of today, on the other hand, are too committed to the ideology that underlies their lucrative startups to be caught in even a momentary ethical bind. Like Oppenheimer, they believe that any technology that can be invented will be, and that it’s best for everyone if the good guys (themselves) do it first. But unlike Oppenheimer, that’s where the introspection ends. On a moral and ethical level, all that matters is being the hero who invented something significant.

Having covered Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” systems for many years, Karpathy strikes me as a relatively tragic figure in the moral and ethical wasteland that Silicon Valley has become. He bears no personal responsibility for the deeply amoral conception and creation of Autopilot/FSD, an idea that Musk effectively stole from Google when the search giant refused to take it to market over the very safety issues that would later claim multiple lives. As far as Karpathy was concerned, AP and FSD were just another complex, real-world AI problem, no different than the work he’d been doing in academia up to that point. Because he had never worked on safety-critical systems, let alone the human-machine interface issues that AP/FSD’s safety problems center on, he was able to blithely lend his capabilities and credibility to systems that are inarguably fraudulent and dangerous.

Here’s the thing: Karpathy did lead genuinely impressive technical work on Tesla’s driving automation technology, and these systems are impressive on a purely technical level… even though they will never deliver on Musk’s promises, endanger their users, and are built on an obvious lie. For Karpathy, and the rest of Silicon Valley, that’s enough. Technical virtuosity, like creating a massive market cap for your company, flatten incredibly complex situations into simplistic hero’s journeys. No wonder these guys think the real story of Oppenheimer is just a cool guy, looking cool and working with other cool guys, while he invents something new and powerful (and therefore also cool).

The only redeeming feature of our new crop of anti-Oppenheimers is that they aren’t exactly inventing the atom bomb. Musk has radically derailed EV policy in this country, multiple people have died at the hands of Autopilot, Tesla systematically evades safety, labor and environmental laws, and much (much!) more, but these are not exactly atomic bomb level issues. Altman’s OpenAI and WorldCoin both have troubling potential, but seem more like hype babies than world-historical forces. If anything, both men regularly exaggerate the worst possible outcomes of their creations to make them seem more real and impactful than they really are.

What’s more, Musk’s wanton destruction of Twitter proves the most important point about Silicon Valley’s rejection of introspection and accountability: even the brightest mind rots without them. There is no special agenda to his flailing, no 5-dimensional chess behind the blatant dysfunction, just the madness of a man who has built incomprehensible wealth on the idea that he can’t be criticized. Musk is by far the most successful of our modern-day anti-Oppenheimers, and his very success at insulating himself from anything resembling accountability is what has left him unable to think critically about anything.

Like Oppenheimer, Musk has become a destroyer of (online) worlds… but, no longer able to weigh the consequences of his actions, he is ultimately destroying himself. If you thought Oppenheimer was a gripping tale of science and morality, just wait until this one plays itself out.