This is the second time I've seen YCombinator invest in something controversial.
First was the PearAI and now Optifye, there must be more.
'Hey Number 17 '
151–160 of 168 posts
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#152Wow! that twitter video https://x.com/AdamLerman5/status/1894215433366245457
What were they thinking?
Reminds me of 1984. Ministry of Peace = Department of War. Ministry of Plenty = Keep state in artificial scarcity.
All the AI techbros about AI gonna revolutionize the world and bring abundance = we're gonna make lives miserable for the 99%, and make ourselves billionaires.
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#153[dead]
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's their turn to sit in the factory for 12 hour a day, 5+ days a week and have AI assisted asses badgering them all day. I'm reminded of this famous Jefferson quote: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give…
Great quote. It’s from Adams though - a perennially under appreciated president. https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
Ah you're right! Thanks for the correction. Wish I could go back and edit but it's too late.
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. Panopticon surveillance. It's near the end stage of technofedualism apart from replacing workers entirely with robots and AI. When all (defacto all/most) of the jobs are optimized away such that no one has skills businesses want, what then? Does Earth become a giant favela ruled by a dozen trillionaires with a tiny supporting bourgeoisie? At some point, the hoarding of money becomes absolutely pointless except t…
> Does Earth become a giant favela ruled by a dozen trillionaires with a tiny supporting bourgeoisie? Yes. SF author imagines it would be more efficient to concentrate the proles of into a small agglomeration of buildings. It's easier for the policebots to keep track of the economically worthless underclass that way, you see. https://marshallbrain.com/manna4#:~:text=terrafoam Wouldn't you rather have an Earth where a…
We're basically headed towards Elysium but without the cool space station. Just a handful of trillionaires living in opulence, walled off from a few billion commoners building everything for them while living in poverty. Plus a robust police and surveillance state to keep those commoners from making trouble.
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the creators read this, they should understand that they are potentially inventing the shackles that they themselves will be bound in (albeit later). I think a lot of techies are under the mistaken impression that when they're done building the society of Elysium , for some reason the billionaires are going to take them along to the space station to live with them.
My theory is that the people working on it think they’ll get to a financial ‘class’ high enough in the process of working on tech. Be that over the course of how many decades. That they’ll be up there among them in the space station. Either that or they’re not thinking about the future at all and just doing it for the near instant gratification of a high salary.
Yea, they're making maybe one order of magnitude more than the average Joe, and they think those piddly $500K of Facebook RSUs are going to be enough to buy them a ticket to the space station.
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's my point - Y Combinator and tech companies are complicit in the inhumane conditions of sweatshops, the how is irrelevant to why it is bad. But framing it as a story about "AI" and "machine vision" just causes people to argue about the technology. [1] Y Combinator supports an AI startup that's pitching granular machine vision surveillance of factory workers.
> But framing it as a story about "AI" and "machine vision" just causes people to argue about the technology. It's relevant because this furthers this idea that current early AI technology is not about making the world a better plance and is instead used to accelerate the worst aspects of humanity. Sadly, the abuse of workers is not a novel idea. So the conversation should be more towards how we establish an ethical…
> It's relevant because this furthers this idea that current early AI technology is not about making the world a better plance and is instead used to accelerate the worst aspects of humanity.
Can't it be about both?
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's their turn to sit in the factory for 12 hour a day, 5+ days a week and have AI assisted asses badgering them all day. I'm reminded of this famous Jefferson quote: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give…
I read the Jefferson quote and his “I“ as part of society that gradually improve(s/d) to a point where people are given the chance to study what their passion is for passions sake - which is an end goal, where it can stop. Not as an individual family growth ladder that needs repetition. As an “if we all work together we can achieve this paradise within three generations from where we are“.
But it’s of course a ridiculous concept because the world is full of jobs needing to be done that are very hard to accomplish, nigh impossible to automate and as Mike Rowe calls them, simply “dirty.” The world is going to need plumbers for a long, long time.
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does Earth become a giant favela ruled by a dozen trillionaires with a tiny supporting bourgeoisie? Yes. SF author imagines it would be more efficient to concentrate the proles of into a small agglomeration of buildings. It's easier for the policebots to keep track of the economically worthless underclass that way, you see. https://marshallbrain.com/manna4#:~:text=terrafoam Wouldn't you rather have an Earth where a…
We're basically headed towards Elysium but without the cool space station. Just a handful of trillionaires living in opulence, walled off from a few billion commoners building everything for them while living in poverty. Plus a robust police and surveillance state to keep those commoners from making trouble.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age full circle and the gilded age brings back communism
Re: 'Hey Number 17 '
#160We were told the machines would free us from repetitive or injurious work, letting us pursue more meaningful and prosperous lives. Or at least they would be our partners we could leverage. Instead, will they be the tools of our enslavement to The Man?
When was the last time in history that people didn't use the most advanced technology to subdue/imprison/etc. other people? I am not saying that good things didn't happen, but where there is money to be made, money WILL be made. And for some countries that don't enjoy regulations like GDPR (China, India, with growing economies 'solutions' like this will definitely come to play). Some people will replace a form of sla…
Intelligence implies belligerence