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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

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Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#151

Post by rainsford »

llamaimperative wrote: post #130

I agree with the overall thrust of this, or should be easy to convince, but boy does this lack of self-awareness just shout “distance yourself and run, don’t walk!” > Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’…

It's also a little hard to square that enemy with the earlier enemy of "...anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness." So we're opposed to credentialed experts in favor of "the real world" but also opposed to those who don't care about merit or achievement? Are credentials and expertise not a reasonable measure of merit and achievement and aren't excessive appeals to the wisdom of the average textbook anti-merit populist nonsense?

I'm actually a fan of the overall idea of techno optimism. But it's hard to get behind a version that starts out with the premise that we should exclude experts who've spent their lifetime focused on getting really good at knowing WTF they are talking about presumably in favor of billionaire VCs who can speak to the "real world". Don't get me wrong, if we're going to become a galaxy spanning civilization or whatever, we'll certainly need large and regular doses of reality. But we'll also need a lot of credentialed expertise.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#152

Post by cratermoon »

zemo wrote: post #127
jhp123 wrote: post #120

It's alarming to see this particular blend of ideas without any historical acknowledgment. The mix of Nietzsche's ideas about the superman, a messianic belief in the transformative power of industry, and a paranoid fear and hatred of "wreckers" who would deny and destroy greatness all have an awfully dark history.

yeah he quotes the Futurist Manifesto further down the page, also with no historical context, which ... I dunno, that's gotta be a dog whistle, right?

Yeah and he quotes neo-reactionary Nick Land

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#153

Post by fullshark »

lxe wrote: post #111

I agree with the premise, but why does this read like a tech bro and his finance/business major buddy in their early 20s got high and wrote it with the help of an LLM trained on /r/iam14andthisisdeep?

Because (successful) venture capitalists don't actually know everything and aren't worth listening to on every single subject because they made a few brilliant bets.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#154

Post by elihu »

> We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.

Let's not do that on Earth please. If you want to build a planet-sized solar concentrator in space for reasons, knock yourself out.

In fact, until we figure out how to not rely on fossil fuels, I think we're better off reducing energy use. We can do that and get more useful work done at the same time by using energy more efficiently. In many respects that will be the natural consequence of electrification of formerly fossil-fuel technology. EVs are far more efficient than ICE vehicles.

> We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Per-capita US carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power.

[citation needed]

Even if true, about half the CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution happened in the last 30 years or so. The path we're on is one that leads to environmental and economic devastation and misery.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#155

Post by Thrymr »

volleygman180 wrote: post #86

Someone should hand Marc Andreessen a copy of “The Technological Society” by Jacques Ellul

Almost any decent book about history, economics, philosophy, science, or technology, really. This looks like a sequence of autogenerated tweets from a libertarian technobot.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#156

Post by tern »

lambda_garden wrote: post #38
sph wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF is e/acc for people that don't live on Twitter?

Effective Altruism is a charity / social club / networking opportunity for young STEM types based on pretty extreme beliefs about Utilitarianism and recently AI. The most famous EA right now is probably SBF. Accelerationism is the belief that we should race towards catastrophe so that we can rebuild society in a better way. E / Acc is a (sometimes ironic) amalgam of the two. You won't be surprised to learn that not m…

The original accelerationist manifesto was written by people who did study history. You can find it here: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-mani...

#accelerate was a meme (which, mainly referred to a set of aesthetics) on Google circles around 2011

Since then, the meme evolved into a bit of a war between l/acc (the original sense of the term) and r/acc (Nick Land flavored).

e/acc is a play on this—but a decade removed, the original context has been mostly forgotten

To understand the original historical context, you can read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Accelerationist-Reader-Urb..., which traces it back to, among other things, an essay by Marx

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#157

Post by [deleted] »

akprasad wrote: post #40
onion2k wrote: post #25

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently. We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people throughout history have been adamantly against the rapid progress of technology. The Luddites are the most famous group but there have been lots more. Even if you ignore those people for being frankly a bit weird, the driving force behind technology for the firs…

The Luddites were not anti-technology per se . Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1]. Given the rest of your comment, it seems the Luddites are your natural allies. Related HN discussion on [1] from 3 weeks ago: [2] [1]: https://archive.ph/…

[deleted]

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#158

Post by hotnfresh »

tech_ken wrote: post #134

I think this needs a close reading by a historian or something. I'm certainly not qualified to do it but still there are so many lines that even to my layman's understanding seem like just obvious, fortune cookie horseshit (ironic, given how aggressively the author is touting "truth-seeking"). The Nietzsche stuff reads like something a stoner freshman engineer would post on /r/atheism. > Our enemy is the ivory tower,…

Between the times the piece twists itself up in knots of self-contradiction or is just, purely internally, gibberish, plus the amount of it that’s, as you rightly call out, “fortune cookie horseshit” and is best ignored, it’s a challenge to even reach a point of beginning to address and critique its substance.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#159

Post by tern »

From the original "[...] Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" from 2013[1]:

> 7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.

[1] https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-mani...

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#160

Post by Karrot_Kream »

akprasad wrote: post #40
onion2k wrote: post #25

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently. We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people throughout history have been adamantly against the rapid progress of technology. The Luddites are the most famous group but there have been lots more. Even if you ignore those people for being frankly a bit weird, the driving force behind technology for the firs…

The Luddites were not anti-technology per se . Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1]. Given the rest of your comment, it seems the Luddites are your natural allies. Related HN discussion on [1] from 3 weeks ago: [2] [1]: https://archive.ph/…

> Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1]

I find discussions about the Luddites online to be deeply illustrative not of the Luddites themselves but of a person's political beliefs. The Luddites did indeed fight for their community and livelihood, but theirs came by dismantling another one. For hundreds of years prior the textiles trade was dominated by the Mughal Empire. British colonization in South Asia, fed by a multitude of factors including industrialization, dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market and eventually catapulted British textile production to the world stage. This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. The Luddites then did not want to turn back the textile market fully back to a world dominated by South Asia but into the middle where they owned the means of production.

Accelerationists view Luddites as obstructionists. Labor sympanthizers view Luddites as a movement for labor protections. The wider view of history paints a more subtle picture.

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