Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Misreading of Science Fiction

Beyond Elon Musk's interpretation of, Silicon Valley leaders have often misunderstood classic books like and . Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer's, or Christopher Nolan's? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a "historically accurate" version of the --turning epic poetry into atrocious slop--even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.