Screwing in the little screws

Is artificial intelligence worth sacrificing for, if you’re too cheap to matter to the broligarchs?

In today’s letter: What kind of world are the tech broligarchs trying to sell us? And is it worth going to war for?

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Even as the world reels again from the old-fashioned disruption of war, two of the leading tech broligarchs looking to define the human future — Alex Karp, the CEO of surveillance and defense giant Palantir and Sam Altman, head of chatbot pioneers OpenAI — made the rounds of the summits and business news shows to describe their vision of the A.I.-first future.

That vision, shockingly enough, that doesn’t seem to include most of their human peers, except in the sense that it will “disrupt every aspect of our society,” as Karp told CNBC yesterday. Not exactly the kind of inclusivity most people are looking for when they imagine tomorrow.

So if politics is about telling a better story, what kind of story are these two telling — and who is it for? Let’s take a closer look.