It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increasingly anti-human takeover of everything.
Edit: I mean technically shareholders don't decide any operational choices but their shallow interests are what everything is decided around.
Today it’s dominated by the military industrial complex and advertisers like Google and Meta.
The hippies were never in charge, only for a brief period were they well compensated and allowed to make noise(1990s).
None of this could exist without the cooperation of technical people. We (as a group) are guilty of building this, and I don't see any genuine reflection or self-awareness or accountability at all from tech people for this.
Yes, but technologists get sniped into identifying and defending them. They're the mouth pieces and the hands. Shareholders by themselves out to add my uniqueness to their assets would just be helpless randos who can't even make eye contact. Think of what "hiding behind screens" does to people, multiply that by infinite and you get shareholders hiding behind technologists.
And yet, the main tangible contribution emerging from this early recognition (and obsession) was to inspire a lot of brilliant CS/math types and billionaires like Peter Thiel or Jaan Tallinn to build and fund companies like OpenAI and Anthropic which went on to literally create the very thing they were convinced will destroy the world, leading to an ever escalating arms race to “AGI”. Also lots of crypto and a murky web of non-profits doing unclear stuff.
The proximity to money in the Silicon Valley/VC world seems to limit the imagination to founding yet another new tech startup that really, definitely won’t compromise their values and will be different this time.
It's a popular movement that has wound its way through out society, and the fruits are clear: surveillance capitalism, eugenics, fraud. It's honestly quite impressive how consistently you can look at [recent negative trend] and find someone at the bottom calling themselves a rationalist and claiming the same set of influences.
The fundamental tenet of that set isn't rationalism but the belief that they are superior to the exploitable masses. That does not lead anywhere good.
I know somebody who says that doing debate in high school and college was terrible for him because it trained him to always argue his point but never to question it. For example, at the time he thought of himself as supremely rational even as he'd make a strong case for why he shouldn't quit smoking. It was only much later that he could admit that was his addiction and his ego talking.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/udFuYqqNdpdo5ym3f/genuine-qu...