Neo-Victorians
"North America's getting soft, padrone. And the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times, and we're going to have to be pure... and direct... and strong... if we're gonna survive them." - Harlan, Videodrome
Four men are the commercial faces of AI in the United States: Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, Chairman of SpaceX.
Today, NVIDIA's board launched an independent investigation after the New York Times reported that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort: an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), whom US intelligence officials, per the Times, assert is a Chinese intelligence asset. The Times reports that Huang has admitted to the affair.
Whether or not the allegations of Chinese influence hold up, Chinese intelligence has already scored a coup. Huang's reputation is permanently damaged. He may have to leave the firm he co-founded and guided into becoming the most valuable business in history. Even if fully forgiven and welcomed back with open arms, he will be watched for the rest of his tenure, by both the Chief Information Security Officer and the Chief Security Officer of NVIDIA, working to find and close every vector of leverage against the enterprise.
A CEO with a secret is a vector. From today, the CISO and CSO of every firm that matters will treat the private lives of the C-suite as attack surface, and that treatment will flow downward to anyone who considers themselves a candidate for those roles.
This has suddenly become true for the three other men who are the public face of AI. Amodei, Altman and Musk will each be under a microscope, and it will be one of security, not judgement.
We have been here before. In the Bad Old Days of the Cold War, closet homosexuality was sufficient grounds for firing an individual, or at least denying them a security clearance, on the basis that they would be particularly subject to extortion. Stripped of all moral judgement, the behaviour itself created unacceptable leverage for an adversary. These leaders and the coteries that surround them will now be expected to lead "upright" personal lives, transparently, while commanding their multi-trillion dollar enterprises.
A 2022 settlement for $250,000 reveals Musk's security risk - silence enforced by NDA. With three marriages, three child-producing relationships and 13 living children he presents the extreme case. Even if the SpaceX board is willing to accept this behaviour (and payouts), along with the firm's shareholders, will the US security establishment?
That seems unlikely, after today.
Welcome to a 'Neo-Victorian' era, as explored by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age, per Miss Matheson:
"...It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation; we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it became unfashionable to teach these things."
Stephenson's Neo-Victorians understood that a society that can not place its confidence in the outward moral behaviour of its leaders, whatever their inner hypocrisies, can not thrive. Markets want no scandal. Security wants no secrets. From today those two demands will be enforced as one.