I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on
Same here.
I want to be an engineer.
As a good engineer, I find a problem then recursively ask why.
I end up with a political root cause - not a technical one.
This makes me sad.
I wish I could just be an engineer.
What the richest and most powerful people want, happens to be "be even richer and even more powerful".
Banal, sad, and universal.
> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress; it’s hugely exciting to think about how much more we could have.
Does he mean "how much more we could have if our federal government wasn't actively destroying our science institutions"?
- Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough.
- Those loans cause money to enter the system and then we all chase it around and we cooperate with people who give us some of it even though we know that having money is a lousy proxy for competence or vision or integrity or any other virtue that might actually warrant such deference, but it kinda sorta works enough.
- Research gets done in support of publications, the count of which is used to assess the capability of the researcher, even though we know that having many publications is a lousy proxy for having a made a positive impact, but it kinda sorta works enough.
If we can fix these systems that are just limping along... If money can enter the system in support of ventures which are widely helpful, not just profitable... If we can support each other due to traits we find valuable in each other, not just because of some happenstance regarding scarcity. If we can encourage effective research in pursuit of widely sought after goals, rather than just counting publications... well that will be a whole new world with a new incentive structure. AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.
The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI said that curing cancer requires raising taxes, cancer would remain uncured.
The trouble with you naysayers is you always take as immutable things that we can change.
Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.
as the top level comment pointed out, we have solutions to many of these things, but we choose not to do them. I don't think it's unfair to say "maybe we shouldn't spend billions of dollars on this thing that will probably just reinforce existing power structures".
> Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.
Agreed.
This system exists and is optimized to make the bankers rich. The idea that it helps ensure that ventures using that money will be successful is the thin veneer used 100+ years ago to sell it to everyone. But the true purpose has always been to make bankers rich. If you to institute any other system that would not achieve that purpose, you will find yourself battling enormous opposition.
The same things are true for huge parts of our society. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious is the US Healthcare system. Experience from all over the world shows clearly that it is not an efficient way to organize Healthcare, by any stretch of the imagination. Still, it won't change, not because people don't believe the outside examples, but because the system is working for what it was designed to do - transfer huge amounts of money to rich people. And it delivers just enough health care that people aren't routing in the streets against it.
It's like the math that takes # of homeless people times cost of an apartment, and then people claim we can solve homelessness for [reasonable amount]. Makes sense until you look how much US spends on homelessness every year already.
Cell phone technology was the closest thing we got to teleporting technology and wealth to the rest of the world. Most developing countries completely skipped a phase of development that required crazy amounts of infrastructure to be built out. More people have cell phones than running water. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Hopefully AI will be a similar leap frog.
Inequality is bad and getting worse. Big changes accelerate it because richer people can adapt and take advantage faster.
I enjoy playing around with AI for fun and find it amazingly useful. But I do not believe it can solve inequality - that’s a people problem.
AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pipeline. But that requires a fundamental rethinking of how we operate now. That world isn't socialism nor capitalism. That's a world where ownership becomes ill defined in many settings but still strict in others. It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here. Do we trust a few people to make all the robots to do all those things and then just abdicate all that power? Do we trust governments to do it? There's reason to trust no one. Because a deep dystopian can be created from any such scenarios. Going towards that hypothetical future is dangerous. Not because super intelligences, but because of us. Those with power tend to not just freely abdicate it... that's not a problem we're discussing enough and our more frequent conversations of ASI and the like just distracts from this one.
I'd like someone, amongst the tech bros for instance but it could be any influential politician in power, to set a target on when do we stop making life more miserable than it could for billions of people, by asking them to aim for no more than structural unemployment, 40+ hours weeks, steady economic growth in the name of progress.
Because as long as the end game isn't defined (and some milestones towards it), we won't have Star Trek, but a sci-fi version of a Dickens or Zola book, or at least an eternal treadmill augmented with marginally less useful innovations.
That's how I project over the next centuries the failed prediction from Keynes about everyone working 15 hours weeks in a near future, in a western world that yet did achieve post scarcity (at least for now)
What I mean is let's say you are making something and you see an issue. You know it'll be an issue and if fixed now will cost $100, but if you fix it a year from now it'll cost $1000. Many people will choose the latter. On paper, I think most people will choose the former but in practice the latter is often hard to determine. An example might be a security risk. It only gets harder to fix as you generate more code and complexity increases. But of hacked this has high costs both through business and through lawsuits.
The amortized one is a nasty problem because it often goes unnoticed. Say a problem costs $100 to fix now but every day it isn't fixed it costs $1.00 every day you don't fix it costs 5% more (so $1, $1.05, $1.1025,...). These sneak up on you and you'll pay a lot more than that $100 by the time you notice
A follow up would be to observe that in many places today, inequality causes substantial sub-populations to feel that they are not thriving, or even declining though GDP is increasing. Which would explain the rage of the middle-American and many Europeans.
If you buy all this, then there is a clear path by which radical abundance resolves the problems. Same as how the Baby Boomers were a very low-polarization generation; when everybody is thriving it’s a lot easier to get along.
Personally I worry more about the possible worlds where technology doesn’t bring us radical abundance. Declining empires with nuclear weapons don’t sound conducive to a fun time.
My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Typically that's online for most people, but in SF, it's a physical echo chamber, too.
That echo chamber allows large numbers of people (coincidentally, the people shepherding a lot of the technology) to rationalize any position they come up with and fall into a semi-permanent state of cognitive dissonance ("of course my technological solution is the solution").
If other people are saying the same thing nearly everywhere you look, who's to say those who disagree are actually the correct ones?
Technology can scale up small conveniences into major economic and quality of life wins.
But when it's tolerated, technology also ramps up seemingly small conflicts of interest into economic and society-degrading monsters.
Our legal intolerance for conflicts of interest as business models needs to go up a lot. No amount of strongly worded letters, uncomfortable senate interviews, or unplug-the-system theater, are going to discourage billionaires farming people's behavior, attention and psychology from continuing to farm people's behavior, attention and psychology.
These are political problems not technological problems.
I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their own governments?
Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government collect fewer tax dollars and citizens can give them to charity as they see fit.
Soft power is of obvious immense benefit to citizens of the United States, however you've rejected that in other comments.
The argument otherwise reads like a stereotypical "Not with my tax dollars!" argument. It's always fascinated me, that. Inevitably it's always an impassioned argument, regardless of the funding subject.
In this particular case, a very conservative estimate might put the number of child deaths in the tens of thousands. Reality is probably closer to hundreds of thousands at this point.
I pay taxes, a lot of them. I don't get angry when my taxes are used by the government to keep disadvantaged children in hellish conditions alive.
If you were to express the total cost of USAID's former budget against your tax bill as a binary choice between that and a few hundred thousand kids dying, I suspect it'd be much harder to maintain your current position.
Moreover, consider that central to this issue is the abrupt dismantling of an agency which was critical to global aid flow, and amounted to a rug pull. There was no justification for that.
Hopefully Sam's ASI is more compassionate than people, which frankly isn't a high bar lately.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/05/28/g-s1-...
I'm more than happy to see the "empire" die and willing to do anything I can to speed that along.
It seems people are infinitely compassionate when spending someone else’s money.
What of the argument against USAID’s rapid disassembly then? Is such an outcome permissible or even desired on account of sparing these funds sooner, aid continuity be damned?
I mean, your plan seems to be:
A. The US should give infinity money to everyone forever and never stop. If anyone ever dies, it's the US's fault for not supporting them enough.
B. If you are going to stop, do it on the schedule of the people who are getting free stuff, and only stop when they decide they don't want free stuff anymore (i.e. never).
A responsible pace that doesn't result in abrupt mass deaths due to the lack of aid continuity.
>A. The US should give infinity money to everyone forever and never stop. If anyone ever dies, it's the US's fault for not supporting them enough.
Nobody said that, but with operating the world's largest aid agency for the better part of a century comes massive responsibility.
>B. If you are going to stop, do it on the schedule of the people who are getting free stuff, and only stop when they decide they don't want free stuff anymore (i.e. never).
You're right. Hopefully those impoverished kids (many of whom are dead now) take some personal responsibility for themselves in the afterlife. To think we'd even entertain pulling their food and medicine on their schedule and not our schedule.
The children? No, but their parents and the other adults running their country. That is who is responsible for providing for them. Americans have their own children they need to take care of and do not need their money seized and sent overseas to take care of other people's children.
And yes, maybe it is a "rug pull" but it was always going to be. It is immoral to engender such dependence in the first place, like keeping someone slightly poisoned so they're constantly sick and dependent on you to take care of them. Let people grow strong so they can take care of themselves and treat with them as equals.
You talk as if it's a zero-sum game, as if the two choices are mutually exclusive.
>And yes, maybe it is a "rug pull" but it was always going to be.
No reason it had to be.
If you look at Africa, it has the most wealth by resources out of any continent. It's also the poorest continent nominally. We're getting a lot of good stuff at INSANE discounts.
What I'm describing is, of course, colonialist in nature. The US is an empire, not a nation. But, the hope is that as we help those countries develop they can help us stay developed, and we can eventually reach some mutually beneficial equilibrium. Instead of exploitation.
But, currently, the relationship is exploitative. It's a bit wild to me that you legitimately think the US, of all countries, is being exploited. No bubba... no. We do the exploiting. Everything you own is build with layers and layers of global exploitation built into it. You have a few hundred slaves working for you as we speak.
Absolutely we aren’t a Christian country. I personally don’t need Christianity to tell me charity for our fellow humans is a good thing. Plus, richest country in the history of the world remember?
The rich in the US enjoy their wealth at the “pleasure” of the lower classes. (And not just the American lower classes.) Those dollars they’re hoarding? Those were created by the people and have value because of the people. So, I’m all for confiscatory taxation to fund humane charitable endeavors and eliminate wealth hoarding. Someone will have to make do with one less yacht I suppose.
Finally, the amount we’re taking about here is a mere pittance. Let’s cut some other wasteful spending first (Pentagon) if you’re looking for savings.
1) The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence.
2) We don’t. USA’s foreign aid per capita is not that high (especially now). To mobilize private money for aid, you need a long-term, trusted infrastructure.
3) Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.
And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs.
> Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.
Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.
If we're non-functional, where is all the foreign aid providing free stuff for us?
C'mon other countries, give us free stuff. It will be great for your soft power, and prevent us from doing terrorist attacks on you.
You are getting a lot of free stuff, because you own the dollar. That keeps you afloat so far, but I don't think it will last for much longer.
Do you think a dysfunctional gov has a higher chance of fixing itself with widespread disease?
Maybe providing aid is just propping up dysfunctional governments by doing their job for them and it would be better in the long run if they were allowed to collapse and be replaced with something that was forced to be functional.
I have no fantasies that aid will magically make countries stable.
It’s not an either/or. While we figure out the practical solutions to corruption in impoverished nations, we can /also/ do other work to improve the situation in Earth. And, in doing so, we will make solving the impoverished/corruption problem easier to fix.
Personally speaking I wish the US was drastically more involved with providing aid because it can help reduce the impact of individual catastrophies happening everyday.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/02/04/beyond-rescue-why-huma...