Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

harpers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 284 posts

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#171

Post by bitwize »

"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."

I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#172

Post by PaulHoule »

popalchemist wrote: post #161
saulpw wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's charitable to frame this as resentment towards capital who gets the "credit". I'm sure people would grumble about this regardless, but the real resentment stems from them systematically eroding our ability to afford housing, healthcare, and retirement.

Yes and broadly speaking those concrete concerns can be considered in aggregate as "upward mobility."

Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach.

Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for about what he made writing one essay -- regardless of how good or bad it really is today, you're not going to see people express that kind of wonder and gratitude about it today.

This discussion circles around it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074389

but I think the real working class stance is that you want protection from economic shocks more than "participation", "ownership", "a seat at the table", "upside", etc. This might be a selfish and even antisocial thing to ask for over 80 years near the start of the second millennium, but I think it would sell if it was on offer. It's not on offer very much because it's expensive.

One could make the case that what we really need is downward mobility. Like what would have happened if Epstein had been shot down the first time or if Larry Summers had "failed down" instead of "failing up?" My experience is that most legacy admissions are just fine but some of them can't test their way out of a paper bag and that's why we need a test requirement.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#173

Post by deadbabe »

voxleone wrote: post #10

The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depend…

Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#174

Post by xg15 »

> Roy was still up. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. He and most of the Cluely staff were flopped on a single sofa. All these people had become incredibly rich; previous generations of Silicon Valley founders would have been hosting exorbitant parties. In the Cluely office, they were playing Super Smash Bros. Did they spend every night there? “We’re all feminists here,” Roy said. “We’re usually up at four in the morning. We’re debating the struggles of women in today’s society.”

Noticed this during the crypto hype as well and the articles about SBF-and-friends' Bahamas lifestyle. Are there more "startups" that feel more like VC-funded frat houses than actual businesses?

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#175

Post by qgin »

krapp wrote: post #139
temp8830 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the village, the horse works the hardest. But the horse will never be elected as the chief.

Horses tend not to run for office. Because they're horses.

Everyone knows someone who worked for years on a project only for it to go nowhere. Pour years into a business that failed. Spend years getting a degree that was useless. Effort might be a part of many people's success stories, but it's not the thing that literally gets rewarded. And conversely, many people get rewarded for things that require relatively little effort.

I suppose I should have said that the correlation between effort and reward has never been 1.0 and has often been a lot lower than we like to believe.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#176

Post by jameshart »

doctor_blood wrote: post #47

Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.

It's a numbers game. You only need one in twenty con artists to become wildly successful before they're caught, and your overall con artist portfolio is guaranteed to win out.

And of course, there's no downside for the investors. If you backed a con artist, you're not culpable - you're a victim.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#177

Post by bitwize »

mayhemducks wrote: post #150
FloorEgg wrote: post #53

I was enjoying the article until I got to this paragraph: > Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or th…

"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well." I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been tol…

Critical thinking is slave mentality, man. Master mentality, the mentality of the guys who FUCK, is knowing that what you want to happen WILL happen and doing everything you can to make it happen.

/s if not obvious

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#178

Post by yesco »

doctor_blood wrote: post #47

Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.

Salespeople are the easiest to sell to. Con artists are the easiest to swindle. The people who believe they're immune to being tricked are always the ones who get tricked the most.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#179

Post by saulpw »

PaulHoule wrote: post #172
popalchemist wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and broadly speaking those concrete concerns can be considered in aggregate as "upward mobility."

Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach. Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for abo…

I love the idea of "downward mobility". In particular over the past 30 years we've created a new class of ultra-ultra-rich with even more wealth than the robber barons of the gilded age had, and we need to figure out how to dismantle that entire class. A puny 3% wealth tax would take over 100 years to knock them down, and that's presuming that their wealth is static and not growing at a rate much greater than 3%.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#180

Post by Buttons840 »

voxleone wrote: post #10

The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depend…

An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.

He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.

Post reply on HN