The Problem With Very Special Boys

What happens when our world is run by people who never learned humility?

"Dyson Swarm realistic representation" by Віщун is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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In a recent article in The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel pointed to a strange exchange from a recent appearance OpenAI chief Sam Altman had on Theo Von’s podcast; you’ll remember Von as one of the dudebro podcasters Donald Trump courted to such great effect in the 2024 campaign (Von was the one Trump chatted with about what it’s like to do cocaine). Altman, who like many Silicon Valley titans spends a good deal of time pondering the far future and how his heroic efforts will deliver us there, responded to Von’s own musing about how in some science fiction films, entire planets look like computer motherboards from above, and what that might portend for our own future:

Altman: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.

Von: Do you really?

Altman: But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.”

Von: Yeah.

Altman: I wish I had, like, more concrete answers for you, but, like, we’re stumbling through this.

You wouldn’t want to ascribe too much meaning to this particular back-and-forth, and one of the reasons Von is so popular (he has over 4 million followers on YouTube, where his is the 11th-most-watched podcast on the platform as of last week) is that he has a disarming amiable-dunce persona that can put his guests at ease. So perhaps Altman was just tossing around some wacky ideas, and if you gave him the opportunity to explain he’d say “Well of course that’s stupid.”

But I don’t think he would. Why? Because Altman is a Very Special Boy, and so are pretty much all the Silicon Valley titans now running our world. Which is part of what makes them dangerous.

Why this is so dumb

A brief explanation of why saying “maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system” is so bone-rattlingly stupid is necessary. A Dyson sphere is a thought experiment developed by physicist Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper that proposed surrounding a star with solar panels to capture its energy, since even if we covered the entire Earth with panels we’d only be getting an infinitesimal portion of the energy released by the Sun, most of which goes uselessly off into space.

It would be a construction project of impossibly large scale; to get the necessary materials to encase the Sun, we’d literally have to dismantle an entire planet or two. But to make a Dyson sphere around the solar system, you’d have to build a machine many times larger. According to my noodling calculations, it would be around 100 billion square miles in surface area, if we put it at the edge of Neptune’s orbit (I might be wrong; feel free to check my math). Even if it was just a millimeter thick, there isn’t enough material to do it with here in our own solar system. So how would that work? We’ll spend thousands of years waiting for the robots we send out to other parts of the galaxy to retrieve entire planets, break them down into atoms, and turn them into…more data centers? What the hell is he talking about?

I have no idea if Altman is aware that people are gleefully making fun of him on Bluesky because of this comment. But if he were, my guess is that he would decide that 1) the actual mechanics of the solar-system-encasing Dyson sphere are immaterial, you plebs, because the point is to think big; and 2) this just shows that only he and a few other people like him have the capacious and imaginative vision necessary to pull humanity into its glorious future.

We need visionaries. And yet…

It’s true that in order to progress, society needs visionaries with the imagination to contemplate what has never been and the will to overcome obstacles and accomplish things no one else has ever accomplished. Most of us those visionaries, history will tell you, are not very nice people. But there’s a very particular kind of person who becomes a tech leader these days, of which Altman is definitely an example: the Very Special Boy.

I use the word “boy” intentionally, because while there are just as many brilliant girls as brilliant boys born every day, they are treated very differently as they move through the world, in ways too voluminous to even get into here. But suffice to say that an obviously brilliant girl will usually not be encased in the same bubble of praise and admiration that a brilliant boy will, with almost inevitable consequences for their respective development and maturation.

When you read about people like Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Bankman-Fried, you learn that from a very young age, their intellect was both identified and celebrated; many of them have parents who themselves are intellectuals of one sort or another, and would be much more likely to put their Very Special Boy on a pedestal for winning a math competition than an athletic one. For as long as they could remember, they were told not only that they were unique and extraordinary but that they were destined for greatness. They might not be prom king, but they would change the world.

I have some inkling of what it’s like to be told this as a child, because I was something of a Very Special Boy myself — not nearly as much as Altman or Zuckerberg, but of a similar species. I did well in school and on standardized tests (a particular skill that may be related to intelligence, but hardly overlaps perfectly with it), and as a result got put into a bunch of “Gifted and Talented” programs back when that was a thing. I was sent to allegedly stimulating after-school programs and summer camps with other nerds, who also had been told they were Very Special. In some of them I met kids who were way smarter than I was (like one kid at camp who was 14 and had just finished his freshman year in college), which began to give me some inkling that there were limits on how Very Special I really was.

Now here’s the thing: As you go from being a child to being an adult, if things go well you will have a mix of successes and failures, and encounter an ever-wider variety of people and experiences that can give you both confidence and humility. But I’m not sure people like Sam Altman ever got the humility part.

They went from high school, where they were the top of their class, to an elite college, where they were told that they and their hyper-achieving classmates were the leaders of tomorrow. Even there, they may have stood out for their smarts, but before really getting the chance to appreciate the different kinds of knowledge and intelligence that might be different from theirs — say, by encountering brilliant literature majors — many of them dropped out of school (Altman dropped out of Stanford, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard) because they knew what they wanted to do.

Then they went to the Valley (where having dropped out of an elite school gives you a special kind of status), developed their idea for a company, had older funders tell them how brilliant they are and give them money, saw their company succeed, and quickly found themselves surrounded by people who admire them and keep telling them how brilliant they are. The ungodly sums of money they accumulated only reinforced their conviction that they are indeed Very Special Boys. And they never had to learn humility.

Ask yourself this: Are you more aware of your own limitations and the things you don’t fully understand than you were 10 years ago? The answer ought to be yes, because as we mature and gain a fuller understanding of how the world works, the more we grasp the complexity of everything — institutions, systems, social forces, human relations. One experience I have as a journalist is that when I dive deeply into a subject that I’d paid only superficial attention to before, I wind up saying, “Wow, this is a lot more complicated than I thought.” Every time. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.

That’s one of the pleasures of learning, in whatever context you do it. But people like Sam Altman know a lot about a few things and think they know a lot about everything — and if they don’t know much about something, it’s just not important to know. To return to where we began, it’s okay to say dumb things sometimes — we all do it. But one of the most valuable experiences you can have is to realize that you don’t know what you’re talking about, so you can learn and grow.

If the average person said “What if we built a Dyson sphere around, like, the whole solar system?” their buddy would probably say, “Dude, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” And then they’d laugh about it. But nobody would say, “This man is a genius, we should give him a trillion dollars to blanket the Earth in data centers.” Which is precisely what’s happening right now.