I do worry we have target fixation for bad technological outcomes. When learning to ride a motorcycle, one of the first bits of advice is to look where you want to go, and you'll go there. If you stare intently at the deadly thing, there's a good chance you'll freeze up and run straight into it.
I was excited when I saw the Andreessen Horowitz posting yesterday, and expected to nod along in agreement. Instead, I saw in it something that looked like it escaped Twitter / X.
This too feels like it's wide of the mark, more of a rebuttal to yesterday's posting than a manifesto that inspires and stands on its own.
Systems have emergent behaviors that arise from the their individual components, and the interactions between them. These behaviors limit the possible stable equilibria of the system as a whole.
In human systems, the components are people, whose behaviors are governed by human nature (itself a product of natural selection) and by incentives. Wishing it weren't so will not make human nature or incentives go away.
Words have meanings and we should adhere to them so communication does not break down into rhetoric.
It focuses on the social circumstances, or “human systems” for which it recommends re-engineering human societies to achieve a variety of goals.
It advocates for non-market economic systems, of which the only currently extant examples we have are socialist.
It advocates for slowing technological development to ease unspecified existential risks.
It offers that engineers can essentially make an inevitable societal decline a little bit less bad.
As much as Marc’s essay was a caricature of a considered techno-optimist position, this is the caricature of the inverse.
There's really nothing outdated about capitalism. It's the political systems that are outdated, where they can't control the ever-growing capitalistic protocol and give it inputs to produce desired outputs. Or anything else for that matter. Voters are too stupid to understand anything complex, and they elect politicans who have no clue or care for it either. And it's been like that pretty much since forever. It's just that last few centuries the technological progress was so powerful that it was able to overcome even the most radical political attempts at ruining everything.
Unfortunately politics are a hard coordination problem - trying to make robust global system out of pieces who have incomplete information, are flawed, irrational and often actively malicious. Distributed systems are hard even assuming near perfect conditions and trustworthy agents, and with such conditions and requirements - it might be unsolvable problem.
