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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
241–250 of 414 posts
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#242I'm really a bit shocked this was flagged. A blog post (marketed as a manifesto no less!) from the founder of Netscape and one of the biggest VCs in the business about the future of technology. I understand its potential for flame wars, but how could this not be on-topic for HN?
It’s a painfully dumb piece to the point that it’s hard to even nod along with the parts I agree with, because they’re so poorly-argued. There are paragraphs that are at-odds with the one right before, and not, apparently, on purpose. If it’s not AI written from a much-shorter prompt then I don’t know how this came to be. Writing on a big dose of uppers then not re-reading before posting? It’s an amateurish mess. I c…
I already liked the piece, but the cynicism on display here makes me like it better. It may have struck a nerve, which is usually a positive indicator that a set of ideas is hitting something in the zeitgeist.
The ideas aren't misunderstood. But then again, you didn't give any specifics. :)
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#243I'm really a bit shocked this was flagged. A blog post (marketed as a manifesto no less!) from the founder of Netscape and one of the biggest VCs in the business about the future of technology. I understand its potential for flame wars, but how could this not be on-topic for HN?
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Read the other comments in this thread: HN, like much of west coast tech, has started to fracture along political lines.
When I first joined HN many years ago, it was a haven for techno-optimism (not unlike this essay), but has fallen back into being reactive, resistant, cynical, and sanctimonious. I guess that's what happens after too many years of b2b saas paychecks.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#244"Love doesn't scale" is crazy.
Incredibly good line.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but boy does this lack of self-awareness just shout “distance yourself and run, don’t walk!” This feels a bit of an extreme reaction to me, I don't try and read into gotchas in writing and use them to "run away". Instead it makes me: 1. View the writing with skepticism 2. Try to understand what Andreessen thinks makes him not one of those ivory tower figures, because I certainly think of him as one. 2 seems the mor…
The manifesto comes from a guy whose business model for the past 3 years was grifting people into the NFT hype, so either he's just another conman selling a vision or a megalomaniac completely lacking self-awareness.
Why not both?
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#246Someone 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.
Here's a great list of books about exactly those subjects.[1] I have enjoyed many of them.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#247> 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…
We should not reduce energy use. Energy and prosperity are the same thing. The only way out of the climate crisis is innovation, which cheap energy accelerates. The moment we create the tesseract, the climate crisis is solved. With unlimited energy, we can purify infinite water, capture carbon, send drones into the atmosphere. Say we cut our energy consumption and carbon emissions by 50%. This would disproportionatel…
I don't think we should forego many of the various amenities that we use energy for, but we definitely can reduce overall energy use without causing a humanitarian catastrophe.
Take transportation. Gas engines are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30% efficient; the rest gets wasted as heat. Modern electric vehicles use motors with efficiencies in the high 90's. With battery/charging losses maybe you're somewhere around 80% efficiency. It'd be nice if people drove less on average as well because traffic can be a problem, but even without that we could reduce the energy needs of transportation to less than half the energy we use now, just by being less wasteful. The transition to EVs is slow because EVs are still expensive and cars in general can have long lifespans, but we should be hitting an inflection point if we haven't already where new EVs are cheaper overall than new ICE vehicles, and in a decade or so that should be true in the used market as well.
There's similar gains to be made by using heat pumps instead of natural gas for heating.
We're going to need a lot more electricity production even in a world that uses less energy overall because a lot of the stuff that's fossil-fuel powered now will need to be transitioned to run on electricity. So, I'm in favor of vastly increasing our deployment of solar and wind farms, and nuclear.
The choice between faster innovation or do something to avert climate catastrophe is a false one. We can do one or the other or neither or both. I really hope we do something about the CO2 problem, though.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#248> The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein "if you democratize power, the powerful will hate you for it" and "if you play with powers beyond your ability to control, they may backfire" seem like really different myths to me > We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world. huh, I don't know that I've ever been told thi…
There is so much fucking wrong with the 'manifesto' but just this made me want to throw up.
> our control over nature
what control.. exactly. Destruction is not control, consumption is not control. Stop any volcanos lately? Prevent any earthquakes? We've been systematically raping nature for hundreds of years and are currently staring down the barrel of extinction because of our inability to control nature.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#249In a world where abundance reigns, the old structures and the leaders who champion them fade into obsolescence. The energy that once went into seeking more begins to flow into sharing, nurturing, and sustaining. In this transformed landscape, resource hoarding and centralized control are not just out of place; they become barriers to the collective human journey toward wisdom and spiritual fulfillment. When everyone'…
really well written reply, much I agree with. Except one part about markets. I think even in the Age of Abundance, market forces will still be present. But I think they will be more like how trees grow to the light, or roots to the water. We will still need signals for efficiency and regrowth. Hard to say the same about money. I can't see a world without value, and I can't comprehend a system with value but no means…
In envisioning a future landscape, I see energy—both its generation and consumption—as well as human attention serving as the core currencies of value. These measures transcend the limitations of material wealth, opening avenues for a more holistic understanding of worth. The question of whether this will manifest as a 'market' is less clear, but what is certain is that it would be fundamentally distinct from the systems we navigate today. The incentives driving such an ecosystem would be radically different, to the extent that calling it a market or associating it with money, as we currently understand them, would likely be a misnomer.
In this envisioned system, the nature of transactions could also change fundamentally. Currently, transactions are exchanges that often end relationships; you pay for a good, receive it, and both parties move on. In a framework centered on energy and attention, transactions could become cyclical or ongoing, fostering long-term relationships and community engagement. This extends the concept of "value" beyond one-off exchanges into a more interconnected, perhaps even symbiotic, system.
Just some thoughts from a nobody on a tiny glowing screen.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#250Sitting on the Board of Facebook must really mess with you...