Guillaume Verdon: observation

Transcript context

…Each individual has agency. The motto, “Keep building” is often heard. What does that mean to you, and what does that have to do with Diet Coke? By the way, thank you so much for the Red Bull. It’s working pretty well. I’m feeling pretty good. Awesome. Well, so building technologies and building… It doesn’t have to be technologies, just building in general means having agency, trying to change the world by creating, let’s say a company which is a self-sustaining organism that accomplishes a function in the broader techno-capital machine. To us, that’s the way to achieve change in the world that you’d like to see, rather than, say, pressuring politicians or creating nonprofits. Nonprofits, once they run out of money, their function can longer be accomplished. You’re kind of deforming the market artificially compared to sort of subverting or coursing the market, or dancing with the market, to convince it that actually this function is important, adds value, and here it is. And so I think this is the way between the de-growth, ESG approach, versus, say, Elon. The de-growth approach is like, “We’re going to manage our way out of a climate crisis.” And Elon is like, “I’m going to build a company that is self-sustaining, profitable, and growing, and we’re going to innovate our way out of this dilemma.” And we’re trying to get people to do the latter rather than the former, at all scales. Elon is an interesting case. You are a proponent, you celebrate Elon, but he’s also somebody who has for a long time warned about the dangers, the potential dangers, existential risks of artificial intelligence. How do you square the two? Is that a contradiction to you?…

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