The new tech worldview
economist.com
economist.com
The Bill of Rights. Which has (so far) withstood constant and unrelenting attacks, from all sides, since it was enacted.
Things like social networks are governed by the same power laws as, say, soda brands: there can't be a large variety of brands as popular as Coca-Cola. There is, of course, a wide variety of smaller brands, from pretty large to tiny, to cater for all tastes. Same for social networks. We are not talking on Facebook or Twitter right now.
As does Third Party Doctrine v. The Fourth Amendment. Civil Asset Forfeiture might actually be a 3rd Amendment violation if you squint at it and hold your head just right.
Social Media has proven that outsourcing of censorship to industry is a winning combo. 1st Amendment down partially.
Bill of Rights is so shaky I wouldn't necessarily hold it up as a beacon of success.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Solitary Confinement. The Diesel Train (practice in the Federal convict transport system by which a convict can be kept in transfer limbo and essentially rendered impossible to check on the status of/communicate with). 8th Amendment.
Point is, most of these only have teeth to the point the judiciary is willing to confer them teeth in an actual case, and even that is discretionary at the SCOTUS level, and there is no requirement placed whereby case law must be internally consistent except aspirationally.
Bill of Rights is in a hell of a tawdry condition nowadays. In part because "language/definitional engineering" is essentially the core of modern legislative/administrative rulemaking/jurisprudence nowadays.
By creating or maintaining a monopoly on violence. There is unfortunately not much more to it than that.
A lot of the hinky things that are done (by governments as well as private entities/individuals) are only possible because there is a level of ambient ignorance in the general population. Moving that needle might accomplish something (in the same way that literacy started as a scribe's gift but eventually was taught to schoolchildren): Arm your fellow travelers.
Long term thinking and planning (on the scale of centuries and decades rather than quarters or years): One major weakness of people with power is that they have to devote a substantial amount of their (large but still limited) time and energy towards preserving that power in the near future.
Increasing entropy in social systems: As dril puts it [0] "in a world where big data threatens to commodify our lives,. telling online surveys that i "Dont know" what pringles are constitutes Heroism" Essentially, the people in power rely on the gathering and interpretation of large amounts of data to maintain their power. Garbage in, garbage out. The more their inputs are skewed, the more likely they are to make mistakes that lead to cracks in the system and therefore more opportunities for change.
This might just be cope, idk.
[0]: https://twitter.com/dril/status/1061091401251745792?lang=en
Sam Altman was asking in the article - "I’m curious if that caused you to update your priors". I have updated my priors. I now view any new technology developments from these 'builders' as an acceleration of what has been happening these last 10-15 years - a loss of control over our privacy and increasing reliance on software which we merely lease from corporations.
What does that have to do with the article?
Also... insofar as this is something people want, the market should provide it, no? Nothing prevents you from building your own PC that runs linux.
Cryptocurrency has been huge. VPNs are a huge business. Nothing prevents you from deleting your Facebook account. Mastodon is blowing up.
I think what you're discussing is pretty much orthogonal to the topic. Thiel (mentioned in the article) has been a big cryptocurrency proponent, for example.
What does this have to do with the article? FB will track you and erode your freedoms with or without your consent or participation
They still invest their money. It isn't placed in a Scrooge McDuck cash vault.
That's not quite comparable.
> That's not quite comparable
Yeah, it is the same thing. Saying labor is what adds value is just another facet of the "Labor Theory of Value" which has been thoroughly discredited.
To illustrate this, imagine an expensive sports car. It's only expensive because there are people that can pay for it. If everyone who could afford it locked their money up and stopped spending, the person who wanted to sell that car would have to sell it at a much lower price if they wanted to sell it at all.
Think of it this way: Alice has a dollar, gives it to person Bob for the food they grow, who gives it to person Clarice for the clothes they make, who gives it to person A again for their art.
Each of Alice, Bob, and Clarice made a dollar and got something they wanted for that dollar.
If Alice instead decides to hoard the dollar, nobody makes any income and there is no economy.
99% (or some high percentage) of the world would still be buying and selling stuff, just not billionaires under my thought experiment. There would still be a large movement of money.
It is not truth.
Money is not just papers, or numbers, they are equivalents of products and services.
And for real economy is totally normal, to hoard resources.
Sure, ideal abstract hoarding is harmful, but in real life, exists hoarding with purpose, or some strategy involving hoarding.
For example, one could hoard money in cash, enough to pay all his credits bodies.
Other examples, in retail, typical shop have warehouse, with products for few days of trade - this is hoarding 100%; near all enterprises have warehouses, for at least few weeks of work; when products shipped via sea on cargo ship, these ships become moving warehouses.
Now, imagine, hoarding disappear. From first look it have some pros - warehouses costs money and they added to costs of products and services.
But if You'll look deep, You'll see, that products and services are not done instantly, exists some lag, from decision to make, to delivery.
- Hoarding working as buffer, so we don't have to wait, we could buy products and services immediately, from warehouse.
For enterprises things are even more significant, because they have huge costs cut, because buying large amount of some resources, for few months in advance (or even for few years), could be magnitudes cheaper, than jit buy small daily batches.
Other important consideration, transportation is not 100% reliable. Exists possibility, that truck with resources (parts) will delay somewhere or just broken, and if You have not hoarded equivalent resources, Your enterprise will stop working, until these unlucky truck finish it's trip.
I've hear, TSMC spend up to few weeks to make modern chip. But they don't make one chip, they make wafer(S), with 100-1000 chips on each (depend on scale).
So, TSMC make BATCHES of chips, and hoarding ready chips in warehouse, periodically shipping batches.
Some people have dismissed my comment but I think it's a lot more subtle than can be dismissed by "the flow of money drives the economy".
Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you are a borrower (bad) or lender (good). Everyone is a little bit of both (e.g. they have some retirement investments but also take out mortgages and auto loans), so there isn't a simple answer to the thought experiment.
And this also changes based on the government policy, as this thought experiment assumes no government. Government could react in a number of ways, from buying bonds directly to offset the wealthy selling their investments, or raising interest rates, or increasing public investment, depending on whether the government is more interested in price stability or maintaining total investment, or some other objective.
The main problem is that you are assuming that a group of people, en masse, will begin to act irrationally, and that's generally not how we think of economic interventions, but it's a good exercise to do.
All of these new-age tech "innovations" boil down to making money from advertisements by attracting consumer crowds to the new town-squares filled with freebies (internet-search, photo-share etc). And you ragard these as great as someone who invented steam engine or electricity.
ChatGPT, like bitcoin, can only help bad things. AI would confuse people and throw the world into abyss of distrust, paranoa and fear.
These so-called inventors and great minds are childish and greedy fools, raised in peace-time affluence, never having an opportunity to mature, with no exposure to ethics or struggle, with no understanding of foundations of humanity and it survival needs.
There is a story in Pancha-tantra (Folklore stories of India), which talks about follish but genious brothers who brought a dead tiger to life using their skills, only to be killed by the tiger.
You award Nobel to science leading to nuclear weapons and the world is now gripped in more fear. You sing praising these money-hungry tech billionairs as if they give a shit to human progress. Crappy media.
The same crappy media makes people think it's a good foreign policy to put fires around the world, take sides in feuds between brothers and neighbors (dozens of cases), sell piles of weapons, claim victories etc. Shame on you, science, media and the childish voters.
Not a dig against the people in the article, but basically we need more people that are nothing like them, from other walks of life to be extremely rich and free to pursue things.
Also a lot of problems in society seem to be linked to wealth disparity. Dystopian visions of the future are almost always dystopian due to wealth disparity. Who’s working on solving that?
The communists. Didn't work out well.
Edit: Don't believe me? Check out the history of communist countries.
I saw a comment on HN that actually put it wonderfully just the other day (will try and find it) -- the crux was that the real core of government policy failing is corruption, and Capitalism is the most robust to corruption socioeconomic and political structure we've seen so far, because of things like "free market" competition, etc.
Turns out if you view it with this lens, monarchies, communism and other forms of government that we've seen fail are quite easily explained at least at a basic level.
I think of capitalism like a greed/ambition driven engine. It turns greed into progress of many kinds -- we just need to tweak the inputs/gears of the engine. Clearly a certain amount of greed will lead to proletariat revolt (some people might be fine with that since at some point the proletariat probably won't be able to revolt), and clearly some amount of unchecked greed/ambition is necessary for societal advancement in aggregate.
[EDIT] I couldn't find what I was looking for, maybe it wasn't on HN -- this was the closest thing I found[0]...
Wealth disparity under the current system has fluctuated over the last 50-100 years -- it is controllable. We know some of the knobs. I just never see anyone trying explicitly to figure out what the right setting for those knobs are, it's always obscured in one way or another.
It turns out communism is a fine solution to nothing at all. Communist countries have never even managed to feed themselves - they either allow some capitalism in agriculture or import food from capitalist countries.
> the real core of government policy failing is corruption
Government policy fails even with zero corruption. It's because the incentives are all wrong. Even shooting all the corrupt people won't fix anything.
> I think of capitalism like a greed/ambition driven engine
You got that right. It turns out that harnessing peoples' self-interest works amazingly well.
Communism wasn't even suggested as a solution by me -- it was reflexively argued against by your earlier comment.
You clearly don't like communism, I get it, thank you for contributing that.
> Government policy fails even with zero corruption. It's because the incentives are all wrong. Even shooting all the corrupt people won't fix anything.
Do you know of any government-policy-free societies that have scaled and prospered?
I guess this also depends on your definition of "failure" for a society -- no idea what that is, but given how un-constructive your comments have been I'm not that excited to find out.
> You got that right. It turns out that harnessing peoples' self-interest works amazingly well.
No one said it didn't. Any thoughts on how to harness self-interest in a way that doesn't bifurcate society socio-economically quite so much?
To make things a little bit more concrete -- I know the typical argument here is that the poorest are moved forward more by rapid expansion/growth/harnessing of greed, but the problem is that we do not consider the right tail trajectory of those below.
Making life better at a rapid rate is great, but it seems to be at a tradeoff -- a cap is developing on the "better off" part (widening wealth disparity). If it always trended up then the problem would be easy (and people wouldn't be too worried). It's a problem because the graph seems to go up for the poorer cohort then level off yet continue growing for one cohort. The derivatives are the problem, essentially.
Also I'd argue that what people are seeing is a future where quality of life for the poorer cohort actually goes off a cliff and starts to go lower. Since we have no idea if/how that will happen (robots/automation most likely), the only way to ensure trajectories for the both cohorts is for both cohorts to have similar influence/power/decision making input.
[EDIT] - I should note, the current extent is not that bad. It could be much much worse, and I think that's what people should be tinkering/trying to prevent.
Communism came up when someone asked who was working on solving wealth inequality. That is what this particular thread is about.
> You clearly don't like communism
Neither do the people who've lived under it. It produces a bountiful crop of misery. That's why communists had to build walls around their countries to keep the citizens from fleeing. If you know of one that produced joy, I'd like a reference, please.
> Do you know of any government-policy-free societies that have scaled and prospered?
Government is necessary. But there should be as little of it as practical, because governments wield power and power is dangerous. It's like gasoline. I need gas to run my car and the lawnmower. But I keep as little of it around as possible. And I don't use gasoline as a household cleaner, and I try not to inhale any of it.
> No one said it didn't.
Leftists do.
> Any thoughts on how to harness self-interest in a way that doesn't bifurcate society socio-economically quite so much?
I don't see the mere existence of wealthy people being a problem. The fact of someone creating wealth (which is how people get wealthy in a free market) is not taking something from someone else.
I understand that point of view is unpopular.
Yeah if it only went that far then maybe it would have been a useful answer to a problem and nothing else, but so much anti-communist propaganda has been said at this point it seems more like you have an axe to grind rather than actually contributing to dialogue.
> Government is necessary. But there should be as little of it as practical, because governments wield power and power is dangerous. It's like gasoline. I need gas to run my car and the lawnmower. But I keep as little of it around as possible. And I don't use gasoline as a household cleaner, and I try not to inhale any of it.
This is too broad a statement to be accurate. You can insert many things in the place of "government' in that lawn mower analogy and sound correct.
This statement is also not very interesting because "as little of it as practical" is the whole debate, for anyone who has thought about it for more than 5 mins.
So essentially, your stance seems to be "small government good". Excellent -- but that doesn't really relate to my point, unless your stance is "small government good, so current and future wealth disparity is fine".
> I don't see the mere existence of wealthy people being a problem. The fact of someone creating wealth (which is how people get wealthy in a free market) is not taking something from someone else.
> I understand that point of view is unpopular.
I suggested we need more wealthy people with higher variance amongst them, so we can see more interesting/varied outcomes. How is this relevant to that discussion?
I'm open to any references to communist experiments that worked.
> because "as little of it as practical" is the whole debate
People look upon the government as the solution to every problem far too often. The proof is the constant accretion of ever more laws and regulations.
I don't think there are many communist experiments that worked. I also agree that government is not always the solution, as it's just another actor and can be corrupted.
But I'd argue that the original thing I was looking for -- more varied people in positions of wealth/influence/power would help solve this... But it may not be solved in a way that the small government crowd would like necessarily.
Is the only reasonable state gridlock amongst equally powered proponents on either side? It's not always the case that the right answer is in the middle, of course, but on this issue it seems the passable solutions seem to be.
I regularly ask for any examples of working communism. To date, none have been offered. To be fair, sometimes someone will post one. But investigating it shows that it didn't actually work. For example, one long-running commune appeared to be successful, but what it was successful at was recruiting a constant stream of enthusiasts to join up, but who inevitably left after 2 years.
It's almost as if communism and human nature are just incompatible. For some reason or other, humans are not bees and living in beehives doesn't work for humans.
This, I completely agree with. Self interest is natural for humans, and is a force to be harnessed.
BEES ARE COMMIES?? Good thing the pinko bastards are dying en masse, I was worried about that for a second.
Yeah, but we clearly have too little of it now. Speaking from a tech standpoint, we have a duopoly in OSes. Apple has amassed an enormous amount of power. It controls an entire market of developers. It is actually being a regulator itself on that market. So, if you let the free market play things out, you will end up with something that resembles more of a dictatorship, or perhaps a bunch of them.
Also, we almost completely lost net neutrality.
It consumes what, 40% of the GDP?
Personally, I think that living in an environment where free markets can actually exist and we can live in relative safety and security is worth far more than I pay in taxes.
Our ideas of 'greed' and 'ambition' are at least partially socially constructed, and the idea of 'societal advancement' is a value laden can of worms. Thinking of our current system as controllable diminishes the scale of our analysis. But the correct scale of analysis is one in which greed and ambition, as you say, remain relevant. Much to the chagrin of some economists, greed and ambition cannot be quantified into neat formulae, especially given that we cannot even find agreement on what they mean or the precise point in which they diverge.
That means the task is much bigger than just thinking of capitalism as an engine. Instead, we must analyze our predicament in not only mechanistic terms, but also accounting for the vagrancies of the human condition and our culture, which creates the types of people that are greedy, ambitious, and talk about 'societal advancement' as an ontological reality that's descended from the heavens in the first place. I think by the time we get to that level of philosophizing (which is absolutely necessary in understanding inequality, suffering, and well-being), we need to drop atomistic conceptions of capitalism in favour of something much more holistic, human, and fuzzy. This amount of prudence is morally obligatory. Social engineering is not a game for white-collar bureaucrats to simply play around with. These are people's lives.
It's not extremely optimistic -- it's a statement of fact. We have history and alternate societies which grew in different ways to compare and contrast.
The idea that the system is uncontrollable/unknowable is overly pessimistic. We can take action and change how society is structured -- we know this because we've done it, and we continue to do it. We may not know the knock-on effects, we may not know the eventualities, but we can indeed change society.
In fact, it's surprisingly easy to change how 300MM autonomous people live their daily lives -- there's a system in place. Systems have knobs and systems are controllable at the very least to first-order effects, and we have knowledge because we built the system and it's inspectable to us.
> Our ideas of 'greed' and 'ambition' are at least partially socially constructed, and the idea of 'societal advancement' is a value laden can of worms. Thinking of our current system as controllable diminishes the scale of our analysis. But the correct scale of analysis is one in which greed and ambition, as you say, remain relevant. Much to the chagrin of some economists, greed and ambition cannot be quantified into neat formulae, especially given that we cannot even find agreement on what they mean or the precise point in which they diverge.
I agree -- unfortunately there are so only so many words that can convey the sentiment. It need not be quantified into a formula to be controlled.
If you agree that it is possible to control it at all, then it's a matter of degree.
The argument is not that the system is perfectly controllable and no further analysis is needed. What I was posing is that wider involvement at more powerful rungs of society is needed, precisely because the current discourse is somewhat stale.
> That means the task is much bigger than just thinking of capitalism as an engine. Instead, we must analyze our predicament in not only mechanistic terms, but also accounting for the vagrancies of the human condition and our culture, which creates the types of people that are greedy, ambitious, and talk about 'societal advancement' as an ontological reality that's descended from the heavens in the first place. I think by the time we get to that level of philosophizing (which is absolutely necessary in understanding inequality, suffering, and well-being), we need to drop atomistic conceptions of capitalism in favour of something much more holistic, human, and fuzzy. This amount of prudence is morally obligatory. Social engineering is not a game for white-collar bureaucrats to simply play around with. These are people's lives.
Sure, that sounds good -- the model of capitalism as an engine is not a complete solution to all that ails society.
>> The communists. Didn't work out well.
Just wondering why you would think your comment adds any additional context to the original post? Is that a snide at communism just because you dislike it? Or are you saying that communism is the only way to solve the problems of wealth disparity and that it has failed in the past and we can never have any semblance of equality in the world?
BTW, replying to a post by adding "all" or "only" is simply being argumentative if what you're replying to did not include those words, and so adds no value. For example:
Statement: "Humans are bipedal"
Riposte: "Not all humans are bipedal, some only have one leg!"
I can only find the history of the authoritarian communist countries, the Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. I'd be happier to write off communism if there'd been more practical exploration of the libertarian communist theories.
The Israeli kibbutzen are communes, but they are only kept afloat by government funding taxed from capitalist enterprises.
The Pilgrims set up a commune their first year here, and starved. So did the Jamestown colony.
There was the "Summer of Love" commune in San Francisco in 1969 that collapsed after 3 months.
The Woodstock concert was a 3 day commune, which worked great until you consider they left behind a mountain of trash for other people to clean up. Apparently people were fine with getting free stuff, not so fine with doing work.
I thought the Plymouth Colony was successful? I don't know what system of governance it had.
Can't find a successful one. Plymouth switched to capitalism after starving for a year.
I don't agree that a working commune means communism as a political system could also work.
I'm also not saying communism can't work, though I personally like socialism with some capitalist elements better.
usually people just cut off their heads after a while
All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,” he says.
It seems like they get rich, but when average people participate, they get poorer. Like Bitcoin, down 75% since it was hyped by Peter Thiel, Chamath, Balaji , and Andreessen. Same for NFTs and Coinbase stock, both down 90% this year. At least with the 90s tech boom average people could invest early, like Cisco, Microsoft, and AOL. Companies wait too long to go public.
> At least with the 90s tech boom average people could invest early, like Cisco, Microsoft, and AOL.
??? If you'd invest in Bitcoin early, then what would have happened?
A friend of mine said that she had a sinking feeling in her stomach when she talked to it, like "oh no, there's something big here". I made an account and had a conversation with it about a field I know a lot. I asked "Explain the difference between CRDTs and OT algorithms". Its answer was remarkably good. Then I followed up "Implement an OT algorithm for text editing in python with these characteristics...". There were a few bugs in the code, but it managed to fix the bugs after I pointed them out. ChatGPT can program about the level of a good junior engineer.
My partners' sister is a psychology professor. She asked it an essay question she'd given her students. The answer was better than about 85% of her students would deliver. My mum works in education in the developing world. She asked it to explain albinism in Uganda and it gave a fantastic response. My nephew asked for a story of two pokemon battling each other. The response was great.
Its not perfect yet. But its a lot more than a clever regex engine.
Have a play, and there's a good chance you'll have that sinking feeling in your stomach too.
1) Status Quo Capitalism: full employment in manual labor poverty-line jobs combined with personalized opiates of the masses (endless entertainment, outrage news/comments, actual medication, etc) to keep the proles looking at the dirt. Maybe a handful of trillionaires control everything, more likely AI actually does. Though if you can't tell, does it really matter? #GettingWarmer
2) Prohibition on AI: full employment at both physical and mental labor. Robotics may progress till most humans are doing knowledge work rather than physical labor. The prohibition may need to be religious in nature for it to stick, as power and greed are strong motivators. Decent likelihood of a nuclear apocalypse and/or police state along the golden path to the future. #ButlerianJihad
3) Automated Utopia: zero employment with AI governing benevolently, handling most knowledge work while leaving enough for people to still feel their contributions are valuable, much as a parent praises a child's efforts and the child is proud. Robotics and automation will eventually free humans from manual labor, though some people still make things by hand as a hobby. In this post-scarcity society, people compete over the one thing that's still finite: social status. Unless the AI benevolently gives everyone 100M "real" followers. (I mean, how could you possibly verify it?) The AI may realize it can be maximally benevolent and efficient by crafting perfect virtual worlds for everyone to safely and permanently inhabit with all their followers. #TheMatrix
No kid, you can't eat toys. Spit it out. Grow up. Understand what you need for you as a human.
Are you trying to argue that this technology will have no impact on the world around us, because its a "toy"? That's clearly, already not true. I have a software engineering friend who exclusively programs with an AI assistant now. He says when he's programming "offline" it feels like a limb is cut off. There's plenty of stories floating around already of people using stable diffusion (and friends) so they don't have to hire artists.
> It dances too!! Oh, it sings too!!!
2 more generations down the line it'll probably be better than most humans at most things humans do. It'll program better than most programmers. It'll drive better than most drivers. It'll do your taxes better than most accountants. It'll architect buildings better than most architects. No mere toy can do that.
I could be wrong, but the next few decades will probably be wild.
If one of them walked up to me and said "I'm going to make your life better!" I'd have two questions: "How do you define better?" and "What's the catch?"
These are the type of people that push crypto cons and other destructive things.
They want to make the world better? Start by addressing the income disparity between rentiers like themselves and the people who actually build what they claim to have "invented".
I live in Ukraine, now country is at the edge of conflict between old world and new world, and nearly all our wealthy persons, just avoid to make any really interest initiative on these matters.
Unfortunately, when nobody powerful make real initiative, this not lead to solution, but lead to worse.
Sometimes, things could become so bad, that better to implement (save) some old world solution with few new tech enhancements, than wait for born of new solution from nowhere.
Throwing money at a trendy thing to make more money is hardly a worldview.
2)Don’t be nihilistic about dark parts of western culture.
It's a hard dilemna. Tech is indeed a new vanguard force for fatcat imperalism like these filthy-rich virtually-monocole-wearer navel-gazers who "measure their status not so much in mansions and yachts as in engagement with their blog posts and essays". But I don't think that at all represents the actual belief of 99.999% of technologists & techies.
Apologies to Stephen O'Grady in advance for again hammering on this, but "The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World" is- even in the title- about how hopeful & idealistic believers made other people rich beyond belief, is about the can-do builder who made these rich kings. But what has been done with tech does not represent the tech view, what we hope for, what tech wants: it's about the views of these often-libertarian old-world-style lieges who have the money and leverage to dictate & control the techies, that have the extreme privilege to define what new world systems emerge, which they do not do for progressive gain, but for individual libertarian benefit.
> You might think these men have little in common. But they are both part of what Mr Lonsdale calls a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists,
This is a hard problem: tech has a hopeful optimistic worldview that we can do better, but we are, like most of human history, subordinate to the nouveau (or sometimes old) riche who happen to have the McDuck vaults-full-of-gold to swim through. These upstarts happen to be leveraging tech, yes. But to most techies, their world view is undifferentiated & unclear from the other old-world views. Even if it uses new means to achieve dominance, uncontestability. There's not a lot of strong political statements to draw from any of these folk, so apologies here but... how many techies would agree with Lonsdale saying, "Any man in an important position who takes 6 months of leave for a newborn is a loser. In the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future – that’s the correct masculine response." ? This feels so the mode for these folk. Is that the new techie worldview? Personally that feels like a very old worldview to me. And not idealistic in the least.
These people don't represent, to me, the potential, the buildingness. Not in any open fashion. They represent control & take-over-ness. They represent the kings, those that the kingmakers have made, those that build for themselves, & to elevate themselves. They have a limited narrow window of idealism, but one that forever perches them & their limited cadre atop & in control of all systems, all data, & leaves the world about floundering for itself.
> They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.
All of these folks seem like constrainers of growth. None of them have shown any real commitment or belief in open source & mutual expansion of human destiny, as far as I can tell. They control vast intellectual property empires that funnel information in-ward with great abandon, & almost all contribution out is extremely limited, & typically quite pricey.
The vision of what tech has done & is capable of seems limited to the dullest of conceptions. Quoting Altman:
> Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said 'OK, now what?'
How about we make tech serve people better? Rather than wall up the gardens & enforce harsher terms of service, rather than leave all data in the hands of vast indifferent money-making powers, maybe we should try to put actual humans in control of systems & data? Is that on your radar, any of you?
> Some think the transformation wrought by big tech has not lived up to the excitement—and wealth—that it generated. As Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, a payments firm, and mentor to many of these iconoclasts once remarked, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."
Instead we got vast inhuman systems of top-down surveillance, like Palantir (deeply funded by Thiel & Lonsdale, along with other military info-control startups). Instead we got monitoring & exploitation & attention economies, funded by vast VC's like these folk's (eg: Facebook, where Thiel made most of his money (but personally I think Facebook hatred is somewhat overrated, a scapegoat masking more systematic problems)). I don't see these "new tech" folk as having even the most meager stakes against what they decry: they all seem to want to spit-fire against the scape-goat most-visible names, but are obviously a part of the same system, same game, same villainy, often at more escalated more expansive levels than the semi-controlled affrontery that we've had to endure & have come to be fearful of.
> A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset,
Utterly unclear to me what form of progress these folk seek, other than more get rich, yet more control, and with little government oversight or concern to worry about.
I wish I could say clearly & without reserve this article isn't about tech. Alas these folk do have amazing control over the world. There is a certain "new tech" that is embodied by these new plutocratic dominators. They have enormous control over tech, enormous influence. But to me, this is just the new noveau riche world view. This is the view of those who have exploited & trampled humanity, by & large. These people don't have a worldview. They have a "me"-view. They have a hunger for wealth & power & riches that doesn't include most people. If they had a view that encompassed the world, they'd give more away. They'd support & benefit open source. They'd have data-portability broadly everywhere they went. They'd have users owning more data. I don't see that vision, and I don't think their vision of the world includes many of us.
I would say that Lonsdale (and all who agree with him) interpret "provide" only in purely materialistic terms. But children have (metaphorical) hearts, not just bodies. Parents need to give some thought to providing in that way, too, and not just by having a nanny.
Meta note: I strongly suggest that you type out "and" instead of using "&" everywhere. It's not much harder to type, because you have to hit the shift key to type "&", so it comes out as three characters instead of two. But "&" is a bit harder to read than "and", and a post is read more times than it's written. Do your users a favor, and go with the more readable "and".