@stefano here’s the thing: in today’s society, you DON’T actually need ability or competence to do things if you have enough competence to fake it and can generate sufficient hype.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying; society needs competent people and everything falls apart if we lose them. However, society doesn’t reward competence, especially compared to their incompetent but charismatic peers, and especially in today’s ideologically driven, post-facts world.

Musk knows jack about rockets. Altman knows jack about AI. They’re white men who know how to hype up investors, and that’s sufficient to be successful in today’s society.

Charlatans are nothing new, but we’ve somehow ended up in a society where the more smoke they blow, the more we reward them, with no checks on whether they’re actually generating any measurable net positive impact on society or humanity as a whole.