Dex Hunter-Torricke worked inside Google, Facebook and SpaceX, writing speeches and shaping messaging for some of the most powerful people in tech. He quit SpaceX a week after the 2016 election, walked away from roughly $100m in stock, and now runs a think tank called The Center for Tomorrow warning about exactly the industry he used to work for.
He told Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy plainly: “I think we’re heading over the cliff right now. You could not have picked a worse time for the arrival of the most powerful technology in history.”
Why he left
Hunter-Torricke’s father was a child refugee from Burma who grew up in a camp in Kolkata. His mother came from Malaysia in the 1970s to work as an NHS nurse. He grew up working-class in Kent, the first in his family to get a degree, and went into tech because he genuinely believed in what these companies said they were building.
“We were all drawn to this place because we believed in a mission,” he said. “We’ve now ended up in something which is deeply nationalist, ultra shortsighted, appears to be mainly driven by just juicing the stock market valuations of a tiny sliver of companies. And I feel personally betrayed by that.”
Zuckerberg, he said, is the biggest disappointment specifically. “There’s somebody who literally talked about the value of connecting the world. And he chose to reinvent himself as a person who literally just does cage fights and wears a bunch of gold chains.” Sitting atop platforms with clear, documented harms to young people’s mental health, Hunter-Torricke argued, and choosing image rebranding as the response, “it’s absolutely wild.”
The pitch companies make, and why he doesn’t buy it
Asked how to read tech companies saying they welcome regulation, he was blunt: “Show me the proof. All these companies came up with a very clever messaging angle. I know because I was part of it.” The promise costs nothing and regulation’s coming either way, so of course they say yes to it. What matters is whether anything actually changes.
On the UK specifically, he pointed to how little enforcement has actually happened despite years of work on the Online Safety Act. “We’ve got an online safety bill. It took years to pass it. It established a whole content moderation infrastructure at Ofcom. Why is it that we have the scale of problems that we’re facing? Because in fact the system is not really being enforced, because in fact the US administration essentially threatened massive reprisals on the UK and other nations who would actually try to moderate the voices, the platforms that Washington cares about.”
On Musk and Zuckerberg specifically
Guru-Murthy asked whether it was tempting to see the men he’d worked for as Bond villains. “Elon was tweeting that he wants to get a volcano lair,” Hunter-Torricke replied. “It is easy to think of them as Bond villains. Some of them seem to enjoy revelling in that image.” He’d known many of them for years and said he genuinely doesn’t know whether their earlier, more idealistic language was ever sincere. “Were they lying to me then about the things they cared about, or are they lying now, masquerading as something else? I don’t know. In a lot of ways, I don’t have time for the psycho drama.”
This tracks with what’s already been reported on Musk’s own recent public conduct, including his claim that civil war in Britain is inevitable despite not having visited the country in years, and his reaction to being challenged on it.
The jobs question
Guru-Murthy pushed him on whether society is actually facing mass unemployment. “Yes, I do,” Hunter-Torricke said, pointing to youth unemployment already climbing and more than a million 18 to 24-year-olds not in education or work. “That’s before advanced AI shows up. This is literally why big tech is plowing more than $650 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone. They realise they’re about to build technology that is likely to surpass the cognitive performance of the average worker. In that future, you can do much more with much less. Organisations are going to become much, much smaller and a very small number of people will be the winners economically, and they will run away with most of the rewards.”
Asked about Anthropic’s Jack Clark suggesting a small number of AI companies could be heavily taxed to fund universal support for displaced workers, Hunter-Torricke agreed with the honesty of the idea but not its feasibility on its own. “No single country, including the superpowers, is going to come up with an answer to this on their own. Certainly there is nothing that the UK can do on its own to get to an economic model that is able to provide, for example, a universal basic income.” It’s a genuinely similar argument to the one already playing out in Britain’s own domestic wealth tax debate, just scaled up to a handful of trillion-dollar companies rather than a few thousand wealthy households.
His actual proposal is international cooperation among countries at risk of being left behind by both the US and China. “They get together and say this is not a future that’s going to work for us on the path we’re on. How do we get leverage in this future to come up with an equitable solution?”
A billion pounds isn’t going to cut it
Asked about the UK government’s recent £1bn AI investment announcement, he didn’t hold back: “Just this year alone, US big tech is spending more than $650bn on AI infrastructure. Elon’s company just became worth more than $2 trillion. So no, that’s not going to work on its own.” His actual suggestion is Britain pooling compute and resources with other mid-sized nations, rather than trying to build a solo national AI champion. “We should also be thinking much more ambitiously. How do we share compute and resources with other like-minded nations who recognise the threat that is coming from dependence upon the US and China.”
Asked directly about Farage
Guru-Murthy raised a specific British example: a crypto billionaire funding Reform and Farage personally. Hunter-Torricke said it confirmed his broader argument rather than surprised him. “It’s a reflection of the fact that everything, including politics, has become internationalised in the 21st century. The bad ideas and the movements and the infrastructure that is powering all these different political movements are things that are flowing in many cases through the United States, also touching other parts of the world.” He argued mainstream parties failed to build the same kind of international networks and resources that fringe movements have managed to tap into.
Leave a Reply