If you needed confirmation of just how much Big Tech know they’re in hock to the new US President, the fact that a man as altruistic as Bill Gates made a pilgrimage to pay his respects at Mar-a-Lago, the Floridian holy site, says it all.
Is there any Big Tech boss who didn’t make a million-dollar donation to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund? There were the usual suspects of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, but also Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook (CEOs of Open AI, Google and Apple respectively). At Trump’s inauguration, such was the scrabble for Big Tech to ingratiate themselves with the new President, they actually ran out of gala seats and tickets as perks for VIP donors.
Acts since have somehow proved more shameless. Amazon and Meta rolled back their DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives before Trump even took power (the latter taking the opportunity to drop fact-checkers, too). This week Google not only renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on Maps in line with Trump’s geographical creativity, but dropped Pride and Black History Month from its calendar app, too.
No subtlety, nor attempt to pretend they had been motivated by genuine do-gooder instincts in the first place. It’s odd to think these are leaders who were once cosy with the Obama administration.
It would be quite funny, if it weren’t so worrying. Much has been said on how Trump’s capriciousness and swagger browbeats international leaders into poor policy. But, with our lives conducted in lockstep with technology, it is perhaps Trump’s undue influence on this industry that should concern us most.
For one thing, Big Tech and all its effects, including being the dominant reason invoked for the unhappiness of the youth of today, is in America’s hands.
Before Trump took power, the US held the only hope for taking on and regulating Big Tech. Its leadership set a precedent for what happened elsewhere, because of the size of its consumer base, the headquartering of Big Tech in Silicon Valley, and the general influence of the US government. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority investigated Google only once a court ruling in the US suggested it was a monopoly.
Now it feels hopeless. Can you imagine how much worse things are set to become under a President who openly reversed his policy on TikTok after crediting it with his winning the youth vote? The fear that consumer data could end up in the Chinese government’s hands can be brushed aside according to how much the app in question helps one man.
Zuckerberg, who owns Facebook and Instagram, has already urged Trump to stop the EU from fining and regulating Big Tech. Until now, this was the only way of cowing firms into acting on misinformation credited with interference in elections, the proliferation of self-harm content and personal information being sold off.
Trump’s initial actions over Artificial Intelligence have been further proof of deregulation. He has revoked Biden’s executive order which required AI developers to share safety results and gave government agencies the power to enforce against AI’s impacts on bias and privacy. Trump has instead introduced the “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” bill. It promises to ditch legislation “inconsistent with enhancing America’s leadership in AI”.
Meanwhile, this week’s AI summit in Paris was a microcosm of what we can expect in a Trumpian world order. Vice-President JD Vance spoke of an “America-First” approach to dominate artificial intelligence, but failed to mention any safeguards against the huge harm AI could go on to cause.
Keir Starmer refused to sign the subsequent summit declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence, which some put down to his desire to follow the US’s lead.
Embodying the disruptive impact of Trump on Silicon Valley is of course the drunk uncle of Big Tech, Elon Musk. His current bid to take over Open AI from Sam Altman may be a stunt – but what if it comes to pass?
Why Big Tech stands to win from a Trump presidency
Read MoreOpen AI is probably the most important tech development currently under way (it’s set to be valued at $300bn). Its systems are used everywhere from Salesforce to Reddit; its products such as Chat GPT are in use by over 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. Musk’s takeover of Twitter, often described as the world’s “town square”, involved the elimination of both content moderators and rules against hate speech. Following this, the rate of anti-black slurs on the platform tripled, while right-wing posts and profiles sharing disinformation gained more prominence.
Imagine the result of Musk, as Trump’s right-hand man, being in charge of Open AI too. Apart from the swathes of personal data (which its models are trained on) he would have access to, weaker moderation policies could allow us to be fooled by the proliferation of deepfakes. Biases could be built into models such that they generate content biased in favour of Trump.
In previous decades, the abiding fear was of a “military-industrial complex”, as warned of by President Eisenhower in his 60s farewell address. The military industry and government scratching each other’s backs was said to lead to a concentration of power in their hands, at the expense of ordinary people. Joe Biden’s farewell address coined the phrase “tech-industrial complex” – an ominous premonition of what is already happening, weeks into the Trump presidency.
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