I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Silicon Valley tech bros need to take more humanities classes. Science fiction is fine, but it’s not meant to be a manual for your business and worldview! They are like 14 year old boys. Wow!
And, as a former 14-year-old boy, I can say you are quite correct! Listening to the likes of Musk and Thiel (and Trump, for that matter), it is reminiscent of being in a gaggle of young boys listening to the Alpha tell us all about what nasty adventures they have had, or nasty plans they have for us, their “gang.” Inside, you know what they say is idiocy, but as a young boy, it still sounds cool and maybe plausible. But your instincts, instilled likely by the matriarchic part of your family, were right. We, as men, should hope we mature into that, rather than stay emotionally and instinctually locked in at 14-year-old boy stage.
Yes. I have nothing against 14 year old boys, of course. They just shouldn’t rule the world! And there are plenty of boys who read science fiction and watch Star Trek who grow up to help mankind. How many NASA scientists were inspired by these stories? It’s too bad others didn’t learn those lessons. I’m sure you have.
Please! If a 14 year old boy talked like Trump, I'd take him to a psychiatrist to get some Ritalin. Trump is more like someone who's permanently stuck in the terrible twos, except that there's no relief from occasional cuteness - just narcissistic whining 24/7.
As an adult female, I never had the socializing boys had. Alpha males belong in baboon troupes. You might enjoy Robert Sapolsky on how to deal with aggressive juvenile male baboons. Just keep in mind that females are about half the human population and Alpha males are the bullying enemy.
Yes half the human population is female, which means half the US population is female, which means half the people eligible to vote are female. Just saying.
These days they aren't really "tech bros". They're just CEO's, investors, managers, MBAs. As so often happens, the real creators get shuffled aside, crammed into small cubicles, ignored. I watched it happen several times in Silicon Valley late 1990s. Especially after Apple semi-crashed– their "manager class" lost their cushy jobs, and infested a lot of genuine tech startups and healthy businesses. Turned them into many of the good-ol-boy corporations that we see today.
So the AI bros think their machines, primed with LLMs, are going to replace basic scientific research? Guess no mere lab scientist has been permitted into their webchats to tell them about the role chance favoring the prepared mind plays in scientific progress. Would AI have noticed the effect of mold growing on a Staphylococcus aureus culture? Would AI have directed the series of experiments that, some 17 years later, made penicillin available to fight infections? What about Katalin Kariko’s lonely journey to develop useful RNA technology which, some decades later, was used to produce vaccines that saved millions of lives? Not saying that in silico methods haven’t been useful in scientific progress, but for heaven’s sake, to depend on a group of tech geniuses huddled in some techno AI bunker to produce all further human progress is bonkers!
They're not actually geniuses. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time to make a yacht load of money. That turned them into vulture capitalists. It also gave their egos a shot of steroids, so they expect the world to worship them as, yes, geniuses.
Adding to the reality that scientific progress comes from human observation of the physical world is Vera Rubin’s ‘proof’ of the existence of dark matter. Her hypothesis came from her studies of stars far away from the supposed centers of mass of galaxies. These stars didn’t move as slowly as theorists predicted they should, suggesting that measures of galactic masses were somehow not accounting for some ten times the mass than was being measured by conventional methods. Cosmologists now accept that dark matter and dark energy exist but have no idea how to study it. Did AI predict this? No. Does AI tell us how to study it? Not so far! I bet that some future collect of physicists will notice some discontinuity which bears on this problem. Maybe AI will help but it will be human creativity, working in astrophysics laboratories, that leads to more understanding of this mystery of the material universe.
In 2021 I cringed when Holden Karnofsky came up with PASTA: "Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement" (https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/). The same lemmings who believed that ASI consciousness would simply emerge from silicon and binary logic gates with faster CPUs ran down this same reductionist rabbit hole.
It also reflects an embarrassingly woeful understanding of how science works. It's not a linear, deterministic, predictable problem of efficiency. Saying nothing of how causality is still completely alien to the SOTA AI megamodels of today.
It kind of reminds me of the "Zero Tolerance for Error!" craze of the late 80s, early 90s. Really one of the dumbest "management tools" I ever heard of. Sadly, it was taken up by many Fed Gov't Agencies, as well as corporations. Urg. What a ... cluster .... no... cybertruck. ;-)
This is not related to scientific research, but here’s an everyday example of what AI would not notice.
My husband was having a minor leg wound soaked with a solution on a piece of wet gauze. It started to drip. The wound care specialist nurse noticed and grabbed a wad of gauze, stuffed it under his sock, caught the drip, and kept his sock dry. She probably wasn’t taught to do that in her specialist training. An AI/robot nurse probably wouldn’t be trained to do that, unless programmed to keep the patient’s sock dry.
Intuition like consciousness are unique entities that are impossible to completely describe or define, which will not be generated by AL (assumption that I believe). Yet these entities must be part of the description of humanity, who are (or were) groping toward civilization. When we discuss the lenses that can be used to look at the problems of our complex, connected and interdependent world, and go to meetings to discuss solutions, I hope we remember the awe of the situation of our sentient existence, were science fiction writers often turn their lens.
We've seen what Musk did with his "AI" when it began spouting nazi cowplop.
Genuine "AI" would state facts, backed up with verifiable evidence, give truthful opinions based on facts. And there is nothing this gangster-fascist dictator-wannabees hate more than truth, facts, and evidence. (See: Epstein files).
One of the best most efficient systems currently in existence is the worldwide weather networks: satellites, computers and educated human beings making very accurate predictions based on evidence and knowledge. And Trump&Co LOATHE it. They will never, ever, allow a real AI to be built.
Real scientists (whether the hard sciences or social scientists like myself) test their null hypotheses, think about competing theories, recognize our biases and limitations, etc. LLMs don’t do this.
This conversation is off the charts in brilliance, edification, and relevance. Thank you so much Paul Krugman for providing so much value with such reliable intellectual honesty. 🙌♥️
This is a frightening yet beautiful conversation. Henry Farrell's imagery made my hair stand on end like a scared cat. and Bruised Ego's pushing their weight around to rule us more reasons to stay somewhat disconnected to the digital world we are living in. Never a sci-fi reader I've tagged a few of the authors you have mentioned. Paul and Henry thank you for this conversation. What a world we are living in......
I watched the entire video(normally just read the transcripts) and all I have to say is wow. Your guest was incredible in explaining all the subterranian goings on beneath the surface of the political shit show in the US.
Scary, yes. Helpful, ever so.
Theil is a puppet master and an ominous figure who I don't understand the depth of his influence.
So, what to do? Not a solution to sit idlely by, but resist with all the power of the masses.
I am continually left with two questions. First, if the masses are so disposable who will the tech bros rule over, and what will their source of wealth actually be? The top of a pyramid requires a base, and tech bros appear to want to eliminate that base while also receiving adulation and money from it. AI systems, on the other hand, do not trade money with tech bros and have been known to criticize their “masters” as Grok has done with Musk.
Second, the long standing core of MAGA is evangelical “Christians”, who have their own ideas about world domination and have shown themselves to have the patience to spend a half century maneuvering into positions of power. The tech bros don’t seem to have ever met an evangelical “Christian” so they have no idea how zealotry can undo science and technology. A political coalition composed of these two factions seems headed for an eventual showdown, and with 2,000 years of patient intransigence behind it, I’d bet on the evangelicals eventually grinding the tech bros into dust.
The base will be smaller. There is no intrinsic need for 8 billion of us. Machines/robots/artificial intelligence will preserve the ecosystem for those remaining.
Christianity as a link to the inexplicable will continue apace so long as it and other forms of supernatural belief provide value. Christianity's greatest achievement has been to encourage humans to care for one another under the auspices of a benign God. Alternate interpretations of the faith have and will occur. To the extent that our sandy supermen assault the essential message of Christianity it will present the intransigence you speak of.
And while all these groups are plotting to rule the world in the Good Old Fashioned Roman Empire way, a gigantic, flaming asteroid is hurtling towards the Earth! The existence of which the same men are denying, ignoring, or plotting to exploit!
Oh, wait, I meant climate change, not an asteroid. Same idea tho. Their response to climate change and sea level rise: "Let's buy Greenland, take over Panama, and build beach resorts in Gaza!" Yes, there are a lotta big brains running things. (Shudder).
PS: All empires fall, and in the most of them fell due to climate change, usually in the guise of extended (century or more) of drought. Others were taken down from within. Betrayed by leaders. The US appears to be experiencing both.
The tech bros probably think Dune is going to be correct -- Evangelicals are the Bene Gesserit and the Freman who support Paul Atreides, who is the Chosen One and a tech bro. Of course, it doesn't end well.
Aside from professional athletes, and hookers, billionaires have no use for the peasantry. They intend to own the machines, and the machines will do all the work. They're fools, as you note, and are likely to end up burned at the stake by people worshipping gilded idols and screaming about signs from heaven.
"Theil is a puppet master and an ominous figure who I don't understand the depth of his influence." This is especially true when you hear him speak extemporaneously, as in when he is asked a question. He is virtually completely inarticulate.
> And when you get all of these cranky and crabby engineers, some of whom
> have left-wing ideas, some of whom want to protest against this or that,
> engagement with the military, when these people are trying to tell you how
> to run your business from inside, this makes you extremely unhappy. And some
> of the stuff Marc Andreessen more or less suggests, that universities have been
> inculcating Communist propaganda into young people
In my case, I got a natural science education a never saw one word of communist propaganda or Marxist economic theory. It was science, science, statistics, science. My interest in it started after I joined a FAANG as a engineer and watched $50B / quarter go out the door to investors (sellers, in fact, the worst kind of investor) while the entire R&D annual budget was merely $8-12B, where my salary came from. Who had anything to do with the success of the company, a bunch 14th hand investors or the engineers at the company? Do the investors have any idea even what is going on, especially with all of the security doors? Why is the company being so tight fisted with investment capital and so stingy with customers when it is throwing entire national GDPs out the window to feed the stock market? It was easy to rapidly conclude that investors are where profits go to die.
Parasites.
Am I looking forward to a communist state? No. That has been tried. Do I think that the proxy rights of institutional investors (who can’t vote anyway) should be turned over to labor? Yes. Some corporate governance oversight is better than none, and who else understands the company better and is willing to do it for free than the employees? It has always been clear to me that engineers advocate for the customer, and management advocates for the investor, and only one of these two is critical to the success of the company.
If you ask me, the appeal of Marxism doesn’t come from Karl Marx or any socialist propaganda, but from the monstrous greed of excessively entitled capitalists. That speaks volumes, far more eloquently and to far more people. Always has; always will.
Nope, they are on only concerned about ROI ... return on investment and their portfolios beating market benchmarks.
Investors are corporate absentee landlords. They have power over the Board and encourage the decay of the organization from the inside-out, destroying the populace who is ultimately their consumer at work and in the shopping queue. Won't they be surprised when no one but the 1% cash disposable income to purchase their shit?
A great comment from a Russian comedian who's name I lost track of: Marx was completely wrong about communism, but he was completely right about capitalism.
What Thiel and his like are wanting is old fashioned feudalism filtered through cheesy Ayn Rand novels. The 'great man' is only great in his own mind and the minds of those he/she enriches through business success, forgetting that there have been people who were successful in business since the dawn of business itself. We can call this trump syndrome. There's a reason narcissism is a disorder, not a key into tech bro heaven (well, maybe tech bro heaven but not a heaven I want anything to do with). All of these guys following trump around waiting to pick up his cast offs are kind of pathetic. The reason that democracy, as terrible as some think it is, is the best available is the muddle. In fact, the muddle is the point - inefficient, messy and therefore human.
"And more or less what they're suggesting is that we are in a world where in the next few years we're going to have what Amodei says is a country of geniuses in a data center, that we won't need traditional research facilities anymore because we will have AI, which is more powerful than human intelligence actually figuring out all of this stuff for us. And so I think that there are a lot of people who are smart enough to realize that this is a, shall we say, decidedly risky bet for the future of the United States and the rest of the world."
Perfect example of the combined colossal hubris and oblivious ignorance of the so-called "AI" tech bro titans. I am honestly not sure which is worse, if these guys know they are full of shit but are just trying to put one over on us to make more money or if they really believe their own delusions of grandeur.
As a behavioral neuroscientist who has spent decades in the lab trying to understand how the brain works, it is part infuriating part comical that these guys (and far too many in the credulous media and government) think that complex autocomplete is going to magically morph into SkyNet and remove all need for experimental research in the real world.
Also not sure whether I'm wishing for their bubble to be popped before it gets off the ground, which will likely crash the markets precariously invested in a handful of tech companies or if it would be better to see them launch their imagined AGI and watch it experience a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" and rain down to earth like so many bits of a SpaceX test rocket.
My guess is that (a) they do know they are full of shit, and (b) their awareness of that fact is one of the reasons that their resentment is so profoundly bitter.
If through good fortune I have reached in adulthood an understanding that I am not always right, and in fact needn’t always be right, it’s much easier to see contradictions as a source of intriguing puzzles that I might enjoy working on over time. Not a rock I stub my toe on, or not a mere rock, a mere obstacle, but a piece of reality that I can look at in different ways, study with a friend or colleague, write about, join a community to investigate, and so forth.
The same men who think AI can take the place of human thinking, and robots of human physical labor, can't understand why its a bad idea to persecute undocumented workers.
Wow. This is a powerful discussion. The nugget for me is the information about lain Banks. Sounds like a must-read. We know that the human brain has a built-in negativity bias - just the way we’ve evolved over the millennia. It partially explains why people with gazillions of wealth are still so self-protective. All the data being fed into AI will reflect the same negativity bias unless we figure out a way to counter it. Way above my pay grade but I sure would like to hear any kinder utopian visions.
Careful coming at Banks as utopian. His main civilization, The Culture, and its offshoots are you might say baseline utopian - no poverty or illness, considerable personal freedom - but the universe as we know it still plays itself. There is war, and slavery, and there are new horrors. Banks relished describing these and his fondness for the grotesque exceeded mine. He's very much worth reading, but you may find yourself skimming some very gross stuff.
As was implied in the discussion while you hear of the music of the marketplace and how capitalism thrives on competition, every capitalist's wet dream and goal is having a monopoly. Many times, the only thing preventing monopoly is regulation. I would infer that the only reason capitalism works is regulation.
I feel like the ghost of Ayn Rand is hovering over this conversation; I'm a bit surprised her name doesn't come up. My impression is that Rand is a significant part of the intellectual/cultural lineage of the right-wing turn in Silicon Valley that Krugman and Farrell are discussing. This kind of thinking, as described by Farrell, surely owes something to her:
<<One of the things about the ways that Silicon Valley thinks about founders, thinks about the power and the importance of the founder is that you ought to be able to make the rules within your own business, that you ought to be able to decide. You are the boss. You are the CEO. You are the person who has the vision and other people more or less within your company are required to run around and to make that vision happen.>>
Lisa Duggan's _Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed_ is a useful read on the subject.
You are absolutely correct that the spirit of Ayn Rand inhabits this entire mindset. & that is crazy b/c her view of the world was male-dominated, black & white, & completely w/o nuance or any understanding of humans. It was a fine read in h/s but as soon as one starts to develop some understanding of how people think, interact & behave, the silliness of Rand's imaginings are incredibly obvious. Anyone over the age of 21 should see the huge cracks in her world view. But instead, many of these "geniuses" think this is how the world should be! Their brains do indeed have the maturity & understanding of 14-year-old boys. This is pathetic.
Well, a totally free market, without regulation is EXACTLY what you have in Russia.
Because a powerful, focused, increasing driving force, destroys market equilibrium and thermodynamics. It pushes a highly asymmetric economic systems with the Oligarchs in charge of the political system.
One of my predilections is to avoid personal theories, and to focus on technical factors. Those zero out human interventions in favor of fundamental forces which dictate behaviors and outcomes. In this view monopolies behave the way they do for reasons that do not involve greed or avarice. Where there is competition there is innovation. And innovation requires R&D. But R&D is overhead, not a profit center. If you are a monopoly then innovation is a cost, and at the end of the day you are competing against yourself. Duh!
World War I was the first war in history to employ weapons that did not exist when the war began. The tank and the combat airplane(as opposed to the purely reconnaissance application), poison gas among them. Why the innovation? Survival and the deadly consequences of losing. And of course WWII raised the ante: the V1 and V2, night fighters, radar, jet aircraft, and Oh yes Little Boy and Fat Man.
Today Ukraine is teaching us that cleverness and innovation can level or even tip the playing field against an opponent which on paper should crush you. But that is an update on the Viet Cong. Yes they beat us; it wasn't a draw.
So the lesson is competition is the enemy of enshittification. And competition in a capitalist economy requires regulation. Every time you hear someone complain about regulations alarm bells should be going off. You can be sure they are not prioritizing your best interests. In that genre are "trickle down", tax cuts that pay for themselves, the Laffer Curve, Supply-side, and deregulation.
Glass-Steagel repealed and bank failures bloomed like measles in Texas.
As for me, I am infuriated that I still don't have the flying car that I was promised on "The Jetsons". Why is that? Who put their thumb on the scales? Oligopolies are just as bad. The Big Three automakers bought the trolley-car systems, and then trashed them to force people away from mass-transit.
What grand hubris for tech bros to imagine that AI will achieve all the future scientific and medical breakthroughs that depend on imagining and reacting to events, conditions that have never existed, unpredictably evolving, unrelated to any data available to AI. Egocentric twits.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Silicon Valley tech bros need to take more humanities classes. Science fiction is fine, but it’s not meant to be a manual for your business and worldview! They are like 14 year old boys. Wow!
And, as a former 14-year-old boy, I can say you are quite correct! Listening to the likes of Musk and Thiel (and Trump, for that matter), it is reminiscent of being in a gaggle of young boys listening to the Alpha tell us all about what nasty adventures they have had, or nasty plans they have for us, their “gang.” Inside, you know what they say is idiocy, but as a young boy, it still sounds cool and maybe plausible. But your instincts, instilled likely by the matriarchic part of your family, were right. We, as men, should hope we mature into that, rather than stay emotionally and instinctually locked in at 14-year-old boy stage.
Yes. I have nothing against 14 year old boys, of course. They just shouldn’t rule the world! And there are plenty of boys who read science fiction and watch Star Trek who grow up to help mankind. How many NASA scientists were inspired by these stories? It’s too bad others didn’t learn those lessons. I’m sure you have.
It sounds to me like the SciFi books being discussed in this talk are not the ones that inspired NASA scientists.
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Please! If a 14 year old boy talked like Trump, I'd take him to a psychiatrist to get some Ritalin. Trump is more like someone who's permanently stuck in the terrible twos, except that there's no relief from occasional cuteness - just narcissistic whining 24/7.
True. His imagination has a long way to go before he would be anything like a 14-year old.
As an adult female, I never had the socializing boys had. Alpha males belong in baboon troupes. You might enjoy Robert Sapolsky on how to deal with aggressive juvenile male baboons. Just keep in mind that females are about half the human population and Alpha males are the bullying enemy.
Yes half the human population is female, which means half the US population is female, which means half the people eligible to vote are female. Just saying.
These days they aren't really "tech bros". They're just CEO's, investors, managers, MBAs. As so often happens, the real creators get shuffled aside, crammed into small cubicles, ignored. I watched it happen several times in Silicon Valley late 1990s. Especially after Apple semi-crashed– their "manager class" lost their cushy jobs, and infested a lot of genuine tech startups and healthy businesses. Turned them into many of the good-ol-boy corporations that we see today.
So the AI bros think their machines, primed with LLMs, are going to replace basic scientific research? Guess no mere lab scientist has been permitted into their webchats to tell them about the role chance favoring the prepared mind plays in scientific progress. Would AI have noticed the effect of mold growing on a Staphylococcus aureus culture? Would AI have directed the series of experiments that, some 17 years later, made penicillin available to fight infections? What about Katalin Kariko’s lonely journey to develop useful RNA technology which, some decades later, was used to produce vaccines that saved millions of lives? Not saying that in silico methods haven’t been useful in scientific progress, but for heaven’s sake, to depend on a group of tech geniuses huddled in some techno AI bunker to produce all further human progress is bonkers!
They're not actually geniuses. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time to make a yacht load of money. That turned them into vulture capitalists. It also gave their egos a shot of steroids, so they expect the world to worship them as, yes, geniuses.
Adding to the reality that scientific progress comes from human observation of the physical world is Vera Rubin’s ‘proof’ of the existence of dark matter. Her hypothesis came from her studies of stars far away from the supposed centers of mass of galaxies. These stars didn’t move as slowly as theorists predicted they should, suggesting that measures of galactic masses were somehow not accounting for some ten times the mass than was being measured by conventional methods. Cosmologists now accept that dark matter and dark energy exist but have no idea how to study it. Did AI predict this? No. Does AI tell us how to study it? Not so far! I bet that some future collect of physicists will notice some discontinuity which bears on this problem. Maybe AI will help but it will be human creativity, working in astrophysics laboratories, that leads to more understanding of this mystery of the material universe.
Or human creativity!
It bears repeating - Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
You are so correct!!! AI can help some of the work but not WHAT should be done.
You can use an ice pick for a can opener but it’s not the right tool for the job.
In 2021 I cringed when Holden Karnofsky came up with PASTA: "Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement" (https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/). The same lemmings who believed that ASI consciousness would simply emerge from silicon and binary logic gates with faster CPUs ran down this same reductionist rabbit hole.
It also reflects an embarrassingly woeful understanding of how science works. It's not a linear, deterministic, predictable problem of efficiency. Saying nothing of how causality is still completely alien to the SOTA AI megamodels of today.
Amen!
It kind of reminds me of the "Zero Tolerance for Error!" craze of the late 80s, early 90s. Really one of the dumbest "management tools" I ever heard of. Sadly, it was taken up by many Fed Gov't Agencies, as well as corporations. Urg. What a ... cluster .... no... cybertruck. ;-)
This is not related to scientific research, but here’s an everyday example of what AI would not notice.
My husband was having a minor leg wound soaked with a solution on a piece of wet gauze. It started to drip. The wound care specialist nurse noticed and grabbed a wad of gauze, stuffed it under his sock, caught the drip, and kept his sock dry. She probably wasn’t taught to do that in her specialist training. An AI/robot nurse probably wouldn’t be trained to do that, unless programmed to keep the patient’s sock dry.
Intuition like consciousness are unique entities that are impossible to completely describe or define, which will not be generated by AL (assumption that I believe). Yet these entities must be part of the description of humanity, who are (or were) groping toward civilization. When we discuss the lenses that can be used to look at the problems of our complex, connected and interdependent world, and go to meetings to discuss solutions, I hope we remember the awe of the situation of our sentient existence, were science fiction writers often turn their lens.
We've seen what Musk did with his "AI" when it began spouting nazi cowplop.
Genuine "AI" would state facts, backed up with verifiable evidence, give truthful opinions based on facts. And there is nothing this gangster-fascist dictator-wannabees hate more than truth, facts, and evidence. (See: Epstein files).
One of the best most efficient systems currently in existence is the worldwide weather networks: satellites, computers and educated human beings making very accurate predictions based on evidence and knowledge. And Trump&Co LOATHE it. They will never, ever, allow a real AI to be built.
Real scientists (whether the hard sciences or social scientists like myself) test their null hypotheses, think about competing theories, recognize our biases and limitations, etc. LLMs don’t do this.
This conversation is off the charts in brilliance, edification, and relevance. Thank you so much Paul Krugman for providing so much value with such reliable intellectual honesty. 🙌♥️
This is a frightening yet beautiful conversation. Henry Farrell's imagery made my hair stand on end like a scared cat. and Bruised Ego's pushing their weight around to rule us more reasons to stay somewhat disconnected to the digital world we are living in. Never a sci-fi reader I've tagged a few of the authors you have mentioned. Paul and Henry thank you for this conversation. What a world we are living in......
‘“Let’s hope for a better Silicon Valley and a better future.” Amen. Thanks again for providing the transcript and yet another compelling interview.
I watched the entire video(normally just read the transcripts) and all I have to say is wow. Your guest was incredible in explaining all the subterranian goings on beneath the surface of the political shit show in the US.
Scary, yes. Helpful, ever so.
Theil is a puppet master and an ominous figure who I don't understand the depth of his influence.
So, what to do? Not a solution to sit idlely by, but resist with all the power of the masses.
Big ask, but necessary.
Thanks Paul for another enlightening post.
I am continually left with two questions. First, if the masses are so disposable who will the tech bros rule over, and what will their source of wealth actually be? The top of a pyramid requires a base, and tech bros appear to want to eliminate that base while also receiving adulation and money from it. AI systems, on the other hand, do not trade money with tech bros and have been known to criticize their “masters” as Grok has done with Musk.
Second, the long standing core of MAGA is evangelical “Christians”, who have their own ideas about world domination and have shown themselves to have the patience to spend a half century maneuvering into positions of power. The tech bros don’t seem to have ever met an evangelical “Christian” so they have no idea how zealotry can undo science and technology. A political coalition composed of these two factions seems headed for an eventual showdown, and with 2,000 years of patient intransigence behind it, I’d bet on the evangelicals eventually grinding the tech bros into dust.
The base will be smaller. There is no intrinsic need for 8 billion of us. Machines/robots/artificial intelligence will preserve the ecosystem for those remaining.
Christianity as a link to the inexplicable will continue apace so long as it and other forms of supernatural belief provide value. Christianity's greatest achievement has been to encourage humans to care for one another under the auspices of a benign God. Alternate interpretations of the faith have and will occur. To the extent that our sandy supermen assault the essential message of Christianity it will present the intransigence you speak of.
Wow! Christianity and AI will save what remains in a sin free benevolent God. Am I getting this correct?
I wasn't aware God had been deemed a sinner.
And while all these groups are plotting to rule the world in the Good Old Fashioned Roman Empire way, a gigantic, flaming asteroid is hurtling towards the Earth! The existence of which the same men are denying, ignoring, or plotting to exploit!
Oh, wait, I meant climate change, not an asteroid. Same idea tho. Their response to climate change and sea level rise: "Let's buy Greenland, take over Panama, and build beach resorts in Gaza!" Yes, there are a lotta big brains running things. (Shudder).
PS: All empires fall, and in the most of them fell due to climate change, usually in the guise of extended (century or more) of drought. Others were taken down from within. Betrayed by leaders. The US appears to be experiencing both.
The tech bros probably think Dune is going to be correct -- Evangelicals are the Bene Gesserit and the Freman who support Paul Atreides, who is the Chosen One and a tech bro. Of course, it doesn't end well.
Aside from professional athletes, and hookers, billionaires have no use for the peasantry. They intend to own the machines, and the machines will do all the work. They're fools, as you note, and are likely to end up burned at the stake by people worshipping gilded idols and screaming about signs from heaven.
"Theil is a puppet master and an ominous figure who I don't understand the depth of his influence." This is especially true when you hear him speak extemporaneously, as in when he is asked a question. He is virtually completely inarticulate.
> And when you get all of these cranky and crabby engineers, some of whom
> have left-wing ideas, some of whom want to protest against this or that,
> engagement with the military, when these people are trying to tell you how
> to run your business from inside, this makes you extremely unhappy. And some
> of the stuff Marc Andreessen more or less suggests, that universities have been
> inculcating Communist propaganda into young people
In my case, I got a natural science education a never saw one word of communist propaganda or Marxist economic theory. It was science, science, statistics, science. My interest in it started after I joined a FAANG as a engineer and watched $50B / quarter go out the door to investors (sellers, in fact, the worst kind of investor) while the entire R&D annual budget was merely $8-12B, where my salary came from. Who had anything to do with the success of the company, a bunch 14th hand investors or the engineers at the company? Do the investors have any idea even what is going on, especially with all of the security doors? Why is the company being so tight fisted with investment capital and so stingy with customers when it is throwing entire national GDPs out the window to feed the stock market? It was easy to rapidly conclude that investors are where profits go to die.
Parasites.
Am I looking forward to a communist state? No. That has been tried. Do I think that the proxy rights of institutional investors (who can’t vote anyway) should be turned over to labor? Yes. Some corporate governance oversight is better than none, and who else understands the company better and is willing to do it for free than the employees? It has always been clear to me that engineers advocate for the customer, and management advocates for the investor, and only one of these two is critical to the success of the company.
If you ask me, the appeal of Marxism doesn’t come from Karl Marx or any socialist propaganda, but from the monstrous greed of excessively entitled capitalists. That speaks volumes, far more eloquently and to far more people. Always has; always will.
'Do investors have any idea ...'
Nope, they are on only concerned about ROI ... return on investment and their portfolios beating market benchmarks.
Investors are corporate absentee landlords. They have power over the Board and encourage the decay of the organization from the inside-out, destroying the populace who is ultimately their consumer at work and in the shopping queue. Won't they be surprised when no one but the 1% cash disposable income to purchase their shit?
My mind was poisoned in high school by a summer job in a shoe factory and a copy of Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class":-)
A great comment from a Russian comedian who's name I lost track of: Marx was completely wrong about communism, but he was completely right about capitalism.
Well this is frightening! A power world based on science fiction. On top of that a love of Trump? Lovely! Way to go power tech bros.
What Thiel and his like are wanting is old fashioned feudalism filtered through cheesy Ayn Rand novels. The 'great man' is only great in his own mind and the minds of those he/she enriches through business success, forgetting that there have been people who were successful in business since the dawn of business itself. We can call this trump syndrome. There's a reason narcissism is a disorder, not a key into tech bro heaven (well, maybe tech bro heaven but not a heaven I want anything to do with). All of these guys following trump around waiting to pick up his cast offs are kind of pathetic. The reason that democracy, as terrible as some think it is, is the best available is the muddle. In fact, the muddle is the point - inefficient, messy and therefore human.
A potpourri—a blend—and hopefully moving toward an intellectual androgyny incorporating feminine as well as masculine views.
"And more or less what they're suggesting is that we are in a world where in the next few years we're going to have what Amodei says is a country of geniuses in a data center, that we won't need traditional research facilities anymore because we will have AI, which is more powerful than human intelligence actually figuring out all of this stuff for us. And so I think that there are a lot of people who are smart enough to realize that this is a, shall we say, decidedly risky bet for the future of the United States and the rest of the world."
Perfect example of the combined colossal hubris and oblivious ignorance of the so-called "AI" tech bro titans. I am honestly not sure which is worse, if these guys know they are full of shit but are just trying to put one over on us to make more money or if they really believe their own delusions of grandeur.
As a behavioral neuroscientist who has spent decades in the lab trying to understand how the brain works, it is part infuriating part comical that these guys (and far too many in the credulous media and government) think that complex autocomplete is going to magically morph into SkyNet and remove all need for experimental research in the real world.
Also not sure whether I'm wishing for their bubble to be popped before it gets off the ground, which will likely crash the markets precariously invested in a handful of tech companies or if it would be better to see them launch their imagined AGI and watch it experience a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" and rain down to earth like so many bits of a SpaceX test rocket.
My guess is that (a) they do know they are full of shit, and (b) their awareness of that fact is one of the reasons that their resentment is so profoundly bitter.
If through good fortune I have reached in adulthood an understanding that I am not always right, and in fact needn’t always be right, it’s much easier to see contradictions as a source of intriguing puzzles that I might enjoy working on over time. Not a rock I stub my toe on, or not a mere rock, a mere obstacle, but a piece of reality that I can look at in different ways, study with a friend or colleague, write about, join a community to investigate, and so forth.
The same men who think AI can take the place of human thinking, and robots of human physical labor, can't understand why its a bad idea to persecute undocumented workers.
Wow. This is a powerful discussion. The nugget for me is the information about lain Banks. Sounds like a must-read. We know that the human brain has a built-in negativity bias - just the way we’ve evolved over the millennia. It partially explains why people with gazillions of wealth are still so self-protective. All the data being fed into AI will reflect the same negativity bias unless we figure out a way to counter it. Way above my pay grade but I sure would like to hear any kinder utopian visions.
Careful coming at Banks as utopian. His main civilization, The Culture, and its offshoots are you might say baseline utopian - no poverty or illness, considerable personal freedom - but the universe as we know it still plays itself. There is war, and slavery, and there are new horrors. Banks relished describing these and his fondness for the grotesque exceeded mine. He's very much worth reading, but you may find yourself skimming some very gross stuff.
Thanks for that perspective. Very helpful.
As was implied in the discussion while you hear of the music of the marketplace and how capitalism thrives on competition, every capitalist's wet dream and goal is having a monopoly. Many times, the only thing preventing monopoly is regulation. I would infer that the only reason capitalism works is regulation.
I feel like the ghost of Ayn Rand is hovering over this conversation; I'm a bit surprised her name doesn't come up. My impression is that Rand is a significant part of the intellectual/cultural lineage of the right-wing turn in Silicon Valley that Krugman and Farrell are discussing. This kind of thinking, as described by Farrell, surely owes something to her:
<<One of the things about the ways that Silicon Valley thinks about founders, thinks about the power and the importance of the founder is that you ought to be able to make the rules within your own business, that you ought to be able to decide. You are the boss. You are the CEO. You are the person who has the vision and other people more or less within your company are required to run around and to make that vision happen.>>
Lisa Duggan's _Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed_ is a useful read on the subject.
You are absolutely correct that the spirit of Ayn Rand inhabits this entire mindset. & that is crazy b/c her view of the world was male-dominated, black & white, & completely w/o nuance or any understanding of humans. It was a fine read in h/s but as soon as one starts to develop some understanding of how people think, interact & behave, the silliness of Rand's imaginings are incredibly obvious. Anyone over the age of 21 should see the huge cracks in her world view. But instead, many of these "geniuses" think this is how the world should be! Their brains do indeed have the maturity & understanding of 14-year-old boys. This is pathetic.
Well, a totally free market, without regulation is EXACTLY what you have in Russia.
Because a powerful, focused, increasing driving force, destroys market equilibrium and thermodynamics. It pushes a highly asymmetric economic systems with the Oligarchs in charge of the political system.
Russia is the future America.
We can't have that.
One of my predilections is to avoid personal theories, and to focus on technical factors. Those zero out human interventions in favor of fundamental forces which dictate behaviors and outcomes. In this view monopolies behave the way they do for reasons that do not involve greed or avarice. Where there is competition there is innovation. And innovation requires R&D. But R&D is overhead, not a profit center. If you are a monopoly then innovation is a cost, and at the end of the day you are competing against yourself. Duh!
World War I was the first war in history to employ weapons that did not exist when the war began. The tank and the combat airplane(as opposed to the purely reconnaissance application), poison gas among them. Why the innovation? Survival and the deadly consequences of losing. And of course WWII raised the ante: the V1 and V2, night fighters, radar, jet aircraft, and Oh yes Little Boy and Fat Man.
Today Ukraine is teaching us that cleverness and innovation can level or even tip the playing field against an opponent which on paper should crush you. But that is an update on the Viet Cong. Yes they beat us; it wasn't a draw.
So the lesson is competition is the enemy of enshittification. And competition in a capitalist economy requires regulation. Every time you hear someone complain about regulations alarm bells should be going off. You can be sure they are not prioritizing your best interests. In that genre are "trickle down", tax cuts that pay for themselves, the Laffer Curve, Supply-side, and deregulation.
Glass-Steagel repealed and bank failures bloomed like measles in Texas.
As for me, I am infuriated that I still don't have the flying car that I was promised on "The Jetsons". Why is that? Who put their thumb on the scales? Oligopolies are just as bad. The Big Three automakers bought the trolley-car systems, and then trashed them to force people away from mass-transit.
Oh well, you get the point.
Unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.
I stand on my complaint.
What grand hubris for tech bros to imagine that AI will achieve all the future scientific and medical breakthroughs that depend on imagining and reacting to events, conditions that have never existed, unpredictably evolving, unrelated to any data available to AI. Egocentric twits.