The Elizabeth Holmes of government efficiency

I have a piece in the Irish Times today about Elon Musk's performative vandalism of the US government. He has unleashed a band of inexperienced twenty somethings - some reportedly still teens - to "disrupt" government. And it is profoundly idiotic (not the same choice of words I used for the paper).

It fits with the Gen X / Elder Millennial tech bro obsession with "disruption", the idea that only outsiders can deliver real innovation. At its core is the lionisation of the young and the inexperienced; as I wrote:

"Disruption became about the naive genius, the Zuckerbergs in their dorm rooms changing how we communicate and advertise. This was how Elizabeth Holmes, a 19-year-old college dropout, convinced investors she could radically transform medicine. She raised more than $700 million in investor cash for blood testing technology that did not, and scientifically could not, exist. She is now serving a prison sentence for fraud, but back in 2014 one of many glowing media profiles quoted her on the secret of her “success”; “we focus all the time on disrupting ourselves, and that’s one of the core tenets in the way we operate”."

I have seen - and being frank, been part of - this phenomenon back in my days hanging out in the UK's answer to Silicon Valley:

"I worked alongside start-ups in Shoreditch during the early 2010s when everyone was trying to disrupt everything. We were living through a time when smartphones realigned whole ways of working across entertainment, commerce, and communication. In this era of peak techno-optimism, I sat in on hackathons where 20-somethings were convinced they could do anything from fight cholera to prevent war crimes over a weekend of sourdough pizza and craft IPAs."

But the stakes for governments, especially one with such far reaching power as the US Government, are so much higher. This quote cut me to my bone:

The notion that inexperienced “super-geniuses” can reform the State is dangerous. One USAid worker told reporters that because of funding freezes that cut access to antiretroviral medications, “300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV now do”.

We have somehow ended up in a world where Elon Musk has the power to deny a newborn baby the right to a life free from HIV.

Audio: Interview of RTE's The Business

I was on RTE Radio's The Business programme on Saturday to talk about what we learnt from the AI Summit about the geopolitics of this new tech - this built on last week's newsletter, and you can listen here:

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