Tech titans should pick up the phone — and so should the rest of us

{"text":[[{"start":7,"text":"The scene that unfolded in the Musk vs Altman trial last week was like something plucked from a nightmare. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s 38-year-old president, was forced to listen as his private diary entries were read out to a courtroom that contained a judge, jury, his own colleagues, the world’s media and a YouTube livestream that anyone could join. "}],[{"start":28.05,"text":"“Financially, what will take me to $1B?” he wrote in 2017. Relatable! The experience of seeing such self-absorbed musings made public was, Brockman said, “very painful”. "}],[{"start":41.3,"text":"Consider this your periodic reminder that it is never a good idea to write personal things on a work-linked device or send indiscreet messages to your colleagues. "}],[{"start":50.449999999999996,"text":"The three-week trial in downtown Oakland was started by Elon Musk claiming Brockman and Altman violated their agreement with him by abandoning OpenAI’s non-profit mission in favour of a for-profit model. Looting a charity, as he puts it. He wants over $100bn in damages and a reversal of the for-profit conversion. "}],[{"start":71.25,"text":"The side quest is to inflict maximum damage by forcing messy, humiliating details into view. In addition to Brockman’s journal we get to see Altman’s messages pleading for his job and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati referring to the man who would become interim CEO as “rando Twitch guy”. More pertinent to the case was Brockman writing that Musk’s story will “correctly be that we weren’t honest with him” and Musk forwarding an email that supported the idea of OpenAI being attached to Tesla, his own company. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":103.6,"text":"The picture painted is less heroic founders pursuing AI for the benefit of humanity and more rats scrabbling in a sack. And we wouldn’t know any of it if they hadn’t written it down. "}],[{"start":114.39999999999999,"text":"Why not pick up the phone instead? Emails, messages and other documents might feel like a private moment between you and your screen but they can be forwarded, leaked or unearthed in legal discovery. Look at the bitter fight between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, stars of It Ends With Us. The exposure of Lively’s cringey text comparing herself to a Game of Thrones character (“I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons”) received more attention than the rejection of Baldoni’s defamation case. "}],[{"start":143.35,"text":"We will probably never know what the tech CEOs said to one another while sitting on Air Force One to China this week, but we do know the bro-tastic way in which Donald Trump’s national security team communicate because they wrote it in a group chat and then accidentally included the editor of the Atlantic. "}],[{"start":160.7,"text":"The shift from talking to texting is so widespread that it cannot be blamed on phone phobia from anxious young generations. Minutes spent chatting peaked all the way back in 2013. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos claims to have stopped making calls more than a decade ago. Watch the latest iPhone presentation and you’ll hear 58 references to the camera and just two for calls. "}],[{"start":185.79999999999998,"text":"The easiest explanation is convenience. But neuroscientist Sophie Scott, who researches the way our brains process conversation, has another suggestion. In difficult situations (fighting over the future of the most talked about start-up in Silicon Valley, say) it is possible that texts and emails feel less socially stressful than phone calls. You get all the intimacy of the person on the receiving end without having to process what is called the prosody — the emotion and meaning conveyed in their tone of voice. "}],[{"start":216.7,"text":"All of which may be true, but the lesson from Musk vs Altman — aside from the fact that the former doesn’t read term sheets in full and the latter has political ambitions — is that it is generally better to accept the awkwardness and just make the call. "}],[{"start":238.14999999999998,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778917894_8887.mp3"}