// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Test
Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening … kinda like using a Chatbot. But worse.
Huang says many outrageous things in the podcast. Like when Klein asks about how kids don’t learn skills when using LLMs, Huang responds:
I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?[…]Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.
Outrageous. But he needs to go on and top this statement with an even worse one:
There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address. […] It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.
One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.
So Huang is not the only person making these kinds of strange statements. Marc Andreessen proudly declaring not to have any introspection. Sam Altman talking about how how ChatGPT (and probably a bunch of nannies) basically raises his kid. Satya Nadella “staying informed” about the world by listening to – and talking to – podcasts that Microsoft Copilot generates for him.
This is not how actual people live. These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit. Why would techbros do that? Constantly.
It of course brings to mind the famous quote from William Gibson’s Count Zero:
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”