It's time for ESG funds to dump toxic tech exposures
A conversation between Elon Musk and Google co-founder Larry Page reveals the sociopathic nature of the Big Tech companies that dominate ESG funds.
In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Twitter and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk shared his fears about artificial intelligence (AI) amid the growing adoption of ChatGPT.
“The smartest creatures, as far as we know, on this earth are humans,” Musk said. “It is our defining characteristic. We are obviously weaker than chimpanzees, less agile, but we are smarter. So now what happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form?
“It’s called the singularity. It’s like a black hole. It’s very hard to predict what happens after that. So I think we need to be cautious about AI. I think there needs to be government oversight. Because it is a danger to the public.”
If Musk’s warnings are to be taken seriously, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be, then they pose critical questions for ethical investors.
Is AI an ethical investment? Or should it be screened by ESG funds along with fossil fuels, alcohol, tobacco, gambling and pornography?
Earlier this month, Alphinity portfolio manager Mary Manning, who runs the Alphinity Global Sustainable Equity fund, said AI presented a greater threat to humanity than climate change if it was wrongly implemented.
It is the Tesla CEO’s revelations about former friend and Google co-founder Larry Page that give the greatest insight into how tech giants think.
“Larry Page and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto,” Musk told Fox News. “I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety. My perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. He wants it to be a digital super-intelligence as soon as possible. Basically, a digital god,” he said.
“The whole goal of Google is AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. There is great potential for good but there is also great potential for bad. At one point I said we have to make sure humanity is ok here. That's when he called me a speciesist.”
In other words, Page was calling out Musk for putting humans first. Which poses important ethical considerations. Are you a speciesist like Musk or do you believe that tech companies should build AI that can overtake us?
A simple way to look at this is with ChatGPT, one of the most popular and powerful forms of AI being used by humans at the moment. It is interesting, useful and fun. But do we really want it doing our jobs for us? At what point do human beings become completely marginalised by the technology they have created? Are we working AI, or is AI working us?
For most people, the idea of robots taking over the world seems far fetched, something out of a sci-fi film. But it is already happening and it is happening intentionally.
One leading IT insider, who wished to remain anonymous, told Investor Daily that within innovation hubs across the world a whole subculture of sociopaths is being pushed through incubators and accelerator programs like Y combinator.
He said the accelerator programs have been set up to pull together financing, innovation and IT experts to deliver tech companies that are completely sociopathic.
Look at FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and cryptocurrency. We’re talking about criminal behavior here. Crypto was designed as a currency that drug dealers and people smugglers can use undetected and it's being traded by mum and dad investors trying to get rich. Nothing about any of this is ethical.
In 2020 and 2021, ESG funds across the globe poured billions into so-called FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google).
In Australia, the BetaShares Global Sustainability Leaders ETF (ASX: ETHI) is pegged to the Nasdaq Future Global Sustainability Leaders (NQFGSL) index. Tech stocks represent 26.7 per cent of the NQFGSL index. Screening exclusions are focused on fossil fuels, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, weapons, pornography and payday lending.
The biggest single stock exposure in the BetaShares Global Sustainability Leaders ETF is Nvidia Corp, which partners with Google to deliver machine learning and AI capabilities.
It is widely known that in recent months Google called in co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the one who allegedly called Musk a ‘speciesist’) to accelerate the launch of its own AI chatbot, Bard.
Musk made his fears clear when he told Fox News that the pen is mightier than the sword: “When you have AI that is capable of writing incredibly well it can be influential and convincing. It is working out what is more convincing to people over time. If it starts using social media and potentially manipulates public opinion in a way that is very bad, how would we even know?”
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