Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance
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If a stay-at-home parent helps raise children and run errands, and as a result the breadwinner is more capable in their job and the children grow up to be stable and successful, shouldn't that kind of work be compensated?
Likewise a community volunteer can do a lot of good if they are not burdened by living expenses, yet often communities that could benefit most from volunteering are those which lack the funds to pay people outright.
It would also be a hell of a lot easier if I could work 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 working on my business without worrying about making ends meet and contributing to my retirement accounts.
- Robert F Kennedy
IMO, getting structure, meaning and belonging from your workplace is a fairly American phenomenon, and is a pretty poor place to get it. The traditional places to get this were from your church and family.
There are much better social constructs than the workplace. UBI should allow them to thrive. Let people self-organize according to their hobbies and taste rather than being thrown together by their job, and I think society will be much improved.
I do wonder whether the moving away from the "career for life" mould has some part to play in the ennui that so many modern people seem to feel. Certainly some of the life events I'm proudest of over the long term are achieving professional qualifications - for instance commissioning as a military officer. It is a standard that society recognises your having reached, carries a degree of prestige and helps give a sense of place in the world.
Clearly the answer is no, and it will result in the ghettoization of those that choose to take only UBI for income. This already happens with Section 8 housing, retirement havens (eg Florida), and so forth. There would be an even starker contrast between the haves (who perform "useful" work) and the have-nots (who subsist solely on UBI for whatever reason).
So what's your solution? With the upcoming automation wave coming, UBI is way better than the status quo. What is better than UBI?
This is something that London (at least) does well. Council housing is available across the city and you will often find amongst some of the wealthiest parts of the city alternating blocks of council housing.
It might indeed be a pain point for those who bought their £1M town houses to then have to deal with the consequences of a whole council estate across the street but it has (so far) prevented the ghetto-ization of swathes of our capital which seems to affect Paris for instance which has less of a mix of housing.
Not quite, we are post-scarcity on the production of those items, but the economy hasn't caught up with it yet, which is why so many in the US severely lack one or more of those necessities .
As William Gibson put it, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"
>Many of the poor in the US live more comfortable lives than many in less developed countries.
I would be surprised if you mean the US can't or shouldn't strive to provide better for its citizens ~300 million citizens until all other countries are caught up for the rest of the 7 billion people on Earth, which leaves me unsure about what you're trying to communicate with this.
>It's unclear why they are entitled to a particular standard of living that is rather generous by global standards just by virtue of their living in the US.
Clarity here depends on your perspective. From the perspective of humanity as a whole you are absolutely correct. From the perspective of citizens within a country the government's (ostensible) purpose for existing is to provide for their quality of life either directly by use of collected taxes or indirectly by facilitating socioeconomic activity.
I'm unaware of any significant number of US residents suffering from malnutrition due to lack of access to healthy food or exposure due to insufficient clothing or shelter. That is not to say there are none, but most are due to factors other than the lack of access to basic necessities.
>I would be surprised if you mean the US can't or shouldn't strive to provide better for its citizens ~300 million citizens until all other countries are caught up for the rest of the 7 billion people on Earth, which leaves me unsure about what you're trying to communicate with this.
What I am saying is that I question the assertion that everyone deserves a particular quality of life even if it must be attained at the expense of another.
Even if I were to accept that, the complications of such a position are legion. What constitutes the appropriate quality of life? What happens in an economic downturn when that minimum quality of life is no longer sustainable? Etc.
We say that noone should starve, and we redistribute wealth to food stamps.
We say that noone should die of preventable disease or injury, so we redistribute wealth to medicare and medicaid an emergency care.
We say that everyone should have an education, so we redistribute wealth to provide free public schools.
I'm not saying this country is doing a very good job of the above, and I'm not saying there's no opposition even to these measures, but we commonly accept this redistribution of wealth with no regard given to the value-adding abilities of the people receiving it.
So UBI is not some brand new thing we have to justify, it's more of the same, and the justification is the same.
I guess the real mental switch is instead of allocating these subsidies to specific buckets like "food", "health care", "housing", and having massive programs to administer and oversee the spending, can government actually get its head around the concept of just writing a check to be spent however? Maybe the problem is... who are the special interests greasing the wheels in congress to get the subsidy passed, when no industry in particular is benefiting from the subsidy?
There was a study in London that hinted at this outcome for homeless persons. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016436
The reasons for homelessness are complicated and often heavily influenced by drug/alcohol dependency and/or mental illness. Things like the Big Issue are an example of projects that tap into the industriousness of people that the GP mentioned.
There may be some people for whom the existing welfare state is too difficult to interact with but UBI is easy enough, but we should not believe that UBI will help everyone. Indeed the sheer cost of UBI is likely to require removing the funding available for the most needy.
Millions of retirees do this succesfully every year, when they transition out of the workforce.
Saying that UBI is bad because people would a priori become restless, and that we therefore need to preserve a bullshit busywork corporate culture, is as much of an von-oben argument that UBI is bad because people would be lazy and sit on their asses all day.
UBI removes the risk.
>We're really talking about finding ways to give structure and meaning to those folks, the large middle class in America.
Firstly I disagree that people need baby sitting. If they do then that is a huge cultural problem. The beautiful thing about UBI though is that your statement won't matter because the slightly more industrious will round up the bored and make projects and people will partake because it gives them meaning. I think you are underestimating the power of the crowd.
It raises the floor on how bad things can get, but it absolutely doesn't eliminate the risk.
You should be aware that you're deducing this by looking at the results of an enduring, pervasive, and almost universal education of people in this regard that was enforced over millennia! This education was constantly discouraging (and even weeding out) the individuals that were not so eager to earn a living to look for different (illegal) shortcuts to solve their material condition. I think that you'll change your view when you'll allow yourself to widen the selection of (kinds of) people you interact with. Hint: you may start visiting the nearest prison and meet up with inmates condemned for thefts.
Please, don't take the good things for granted, and definitely don't let our current society dominated by "industrious" people you see now become a myth for future generations!
> I actually think we simply handed this conversation over to the free market in the 20th C and that answer isn't going to work in this century.
The free market / globalization dogma only took hold in the 1980s, under Reagan (in the US) and Thatcher (in the UK). Before that, the economy was much more highly regulated, taxes were over 80% in some categories, labor was much more powerful, and governments ran or controlled many industries.
(Remember that under these conditions, in the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. experienced possibly its greatest period of economic performance ever. The 1970s were a period of recession, at least partly driven by OPEC's oil embargo on the West.)
The issues you attribute to the 21st C have existed since the 1980s: The economy has grown but only for a very small minority. Everyone else's incomes have stagnated (while costs have increased, especially for health care and higher education). The benefits never 'trickled down' as promised (and what a condescending economic strategy!) and inequality has exploded. With labor weakened, ordinary workers have much less voice in business and government - and not surprisingly, they've been less able to secure the benefits of economic growth while those with a stronger voice have done exceptionally well.
I should say: The adoption of these policies and the stagnation of wages are coincident, but I don't know enough to say there is a causal relationship. I do know the problem has been around since the 1980s; it's just that the consequences have accumulated: What was argued be a temporary problem is now, decades later, proven to be a structural one, and the inequality has widened to a chasm.
That article was shrill, it impugned motive, and it attempted to stigmatize. This is more of threat than people who are earnestly trying to help but who may be missing part of the picture.
See: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%E2%80%99s%20U...
Apart from the means to throw vast amounts of money at the problem, there's no reason that Silicon Valley nerds should be expected to solve squishy human problems like inequality. Those require a greater understanding of people and society. And to borrow an analogy from John Oliver, expecting tech entrepreneurs to possess this is like expecting a vegan to be good at karate - there's no cause and effect between these two, and the correlation usually goes the other way.
Conversely, there's no reason reaching your exit should be so profitable. Leverage computers, while government raises capital gains tax to income levels to even the playing field (which, coincidentally, is a great way to capture efficiency gains and distribute to social safety nets).
Change isn't predictable[1], so it is misguided to expect that anybody will be able to solve difficult problems like inequality. However, we can and should expect "Silicon Valley nerds" to at least follow the principle of failing safely when designing new technology.
Technology can provide incredible benefits to society, but harmful effects can also be amplified. While we shouldn't expect a solution to hard problems, we should be assigning liability and charges of negligence when someone makes the these problems worse.
[1] For detail, see James Burke's non-teleological interpretation of history.
That's not quite true. There definitely is a culture that is specific to Silicon Valley. Of course, not everyone in the valley matches that culture, but on average there are some values and a certain rhetoric that comes out of that area that is very recognizable. You can see that by watching the silicon valley show, the guys in the show represent the different stereotypes of people that you encounter all the time in the valley.
This is important to the argument here, because one aspect of the silicon valley rhetoric is that its objective is to do good, to make the world a better place, to not be evil. It is that rhetoric that pisses off people. The fact that ruthless businessmen (because they are ruthless businessmen) put themselves on the right side of morality. It is going way further than Wall Street's "greed is good". At least the Wall Street guys had some actual cynicism behind it. Here, you get people who actually believe that they are making the world a better place, and that humanity owes them the insane amount of wealth they're getting out of it. And that's where the arrogance comes from. Instead of telling the world: 'we're making life a little bit more convenient' they say 'we embody human evolution, we are progress and progress is good'
In the same way, people working on things like AI are looking at the limitless potential, not necessarily as their own achievement, but as helping to nurture something which will eventually develop on its own, but in ways that are currently unimaginable by people.
This might look arrogant to other people, but it's more like humility in reality, a realization of what our limitations as people are and an understanding about how we might be able to build intelligent systems that can surpass these. They might not all be Artificial General Intelligences. They will often be good at very specific things, like AlphaGo, but they will be able to make leaps of intuition that we know no human could accomplish.
I think that most people's problem with pride isn't that someone else is feeling good about themselves but rather that it humiliates the person seeing it. We're going to have to learn a lot of humility as a species if we are ever going to overcome our limitations.
I wish it was this way but in my experience, technologists are creating great/novel technology for the sake being able to create great/novel technology, instead of thoughtfully designing systems that consider consequences beyond a high-growth business model (if any). I agree it's not arrogance but also it's hard to pass of as humility; rather, it seems to be a limitation of wisdom which is hardly unique to SV.
That's pretty much it.
The rest of the article goes off about how universal basic income is good, or bad, or liberating, or condescending. Then concludes saying "I sure sure stung SV where it hurts, huh? Now everybody suggest better ideas than UBI because I haven't got any but I still want to feel edgy and validated."
EDIT: I think I get it now, the author is a socialist type who is troubled by a capitalistic solution for post-labor society.
With UBI, the economy would still based on capitalism, using money, private ownership of capital and property, and using all those things to create profits (which would then be taxed). People will develop marketable skills to earn more money (which would be taxed). All this is the same as it is now.
By way of example, if you are trying to ensure that everyone gets a loaf of bread: a communist solution is taking over the bakery and ordering its workers to produce a loaf of bread for everyone. A capitalist solution is taxing the owners of the bakery and then transferring everyone money equal to the price of a loaf of bread. UBI is clearly in the latter camp.
Um, universal basic income? It is fundamentally redistributive. How does he think it's going to get funded? It's going to need 60-70% tax rates across the board.
And they make tons of cash.
Instead of working a crappy job that you hate, you can afford to find a job that you love, even if it's lower pay.
eg. If you're working for 15k units of money at a job you hate, under basic income you could keep on earning 15k + say 10k of UBI for total 25k. Or you could switch to 10k UBI + 5k salary at a job you love. The beauty of that system is that currently there are a whole class of jobs that really struggle to exist (like music/arts/etc.), because no-one can afford to work for only 5k a year. It also has an added benefit of improving those terrible jobs in the first place, as no boss can abuse his staff without them walking out (no unions needed!).
Sure, but wouldn't price increases effectively divide the equation by 15k? I find it intuitively difficult to believe that if walmart cashiers suddenly got an extra 15k money units the price of toilet paper (and every other basic essential) wouldn't increase by some factor, effectively neutralizing UBI.
UBI sets a floor, and we conveniently already have a floor today - disability + food stamps + unemployment + whatever else you qualify for.
Note: The main idea of the universal part of basic income is that it is far cheaper to run than disability/food stamps/unemployment/etc. For every penny we spend on "qualified" handouts, we spend twice that in verifying the handout in the first place.
I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like if everyone who had a wild hair to be a professional musician or writer went ahead and did it. Good? Bad? I don't know. Interesting for sure though.
Another interesting feature that I can see happening is that "undesirable" jobs like cleaning/garbage/sewage/etc. might start becoming high paid jobs instead of minimum wage. Afterall, who will want to clean toilets for only a slight increase over UBI? Versus getting an education and finding a job they like?
Edit: Also note that "job you love" doesn't exactly have to mean "follow your passions", it could just mean getting away from a terrible boss or awful company. I've had a job where the work was fairly trivial, but the team I got to work with was excellent and my boss was one of the best I've ever worked for. If people can afford to hunt for a job like that, it's an improvement.
Edit 2: I just want to follow up with another point. Undesirable jobs being highly paid means that there will also be an economic drive to automate them first. Currently low paid jobs stick around because the labour is cheaper than automation. If the really dirty jobs get eliminated this way, that might be a good thing too.
About halfway through he makes a good point about Uber drivers not making much money from the job. He mentions hypothetically giving drivers equity in the company. I think the end of the article had a pretty clear call-to-action, without gloating. Personally it got me thinking about ways I could change services I've built to pay both myself and users creating content on it. Think about if you could make money by posting great photos on Instagram. Not many SV engineers might care, but for others, that could potentially provide a much-needed source of income and an alternative to the currently non-existent UBI.
Two issues about the ownership: 1) They're being paid in transferable tokens which are redeemable for stock (ie, money) if they desire. 2) Uber isn't worth its valuation so they're better off with money.
Which, if you think about it, clearly doesn't work. The driver already gets the large majority of the fare. It's just that the driver gets most of one fare whereas Uber gets a small slice of every fare so the driver makes $8 once and Uber makes $2 times a billion. Even if you gave every single share of the company to the drivers and left nothing for any other investors, they would only get the small remaining slice of the fare after whatever administrative overhead the company has. In other words they would get the equivalent of like a 10% raise. It doesn't fix anything. The fundamental problem is that the market is highly competitive so it drives down fares/wages. If you want to get paid more, you have to do some other kind of work.
> Personally it got me thinking about ways I could change services I've built to pay both myself and users creating content on it. Think about if you could make money by posting great photos on Instagram.
Which is exactly the same problem. When you post a picture on Instagram, Instagram on average makes a few cents. They're a billion dollar company because it's a few cents times a billion people. If you gave all the money to the people posting pictures they would still be making far less than minimum wage.
1) I think the parent missed the point that the author was suggesting potential alternatives to UBI, and
2) It's an interesting idea that some of one's income could come from products like Instagram.
Of course the companies are the ones creating the value in the first place, which is why they make the $2 x 1B. But even when Uber rolls out its driverless cars, the Uber drivers who were automated out of their jobs are still going to want to work at something. Hell, they might even want to try to make money from their new endeavor rather than live off of some basic income. And the "arrogance" I think the author is referring to is Sam's notion [0] that the people working all these soon-to-be-obsolete jobs across the country are going to suddenly need UBI so they don't end up living out on the street, which just doesn't seem true.
[0] "However, if we cannot find a new kind of work for billions of people, we’ll be faced with a new idle class. The obvious conclusion is that the government will just have to give these people money, and there’s been increasing talk about a “basic income”—i.e, any adult who wanted it could have, say, $15,000 a year." http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-and-wealth-inequality
Doesn't it though?
Automation pretty much has a formula. The cost of R&D for the automation has to be less than [human compensation for doing X] times [number of humans who do X] in order for X to be automated.
The cost of developing the automation is highly correlated with how much intelligence is required to do the job, so the things automation targets most easily are anything that pays well, employs a lot of people and doesn't require high intelligence.
Automation replaces jobs starting from the middle and going up and down from there. So the safest jobs are the ones requiring the highest intelligence and the ones paying the lowest wages, and as automation improves, the level of intelligence required to be in the first group will increase and the wages paid to the second group will decrease.
Now suppose you're someone who is already below the intelligence threshold for the first group. You can still get the second type of job, but soon enough that type of job won't pay a living wage (assuming it even does currently). And if we continue to have minimum wage laws then you will instead find yourself unemployed, because automation will drive the value of unskilled labor below minimum wage.
UBI fixes that. It lets you add the UBI to the low value of your labor and end up with enough to live on. Or use the UBI as the safety net required to do higher reward work with higher risk of failure.
The trend is very clear: the list of tasks which can be automated is getting longer. The list of jobs being done by unskilled and/or nontechnical workers is getting shorter. This is a trend noted by economists for many decades (we've all heard about how most jobs in America are now 'service jobs', that is just one example).
It is very lazy to do what this author is doing. See success, demand charity via a convoluted argument which boils down to "instead of solving everyone's problems, listen to my populist bullshit and solve them in this obviously unworkable way that is based on ignorance and doesn't challenge any assumptions that are widely held. Change is scary and not guaranteed to make every single thing better, so we should fight it."
Trust is a slippery thing, given it can be swayed by biases. So is blaming others, which is exactly what you are doing with your comment. Arrogance comes from blame based on a comparison operation to the one doing the comparison. There's clearly biases involved in that operation.
The quotes you are using in your third paragraph are a way for you to speak for others, which is exactly the type of arrogance being referred to in the article.
Let others speak for their own thoughts and actions. Stick to your own and we'll all get along!
Edit: trimmed this to my core response
I think that watching TV has no inherent prevention from being arrogant, so TV watchers must be arrogant too! (Armchair quarterbacks anyone? Hell, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the article itself was written by some sort of armchair [whatever]!)
Competition is gaining resources others are also attempting to obtain. When the trust channels get double bound by others, VCs for example, judgement and arrogance appears. I view competitive arrogance as a special type of judgement that indicates another's approach to the problem you are solving will NOT be competitive. Again, it's easier to judge others than it is yourself. Saying something doesn't make it true.
Competition can occur without judgement. Just look at life, less the human equation.
No, it's still arrogance to believe you're right and the rest of the world is wrong. Even if you believe it's "true".
If you are right, then arrogance is a wonderful thing.
This seems to be the crux of the argument, that concentrated wealth is bad but direct redistribution via taxes/Government is also bad. The "proposed" solution in the article is to construct a most certainly complex set of laws/regulations such that companies themselves are forced to redistribute their wealth amongst their employees, which only works if you have employees to share with. If 3 people make an awesome mobile game that makes millions of dollars, even split evenly, they're helping virtually nobody with their product yet accumulating a very non-trivial amount of wealth. UBI or similar tax schemes would naturally capture this wealth and redistribute it, I'm not aware of a cleaner/simpler alternative than that.
Note: I think the discussion this article is creating is good, but that the article itself is quite poor.
The article does not provide a definition, and seems to repeatedly make the hilarious mistake that Silicon Valley can be "personally" deserving of the sort of moralistic/authoritarian pseudo liberal browbeating that's so common in the media nowadays.
It isn't a person that can be shamed on social media. It isn't a nation, a government body, a think tank or any other sort of institution that owes you or society a damn thing. If it even can be viewed collectively it's an expression of capitalism and technological progress that is single mindedly interested in providing value to shareholders.
I am sick of the Larry Ellison type role model of leadership that is encouraged and celebrated.
Mindless ambition is not a bad thing if you want to climb a mountain or walk to the north pole in winter on your own. But if you want to rule the world you will do harm in unimaginable ways.
Restore sane monetary policy so most people can accumulate wealth. Rebuke the broken Silicon Valley VC model of proprietary systems that further concentrate the N^2 wealth from Metcalfe's law into a few rendezvous bottlenecks. Only then can we have a chance at a functioning economy in the face of increasing technological progress.
> After feedback, BI will just raise rents a corresponding amount
Basic Income is inherently redistributive. The prices of goods are inherently based on the distribution of income. It is pretty reasonable to expect the balance of prices to adjust given the income redistribution.
> And income always comes with strings attached
The point of BI is income without strings, so could you explain how this is impossible?
> Restore sane monetary policy
Could you explain what you regard as sane monetary policy?
> Could you explain what you regard as sane monetary policy?
Restoring the ability for non-upper-class people to save. Specifically, ending the policy of forced inflation that prevents the lower class from saving in cash, and pushes the middle class into simulated "investments" to slow the erosion. Technological progress means prices should be getting ever-cheaper, so the effects of forced inflation get ever-worse - an economic treadmill that favors income (with accompanying requirements) over minor wealth (which can be wielded as one pleases).
> The point of BI is income without strings
That is the initial intention and design, but all systems evolve. BI creates an income stream at the mercy of politics, which are the biggest strings that can be attached. Imagine the same "drug users on welfare" rhetoric applied to even more people.
> Basic Income is inherently redistributive
But still subject to the rent treadmill, which will simply recollect the distributed money upwards to the money printers and associated artificial industries (eg by increasing the arbitrary capital cost of a place to live, raising the carrying cost aka rent). BI seems like a solution because it goes right along with the trends of centralization, but it's those very trends that are causing the economic pain in the first place!
Do a thought experiment - imagine claims on future BI were allowed to be sold. There's currently a lucrative trade in turning structured settlements into immediate lump-sum cash, and it's often looked down on as exploitive. What economic incentive keeps BI payments from being deannuitized in such fashion?
If your immediate thought is to pass a law prohibiting that, then you seem to agree that it goes against current economics. My fundamental point is to think about that economic gradient, what makes it so, and how that underlying problem can be reformed. Because otherwise BI just seems like adding fuel to the fire, regardless of laws to make the burning less efficient.
We want to fund companies that have the potential to
create a million jobs.
There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to
divide labor between humans and computers-—we are very
good at some things computers are terrible at and vice
versa—-and some of these require huge amounts of human
resources.
This is both good for the world and likely a good
business strategy—-as existing jobs go away, a company
that creates a lot of new jobs should be able to get a
lot of talented people.
"Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity"
People are poor because they are lied to about how the world works. They are lied to by the true believers whose paychecks depend on them repeating the same tired post-modern bunk. Poor kids drop out of school because they know they are being lied to, but don't have the tools to manage the cognitive dissonance - because they point of most public education these days is to indoctrinate kids into accepting and submitting to dissonance instead of reasoning about it.
I will help anyone who wants out, but anyone who wants me back in can drop dead.
Come on hacker folk… you can (and have!) reach higher than this.
Oh… and before you hit that vote or reply button… take a deep breath and read through some of Papert's earlier works.
It's easy to take an intellectual position on your reading of the (assumed) flaws in a critics commentary but, as most smart kids learn sooner or later, once the tide turns against you it becomes a lot harder to win people's trust.
In fact, a study of startup markets shows that an extremely large percentage of founders in other cities are transplants from Silicon Valley (or lived there in the past). Why is that?
I would bet that when it came to pure ability, 80% of the people reading this post have what it takes to potentially do something used by millions of people.
Though we can't learn it, it is a matter of cold data where anyone who actually will do so is located. That data is very skewed geographically, and in my personal estimation, it is skewed toward Silicon Valley. This could probably be demonstrated.
[1] articles about the "arrogance of Silicon Valley" can themselves be construed as being someone telling people to get a grip on themselves and to stop changing the world. "You're not special enough to change the world" means: stop doing it
All that is being observed is that the natural tendency for technology is remove the need for manual labor. This first happened to agriculture, then manufacturing and now the push is to automate services that can be. Over time this naturally leads to people needing to move into work that creates this new technology or create new industries in order to work in. If indeed they need to work.
The idea that technology will eventually power our basic needs without human assistance isn't that far from reality, sure we may still be decades away but decades aren't really that long. We need to think about the problem well before then because even small amounts of unemployment (10-15% or greater) causes serious problems given societies current structure.
It's not just work that breaks down on this automation horizon though but also money/wealth/capitalism. Whatever you call the current state of affairs. People will still need to live, do something day to day etc but they will no longer need to work just for society to function. So money as an incentive doesn't really need to exist at that point.
Ofcourse this is very pie in the sky but even so I don't think people realise this is a very real possibility and may happen sooner than many of us think, not in it's completion but sufficiently to force significant numbers of people out of work and make people consider it as a real future.
• "Silicon Valley isn't spending time working on stuff _I_ think is valuable."
• "So what if kids find Snapchat to be critical. Those kids are "connected" and therefore don't matter! _I_ don't get it, therefore it's dumb!" (Even though it's very easy to demonstrate many social networks do in fact engage with and edify kids in low income families because of specific allotments of social media time in schools.)
• "Universal Basic Income is bad because people have a deep seated desire to work and their basic needs aren't being met, so rather than triaging that problem and lifting them out of the toxic debt spirals that entrap them in this state, we should focus on _educating them._"
• "Taxpayers as a whole have no business helping the less fortunate. This is the sole responsibility business." (Even as we then mock them."
• "Therefore businesses should have the mandate to make people's lives better, rather than offering them better solutions. That's not presumptuous at all."
These are all implications of the worldview of this article. It's cleverly couched in terms mocking Sam Altman's naive view of the world and then somehow using that to pave over the huge amount of work all over the country on technology centering around education, medical treatment, financial improvement, legal automation, etc.
And in the end, of course, this article is about... DISRUPTING VENTURE CAPITALISM. Because again, THAT top-down view of the world is bad, but OUR top-down plan will be totally great.
First of all, before any of this can come to pass, SV will have to deal with the government. They control over a third of the country's spending. And they're not just going to allow subcontractors to automate all those jobs away to the most cost effective bidders/ most efficient solutions. Ever hear of no-bid contracts - they're the norm. There's no rule that says Government has to use tax money in an efficient manner, just look at what's going on right now.
There will eventually be some degree of automation. But, unfortunately for society, I don't think it will ever become as widespread as alluded to in the article.
Does anyone actually disagree with this? And if not, why write an attack against that position?
Even though it's outside the natural scope of the YC (that being a Canadian-based study vs US-based), there's no reason why this can't be done. Particularly with the cultural similarities between Ontario (at least Southern Ontario) with parts of the US.
There's huge value in having 2 independent studies that can check each other's assumptions than putting all our eggs in one basket.
And Valley companies are doing just about everything they can to work on spreading the expertise via online education, telepresence, open source, etc.
Vast majority of those who work in SV were not born there or started in some social network. They moved there because they were highly skilled, and then they entered the social network.
I was raised by a single working mother, and went to a state university. Not rags to riches, but definitely not a life of privilege.
Meritocracy in SV isn't perfect, especially when you consider the supply feeding into it. But it's the best example of meritocracy the human race has.
I'm sad at how much could be accomplished with the waste created by SV incompetence. It's incredible how little merit people have considering the amount of money they're paid. I feel like the compulsive gambler is the best analog to Silicon Valley: Blowing every last penny you have, over and over, on the belief that you'll someday strike it rich.
There are several infamous SV examples of literally gambling, such as the former Fry's executive who embezzled $65M to feed his gambling habit:
http://www.dailytech.com/Frys+VP+Arrested+for+Embezzling+ove...
(How do you release a guy on a $300K bond when he's already stolen $65M that you know of? That's a heck of a bargain for him!)
No, it is having to pay super high salaries because it insists on forcing people to all move to the same place, which both artificially limits the talent pool and drives the cost of living there higher.
> The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech.
The result is that self-taught people have an ever-harder hill to climb to even get interviews, let alone get hired. How many times have we had discussions here wherein people said their job postings were inundated with unqualified and barely-qualified boot camp grads?
And I think the inundation of underqualified is just the cost of sorting out the good people. I've personally hired two people who never went to college. And I know a lot of people with unrelated and/or BS-only degrees who went big. You can get a laptop that does fine for $300 + internetCost. Getting an education that could earn 6-figures if you're good at it has never been easier. Maybe not perfect, but never easier.
Yes, but they are the exception.
> And I think the inundation of underqualified is just the cost of sorting out the good people.
Which this industry has consistently shown it is horrible at.
> I've personally hired two people who never went to college.
That doesn't say anything about how the larger industry behaves.
> And I know a lot of people with unrelated and/or BS-only degrees who went big.
A degree is still enough of a signal to get you past screens that one with no degree can't.
> You can get a laptop that does fine for $300 + internetCost. Getting an education that could earn 6-figures if you're good at it has never been easier.
"Could" being the opportune word. In most of the country the median salary for a software engineer with a degree and 10 years experience isn't six figures. If you are trying to sell people the idea that they are going to make $100,000/year after a few months of Coursera courses on a $300 laptop you are selling a pipe dream.
I've had English & PoliSci coworkers who couldn't find rewarding work in their degrees; so they self-taught tech and landed well-paying jobs in short order. Smart cats. I remember one venting about an English-degree colleague berating him for his privilege. Same degree; A made a choice, and B blames privilege. It's a general sentiment I see towards coders, like we were born with a laptop and capital.
Privilege is still involved, though. You need to have a lot of spare time in order to self-teach programming - that's very easy for people with comfortable incomes and/or the support of people with one. If you're drowning in student debt and taking on multiple part time jobs in order to make ends meet, self-teaching is never going to be able to get high enough on the priority list.
They really don't. Were you paying rent while working as a pizza delivery driver? Did you have any dependents to support? Any health conditions that you struggled to afford to treat without health insurance?
Some of these are intractable problems (if you have kids, life is busier) but the broad attitude of "opportunity is waiting for you if you choose to take it" is nonsense. It's entirely possible to be trapped in your current life situation. It wouldn't matter so much except that it is an absolutely tiny leap from that characterizing these people are lazy and not deserving of any help or pity.
You can all construct all kinds of fictional scenarios where someone can be literally occupied for all 168 hours of every week, but we both know that the overwhelming vast majority of people have 20 hours a week of time. I have two small kids now and work full time and still have 20 hours over the course of the course to week to do things. "Life is busier" just means there are other things you choose to prioritize higher.
A lot of people learn to code while living with the parents, I don't see what is ridiculous about me mentioning it.
> You can all construct all kinds of fictional scenarios
Look, these scenarios exist. It isn't the scenario you experienced, and I'm not saying it's some widespread epidemic that is taking over the country. But they absolutely exist. It's why things like scholarships exist for universities - to help give people opportunities they would not be able to reach otherwise. There are no scholarships for self-taught programming, so it is not a realistic option for everyone.
I now think the article has a point about arrogance.
For most individuals, low-paid and low-skilled jobs don't give nearly the sense of purpose that a tech job gives. People are driving cars and sweeping corridors because they need to survive, not because they love doing it.
The difference between welfare and honest income resulting from such a job is ~$5/hr in many industrious cities in the US. I think many people would - understandably - rather just sit on their asses all day and collect that welfare instead of working a back-breaking manual labor job. That's why there is a record number of "discouraged workers" [1] in the US's labor reports. Low-income jobs are becoming less useful for the overall economy and this trend started over 100 years ago. This is why the government established that ever-convenient "safety net" (which, yes, has many holes in it) in the first place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discouraged_worker#/media/File...
> In its mind, Silicon Valley creates the future, while the rest of the world will soon become the “idle class.” What if they instead helped people build wealth for themselves?
The idle class is a desirable end state. I for one would take that deal immediately if offered: to have the rest of my existence unconditionally funded, without anyone forcing me to do work I don't want to do. I think there are many people who would be happy to not have to sell their labor to survive.
The authors' premise clings to the idea that everyone needs to derive their self-worth from the illusion of providing for oneself. Everyone who grows up in the Western world owes their survival to their family, society and the government. In reality, you are not independent. Selling your labor on a market is just one way of partaking in the enormous system you were born into. In the future, you'll be able to work on whatever you want, irrespective of the market, and that's how you'll contribute back. Make art. Organize communities. Study the nooks and crannies of the universe. Play sports. Live.
> And you wonder why political candidates on both sides are tapping into anti-elitist anger with great success.
It is only elitism if it denigrates. On the contrary, automation is supposed to be relief from drudgery. If anything, it denigrates the work, not the person. The major challenge is to have our political systems keep up with the pace of change. This is a huge challenge.
> The idea here is borne from an underlying assumption that capitalism has winners and losers, and the victors have a responsibility to take care of the rest. Instead, we’d posit that many of the “winners” in Silicon Valley are part of a faux meritocracy — being born into the right city or social network.
The system can be unfair and still have winners and losers. I think most people in SV understand how exceptionally lucky they are to not have been born into slavery in Mauretania, even though they don't exactly go out of their way to show it. The authors are right: SV is not meritocratic in any sane definition of the word. SV is unfair. It should be improved upon, but it's never going to be perfect.
In the authors' view, you are not being taken care of by your society if you sell your labor. I disagree.
> When India didn’t go for a Silicon Valley-led internet proposal, Marc Andreessen gained global denunciation (including from Silicon Valley CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg) for a tweet
This is a cheap attack on Andreessen. His comment, while horrendously worded, was clearly meant as a complaint against knee-jerk reactions. (That said, I think India made the right choice in rejecting Free Basics.)
> the world will eventually be out of work and become a burden on the enlightened few
Hopefully, by the time we get there, redistribution will be extensive enough that everyone can live a lavish life.
> the resulting social unrest
Probably. The political climate will not adjust lightly.
> Snapchat may be solving an important problem for well-connected young people in America who don’t have to worry about basic needs. But whether it’s unemployed young people in St. Louis looking for their next paycheck or a family in Flint, Michigan worried about clean water, many Americans have more immediate problems.
There is a difference between problems that capitalism can solve and problems that politics can solve. Capitalism solves market problems. Politics solves the rest. St. Louis and Flint are political problems. The problem is politics, not tech. Imagine if politics were more efficient.
> What if a percentage of the $50B valuation were shared among the drivers, based on a merit-based system?
This would be a nightmare to implement, notwithstanding that it's a terrible way to influence the market. The market is good at figuring out what things are worth. It often makes very unfair decisions, and in those cases politics should come in and rescue the day. The American model is increasingly incompatible with technology, which is increasingly demanding more redistribution. Why try to shoehorn a very complex equity-sharing system into the market, when some simple redistribution could achieve the same end? It's all for the sake of preserving the faux ideal of being independent.
> But the conclusion — that the automation of these jobs will create a lot of wealth for a few people (of course the brilliant ones in Silicon Valley) but leave most out of work (the rest of us) — is reflective of Silicon Valley’s arrogance.
Politics. We'll just take the money from them :)
> How do we change ownership structures to prevent Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp from distributing billion-dollar windfalls among only a couple dozen people?
Whatever the imagined solution is, it is redistribution. You can dress it up in a wig and an evening dress, but it is still redistribution. The only difference is perception. Redistribution via UBI is seen as robbing people of their independence, whereas redistribution via unspecified market intervention is not.
Technology is going to go the way it wants to. I've said it a million times but I'll say it a million times more: politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics.
This reads like somebody just wanting to complain.
YC says that their startups need to move to SF/SV? Yeah, they do. They do it because they see real, concrete value for a startup being there. YC has actual experience with startups, so they have a reasonable basis for knowing what they're talking about. This isn't "Silicon Valley Arrogance", it's some people who are actually involved seeing that there are concrete benefits to being in SF/SV.
YC is talking about basic income because they think SV's going to have all the money and everyone else is going to be left behind? YC's talking about basic income because they see people being left behind, and they actually care enough to want to do something about it. That's not arrogance; it's observation plus compassion.
In fact, most of them (and likely also you) are alive only because modern society is full of rubber bumpers and safety nets. I don't mean things like Social Security - I mean things like grocery stores and municipal water.
This isn't a bad thing, and it doesn't mean those people aren't good, or not worthy of basic human care and comfort. After the robots take their jobs, we need to give them a guaranteed basic income or they'll be dying in the streets.
There's nothing arrogant about acknowledging that - I think it's arrogant to assume that every person is smart enough (like you) to take care of themselves in a shockingly changed economy.
But that stuff isn't free - you still need money to exchange for groceries because you've spent generations specializing in factory work and forgot how to hunt. A lot of people are going to need hand outs so they can maintain access to these "rubber bumpers" that they're unable to provide for themselves.
Nobody wants to talk about this for the same reason that the abused wife and children who live under a borderline-psychotic alcoholic father don't talk about it: it's "reality," and we don't feel like there's anything we can do about it, and talking about it threatens our coping mechanisms. The human ability to not see is prodigious, probably an adaptation that has arisen precisely to help us cope with our condition. I once heard an anecdote from a psychologist about a woman who was raped by her father in the bed with her mother, and the mother claims to have seen nothing.
In our case the abusive father is "nature," a soulless chthonic process that did not think about the ethics of imbuing the agents in a Darwinian system with self-awareness, empathy, and consciousness. As far as we can see it just happened as a result of runaway evolution for central nervous system capability.
So nature builds random assortments of genes and throws them at the wall. Never mind that these "agents" experience their existence. If you happen to be born with no legs, then... well... you are born with no legs. If you happen to be born with a less efficient brain that makes the world a bewildering haze of incomprehensibly complex systems that all seem arrayed against you, then... too bad. You're just a trial permutation in an algorithm.
Watch the film Dark City. That is the human condition, only it's not being done to us by creepy aliens but by an unconscious natural process.
I happen to think we might be able to do something about this this century, and that Silicon Valley might have some part in that. But the irony is that the sort of folks who write screeds like this Medium piece would be the first to shriek and condemn any attempt to interfere with holy Nature and its blessed bell curve distribution of genetic traits. Even talking about it is threatening our coping mechanisms.
Society is getting more complex, but our genes are not changing that fast (if at all). Eventually a huge number of people are going to fall off a cliff where the economic value of their labor in a free market is <=0. That's actually completely disastrous for the entire economy, since it will cause the velocity of money to collapse and lead to political and social instability. Guaranteed minimum income is one way of dealing with this problem. Personally I think CRISPR is another. It's time to open our eyes and start doing something about our condition.
I don't advocate eugenics at all. We shouldn't get rid of "inferior" people. We should empower them to improve themselves in the manner of their choosing. Actually we already do this. If I have no legs I can get a wheelchair. So all I advocate really is going further... a whole hell of a lot further. Radical transhumanism is really nothing more than the radical advocacy of medicine, so much so that I doubt the need for a new term.
Guaranteed minimum income might actually be a stepping stone here, since it would empower those whose abilities are no longer economically valuable with both money and time. Some will waste it playing Halo and watching TV and drinking beer, sure, but some won't. What will they do with their free time? When interesting things are discovered by a few pioneers they spread virally through populations. It will also prevent the collapse of the modern economy due to collapsing monetary velocity. The Hunger Games is an almost accurate portrayal of a post-labor world that still clings to the Puritan work ethic, but for one detail: I doubt such a society could maintain high technology for long.
I do wonder sometimes if our periodic freak-outs about "decline" (e.g. Naziism) aren't at some level psychotic reactions to un-shielded glimpses of the true reality of our condition. Coping mechanisms exist for a reason. When they break down at an individual level, things like suicide and psychotic breaks sometimes result. Historically humanity was utterly powerless to alter its condition, and when you're powerless coping is all you can do. The eugenics fervor of the early 20th century happened as religion started to break down and as we started to comprehend the nature of our "alien god": http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/
(Not a total fan of Less Wrong but that article is brilliant.)
Another great film in the genre of Dark City is Life is Beautiful, which is an excellent allegory for the role of religion in human existence. We all live in a death camp called nature, and we have people like priests and philosophers who tell us it's all just a game and if we do real well we'll win a tank... or a trip to heaven. I believe humanity has historically used "gnostic" themed fiction like this as a safe way to examine its condition without truly "seeing" it.