“There is a large graveyard filled with my enemies.” In 2023, so boasted Elon Musk on X, the dumpster fire of a site that he had bought for $44 billion a year earlier. Fittingly, the line opens Faiz Siddiqui’s scathing portrait of the tech mogul, Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (St. Martin’s, May 6). Siddiqui, a Washington Post reporter, wrote the book before its subject began proudly chain-sawing his way through the federal government as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. The author makes clear, however, that the seeds of Musk’s chaotic and disruptive decision-making were planted long ago. The richest person in the world, writes Siddiqui, is “a man with little regard for the consequences of his actions, for the minor aftereffects one might describe as fallout.”
Musk’s brashness might still find support in certain brospheres, but the bloom is off the rose for many tech wunderkinds and their powerful corporations—long gone is the wide-eyed and self-regarding Silicon Valley mantra of “making the world a better place.” Prominent among those who could use an image makeover is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who, along with former chief executive Sheryl Sandberg, comes off as not especially charming in former insider Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Flatiron Books, March 11). Amid all the book’s intrigue, wrote our reviewer, “Wynn-Williams’ accusation of some spectacularly louche and horndoggish behavior among the top brass seems an afterthought, but that gossipy element is there, giving a human touch to ‘these people and their lethal carelessness.’”
All this cause for concern doesn’t even take into account artificial intelligence, whose likely era-defining effects we can only guess at. Two new books approach the subject with caution and skepticism. In More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade To Control the Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, April 22), astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker assails groupthink in the tech industry that promotes an “ideology of technological salvation.” Our critic called the book “an important and sober investigation of Silicon Valley’s boldest claims about the future.”
Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, the authors of The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (Harper/HarperCollins, May 13), contend that corporations singing the praises of AI are not to be believed. “In the vast majority of cases,” they write, “AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier.” AI boosters, they add, “are indexing their fortunes—and mortgaging ours—on a future that doesn’t exist and that won’t suit us at all.” Our reviewer summed up the book as “a refreshingly contrarian take on AI and the clouds of hyperbole surrounding it.”
How to confront the perils of tech? Hoping not to sound, in his words, too “Luddite-y,” Chris Hayes argues for a reasonable approach that can help us all in our daily lives. In his thoughtful book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, Jan. 28), he maintains that Apple and Google and Meta and other tech giants are not so much information companies as attention companies. Maybe it’s time, he says, to stop giving them so much of what they crave.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
PHOTO CREDITS: From left, Jeff Bezos (photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images), Sam Altman (Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images), Sheryl Sandberg (Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for WMC), Mark Zuckerberg (Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images), Elon Musk (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
