a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by b_b
b_b  ·  2292 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "This is why they hate us" - The Other Tech Bubble

FWIW, I have no position on Sam Altman, or what he was arguing for or against. My only point in the earlier discussion was that I don't believe that there's a such thing as an idea that's too dangerous to discuss. This has nothing to do with the tech industry specifically.





kleinbl00  ·  2292 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Okay.

But.

1) The title of the essay is a Galileo quote. He could have gone with a more offensive allegory but atheists aren't as likely to go with "and there was light." Nonetheless we have a tech billionaire insinuating he's the persecuted genius responsible for heliocentric thought and pretty much everyone who isn't in the tech industry on the side of the witch burners. That's some straight up Erlich Bachman shit right there, down to the goddamn Latin.

2) His comparison is to Beijing, where men are coolies and real men are mandarins. China knows how to treat poor people.

3) His "heresies" include "intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension" and I mean fuck. HG Wells whipped out the Morlocks and Eloi 120 years ago. It's bad enough that rich people are living longer and poor people are dying precipitously. Fuckin' Justin Timberlake knew the optics on that shit weren't great in 2011.

4) Fucking Newton and alchemy. Turning lead into gold is not the same as turning ghettos into places nobody can afford to live anymore. The normies are commuting from Stockton.

    On the far side of a fire pit, two founders of Shypmate, an app that links you to airline passengers who will cheaply carry your package to Ghana or Nigeria, were commiserating. Kwadwo Nyarko said, “We’re at the mercy of travellers who never have as much space in their luggage as they said.” Perry Ogwuche murmured, “YC tells us, ‘Talk to your customers,’ but it’s hard to find our customers.” Altman walked over to engage them, dutiful as a birthday-party magician. “So what are your hobbies?” he asked. Nonplussed, Ogwuche said, “We work and we go to the gym. And what are yours?”

    “Well, I like racing cars,” Altman said. “I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival.” Seeing their bewilderment, he explained, “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

- The New Yorker

5) Bitcoin. No one on earth outside of Sam Altman's food group thinks Bitcoin is a good idea. "I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of San Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many ways to go wrong." Said literally the rest of the world. Too crazy and too dangerous are pretty much the majority report on Bitcoin right now.

6) Fucking SpaceX. "If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard." SpaceX is trying to make space cheaper through reduce, reuse, recycle. Meanwhile, about 1 in 3 apps out of Ycombinator in 2017 are tapeworms for the digital digestive system.

7) And if you didn't get the Galileo reference, let's put it on the nose while I stand next to SpaceX and Bitcoin.

    Wildfire seems to be a bit of mixture of Yik Yak and Patch, bringing local user-submitted news and campus alerts that are tolerated though not officially approved by university adminstrations.

Nobody fucking needs that. Nobody fucking wants that. And it's the kind of bullshit that makes a cracker box in Menlo Park cost $900k.

    If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand.

It's not San Francisco. It's not ideas. It's not things that are too dangerous to discuss. It's Sam Altman and the fundamental entitlement of the tech industry and it shows that you can take the bloom off the rose but you can't take the glass off the glasshole.

b_b  ·  2291 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    And if you didn't get the Galileo reference...

I did. I read a biography of Galileo a few years ago, and it's safe to say that we don't have a modern day equivalent of Galileo. One major difference between Galileo and the "heresies" in question here, is that Glaileo was fighting for that which was obviously true. In fact had been proven theoretically for a long time (millenia), and he now had the precise experimental verification. Politics stood in his way moreso than science. That's quite a bit different than hypothesizing things that would fundamentally change the nature of society, then trying to unleash them without regard for experimenting on people.

I'm clearly not as well read on the Valley bigwigs as you, but my view of them is fairly negative on balance. I've read close to nothing on Sam Altman; hence the above demureness. However, I think your long response supports my original statement that ideas can never be too dangerous to discuss. If we hypothesize, say, letting everyone live to infinity and beyond so long as they can afford it, then we should have a societal discussion about what that would look like and how it would affect people before anyone implements such as thing. The problem with the Valley is that they fundamentally don't want to have those conversations. They kick and scream whenever anyone tries to kill their valuation, and they do so on "free speech" grounds.

If we truly got to have a societal conversation around, e.g., Uber (vis-a-vis debated legislation, say), then we might come to the conclusion that yes, people want an easier way to get a lift quickly and maybe the taxi industry could benefit from some innovation and deregulation. But, we never get to have that conversation because on the one hand "my right to make a profit says your town council can go fuck itself", and on the other hand, "fuck you, we're rioting and shutting down the streets to keep you capitalist pigs out of our little corner of heaven". Move fast and break things is the opposite of conversation.

kleinbl00  ·  2291 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    However, I think your long response supports my original statement that ideas can never be too dangerous to discuss.

I agree with you but it isn't the point. Ideas can never be too dangerous to discuss, but ideas can be too controversial to discuss in any situation at any time with any audience. Thus my rather long-form "it's not the idea it's the dick" - if Sam Altman were to say "we are grappling with technologies that have the chance to improve the length and quality of life for humans everywhere but right now only the rich can afford it, what are we going to do about that" I'll bet half of California would jump into the fray. If instead you say "I'm gonna make rich people immortal, bitchez, outta the gene pool" you're gonna get run out of town on a rail.

There are far, far, far too many examples of Silicon Valley wunderkinds in dire need of sensitivity training. That's the issue. Not the idea itself.