The funniest bit is that the previous villains -- financiers and oil barons, etc. etc. - haven't gone away. I don't understand why the high-powered critics have completely pivoted to hating on tech. Say what you will about Google, OpenAI, etc. but we're not funding mass killings in the Niger river delta or foreclosing on people's homes.
The "chattering classes" in general and NYT in particular have been writing think pieces about tech for decades [0] [1] [2] [3]. So I'm not sure what you're talking about and what COVID has to do with it.
[0]: About Facebook in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/jaron-lanier-on-l...
[1]: About the risks of the Internet for children in 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/technology/personaltech/2...
[2]: About greedy dot-coms in 1998: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/27/magazine/fast-forward-gre...
[3]: About whether children need to learn computer literacy in 1984: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/13/opinion/false-notions-abo...
But I don't think tech has had a positive human narrative in almost a decade. The noveau riche arose as semi-gentle intermediaries originally, empowering & connecting the small, and every single play we see is to intermediate, not serve.
So where is the contemporary good to report on, where is the modern earned goodwill?
Instead what is emitted is double trash. It's all inscrutable/doesn't serve a clear need to boot. And it's far more owned and intermediated than ever... Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, VR, and now AI. None showing the genuine enrichment humans could really tangle with that tech had brought us.
Neutrality is not enough, only mildly bad news is not enough. We need to make things that fill needs, and that expand imagination/open horizons, in ways where we ourselves can be part of the narrative.
But yes please let's also cover the genuinely detestable parts of the world as such. Let all be accountable.
Long gone are the days when optimism and naivety was warranted. Those large companies abused it to become the ruthless behemoths of today.
Haven't you read the news that an AI agent took over administrator control over a startup CEO, founder, whatever and corrupted the machine to a halt?
I heard it used some `sudo` magic spell. It could have `sudo'ed` an Iranian nuclear launch site and plunged the Earth into full scale nuclear WWIII.
That said, some part of it is true. There will be a stupid "AI" that reduces your credit score to some value. There will be no recourse and no human you can ask how the score was calculated, you have no method to correct false information. Perhaps it is just because you are ugly, verified by the ugly algorithm. Perhaps you aren't visible enough on social media,
Here you are indeed slave to the machine, but the news would perhaps just be, that this is already the case anyway.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
It is also responsible for a rise in hate crimes:
It is more akin to a paper company being blamed for the writings on it or a phone company being blamed because the orders to invade were sent over text message.
> It is also responsible for a rise in hate crimes: > https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082972
Very interesting attempt to gain causality through internet blackout, but I'm not really convinced by a study that provides no evidence that they pre-registered their analysis.
It’s even more damning for Meta when you consider just how insidious their tactics are to get people hooked on their platform.
They might not be selling the guns nor pulling the triggers, but they’re not exactly innocent either.
this reflexive distaste for ambition is exactly what Nietzsche talked about in his Genealogy of Morality
As entertaining as it was to read "On The Genealogy of Morality" when I was 20 years old I'd say it's rather... Reductionist, at least.
Sloterdijk updates on it even bring up how to consider "will to power" not as an individual ambition but as a holistic way to actualise oneself to give something back to the world, not as a power over others which is the main way corporations are run.
Pursuing your ambitions at the expense of the rest of the globe is not moral.
Please update your philosophical repertoire, you're stuck in the 1800s.
Additional point: we can't have a balanced community discussion if only a small percentage of viewers have access to the full article. This is a community website, so we should favor content that is openly shareable.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
The converse is also true: if there's not a workaround, it's not ok.
It's pretty common on non-paywalled articles for only a small percentage to read the article, yet we often manage to have balanced discussions of those.
Altman could now get equity in OpenAI—around $10 billion worth
What’s scary about him isn’t that he’s good at getting rich (he’s a billionaire even without any OpenAI equity)
Friendly reminder that a billion is a thousand times a million... $2.8B is not a number to glance past like it's normal. According to Statista, he's one of ~10,000 in the entire world: https://www.statista.com/statistics/621447/billionaires-tota...
Though Altman (wisely) wouldn’t use this term for it, I’d say it boils down to accelerationism
I'd call Altman simply... arrogant. I don't think he subscribes to any academic trend, simply because he doesn't seem interested in reading any academia. Case in point is his recent decision to try to be the one to name the new era of human development, a task for which he chose "Intelligence Age" (https://ia.samaltman.com/); that's some serious confidence, at the very least.
IMO he is a normal MBA-type who's been caught up in something that feels world-changing, and he's at the point where any amount of deceit or malice is worth it to keep his influence over that. In this way, I see him as a much more well-spoken Elon Musk; they both are true believers in the power of AGI, and their defining purpose is to be credited with the benefits it'll bring about.
As I said in an old post on Altman: made-in-house bias is strongest when the house is your own skull.
[ETA in response to a comment below, b/c deleting a long paragraph feels like abandoning a project!]:
Fair enough! I myself have limited working experience with executives and have never met Altman, so I'm going off his blog posts mostly, along with the negative personality pieces that have popped up over the past year (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1804u5y/former_open... , https://mashable.com/article/open-ai-board-why-fired-sam-alt... , https://www.techspot.com/news/103176-lies-psychological-abus... ). I agree that he's quintessential Silicon Valley rather than the traditional image of "MBA type"--a white man in a fancy suit in New York or Chicago, mostly--but he seems to otherwise fit the bill. Namely:
- Personal overconfidence/hubris, as I discuss above.
- Tendency to overpromise his organization's capabilities, as a rule. "Move fast and break things" type vibes.
- Prioritizing growth/scale over other concerns -- I think the switch to for-profit makes this objectively accurate.
- A noted aversion to transparency in general, as best embodied by OpenAI's approach to opensource.
- A history of dodging accountability, namely in the ouster fiasco.
- A charismatic but potentially manipulative leadership style (the main gist of this article).
I think you would be shocked at how much these philosophical trends actually are part of the discussion in these SF circles.
Sam Altman is also absolutely not a normal MBA-type, having met many of those.
I'm doing a primary literature review of Land's core thesis that AI and capitalism are teleologically identical at https://retrochronic.com/ and I hope it will show that there is at least some substance to his work, such as his perspective on AI in the context of capital autonomization.
Has the narrative really become that Sam Altman is single-handedly responsible for the massive leap in AI?
I really don't think that Altman is even close to being in the top 5 worrying techbros. At best, he enabled OpenAI researchers to get their work done 1-5 years sooner.
This stuff was going to happen with or without Altman.
The advancements to come will happen with or without Altman.
These kinds of articles are alarmist nonsense.
1. Elon Musk
2. Mark Zuckerberg
3. Sam Altman
4. Peter Thiel
5. Jeff Bezos
[1] [see the Open AI section] https://archive.is/S9rwj [2] https://archive.is/0To6q [3] [and the Open AI section again] https://archive.is/ejoOx