Kristofer Ahlström: Think – the world's smartest AI king is a mammal with urges

Few are blessed with a penis that can control the world economy, and when the supporting organ fails, the stock market crashes.

One of those privileged few penises belongs to Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker Nvidia and high priest of the fast-growing church of artificial intelligence.

When his affair with a Chinese woman, suspected of being recruited by the Communist Party, became public, the SEK 3,300 billion market value went up in smoke. The private is not only political, it can also be global economic.

Anyone who has read their Thomas Pynchon recognizes the scheme. In his World War II novel Gravity's Rainbow, an American lieutenant's sexual conquests in London foreshadow German rocket attacks. The man goes to bed with a woman and moments later the Luftwaffe razes the address to the ground.

When Nvidia's security department invested SEK 40 million in protecting Huang from external threats, it was less prepared for an internal threat: his emotional life. Of all the factors they counted on, they missed the human factor.

There is something almost comforting in how the developer of the world's smartest and most forward-looking technology is nevertheless vulnerable to the most primal mammalian of us: our urges, our desires and our vanity.

Why shouldn't a far too beautiful woman fall in love with him when the rest of the world already has?

Huang's success and cult of genius have probably already taken a heavy toll in distorting his worldview. Why shouldn't a far too beautiful woman fall in love with him when the rest of the world already has? The fact that technological development is exponential does not matter if biological development is at a standstill.

It offsets that AI learned to imitate human things like writing poetry and reasoning as long as it is operated by humans who work with the same emotional tools as a Bronze Age chieftain. The chief could also be seduced; flattered by compliments about his firm calves, he could make rash decisions and drag the entire tribe down with him in depravity. With the small difference that the tribe now includes the entire international economy.

Espionage, meanwhile, has undergone its own technological revolution. Intelligence services that used to use microfilm and bugs in flowerpots today operate with satellite systems, cyber intrusions, encrypted information.

Still, it is nowhere near as effective as old time honored Mata Hari methods.

There is hardly any difference between the honey trap that Huang seems to have been subjected to and the so-called Romeo agents that the Stasi hired to woo West German women during the Cold War. The relationships could last for years. Some of the women even thought they were marrying the men, but the wedding turned out to be arranged by the East German security apparatus. Women who today are disappointed by men's duplicity in the Tinder market still stand quite easily against the painful realization that one's love life was bureaucratic affairs in a fluorescent-lit room in Lichtenberg.

To paraphrase another old German: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as thousands of memes online with pictures of boldly dressed Chinese women and the caption "The last thing you see before easing export restrictions on advanced chips".

There is something to cling to in the dizzying technological development, the reins of which we find it increasingly difficult to grasp: a man who feels irresistible is nevertheless quite easy to control.