The law is not for entrepreneurs, they just see it as a signpost that you have to be aware of. It invariably ends ok in the long run and in the short term everybody calls them tech bros.
Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb. Yes, there’s a negative externality aspect — if your neighbors are suddenly renting out their place to random people, that can get painfully annoying for you. But I bet if you did a methodical poll, most people would choose not to un-invent Airbnb.
Self driving cars, ditto. Cruise’s fleet is finally deployed all around SF, according to pg. It’s about to become as ubiquitous as electricity. And in the beginning, so many people argued that it’s against the law and therefore shouldn’t be developed. Then it quietly shifted to well, maybe the law should change.
It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril. You’re outsourcing your thinking to the lowest common denominator: it’s what people in positions of power feel is justice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, do you really want to be the kind of person that believes it should be obeyed no matter the tradeoffs?
This isn’t a hypothetical for me. People have asked many times if I was worried that someone will try to come after me for making books3 available. Till one week ago, I wasn’t. But if the world really wants to say that I’m causing suffering by making books available to machine learning researchers, I have very little leverage to argue that I am not in fact doing that… except ethics. Because without books3, only OpenAI is able to train powerful large models, because they’re the only ones that can get away with it. Is that justice?
You’re an inspiration to me in many ways. I still remember you showing me your workshop, and how friggin cool it was. I’ve tried to channel your maker spirit over the years to be even half as talented. But I just don’t understand where this bitterness comes from against “tech bros”; it’s a fairly common theme in your writing. Sweeping generalizations are such dangerous territory, in terms of history proving that you were mistaken.
Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible. I think it’s pretty dystopian. But that’s a separate question: evaluate each startup on its merits, and crucify the Theranos frauds. This can be done on an individual basis.