Everyone needs to read The Limits to Growth and then come back to this piece for a laugh. Donella Meadows is far more profound and intelligent then the vast majority of non-system thinkers who stumbled into the halls of power.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
281–290 of 414 posts
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#282> Markets > We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us > We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral There's many things off with this. The USSR from the 1920s to early 1950s had enormous economic growth - particularly in the 1930s when so-called free markets in the West had collapsed, by the 1…
This is a pretty crazy post full of misunderstandings and misinformation. For example, the existence of government spending does not mean the country's economy is centrally planned. Central planning refers to a very specific type of system where the central government plans the minutiae of the economy, such as how many widgets will be produced per year and how much they will be sold for. In Western economies, those d…
How many board of directors out there control half the economy (boards make all the important decisions). I bet it's smaller than the number of aparachiks. US economy is centrally planned, just not all publicly planned.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#283The relationship between technology and society is one filled with complexity. A statement like: "We had a problem with darkness so we invented electrical lighting", isn't representative of the real thing.
If we think for example about the printing press it should be clear that there are certain forms of society that would make the invention of the printing press more likely — namely ones where books played a big role and literacy became more desireable. But on the other side the invention of the printing press had huge impacts on the societies that adopted them and branched them off into a totally different timeline.
The relationship between a society and a technology is always dialectical: society changes technology and technology changes society. Part of our role as technologists is to be aware of that — if we care about where humanity is moving at all.
Now if you jump back into the beginning of the last century a lot of the promises made by modernity were about automation making our lives easier. One could say: "We had hard labour so we invented automation" — only that the fruits of these automations haven't reached those whose jobs got replaced.
Somebody working an average job 40 years ago could easily sustain a family. That is no longer possible. Technology got nothing to do with it, where the money flows does.
A household appliance 40 years ago would last you decades. Today you are lucky if it lasts you 4 years. Technology, again, got nothing to do with it, where the money flows does.
Endless growth works till you hit saturation. All growth requires external inputs in order to work. And in an finite world those inputs are finite as well. You can't put a mic into a loudspeaker and get infinite loudness because that would take infinite energy and all components in the circuit would have to be able to handle that.
There is no free such thing as free lunch — also not with economic growth.
There are many things that can look really great if you are good at selectively ignoring a big chunk of it's systemic in- and outputs or handwave them away.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#284Techno-optimism? lifts hood hey, it was techo-feudalism all along!
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#285Oh my, he actually quoted Italian futurism. We live in sacry times.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's perfectly self aware that he has rejected his own class. It's weird that people think that's impossible or something and insist that he must be one in the same.
This isn't it, he was never part of the class in the first place and he does not share its insular self-serving worldview. He didn't go to Harvard, he went to Illinois. He built his own tech firm when taking that path wasn't even a thing for people to do, he did not inherit banking interests.
It's ironic he talks about markets yet Netscape came from Mosaic, developed at a public university (Urbana-Champaign in Illinois) without market forces. HTML and HTTP developed at CERN, another public institution.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually agree with the idea that we should judge people based on their popularity with customers rather than their peers. Credential are very often indicative of the former
genuinely curious what truth-distilling insight you think the average customer has that somehow can’t be manipulated artificially. people get duped by deceptive marketing every day, man.
On the other hand, we have seen how perverse incentive amongst experts work too. Academia is rife with fraud (e.g. publishing 500 paper a year), because certain incentives make it possible. I agree expert are important and should be judged by peers, but incentives around budget allocation and prestige should not be attached to performance, especially in science. However I understand it's a complex topic so I probably miss a lot of information, just my 2 c.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you design a system that can only really last for a single generation or two it's not really an appropriate model for a civilization is it? The USSR had 3 decades of solid growth? That's cute. The U.S. has been booming for hundreds of years at this point. The US economy is not centrally planned. Government expenditure is 37 percent of GDP, not even a majority. Even much of the government expenditures that do occur…
> The U.S. has been booming for hundreds of years at this point. Glorifying the early US economic system is not doing much for your argument.
I'm speaking to the last several hundred years including colonial times, early 1800s, post Civil War, early and late 20th century and the present. The number one economy in the world for over a century and counting.
Even in recent times, the U.S. has out-paced the EU. The U.S. economy is now 50 percent larger than the EU. There was a lot of talk of China surpassing the U.S. as recent as 8 years ago, however, the U.S. has pulled out ahead as China's growth has stalled. And the USSR no longer exists, but to the extent that you can equate it to Russia, well the Russian GDP is smaller than some individual U.S. states.
[1] https://archive.ph/zygD4 [2] https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/as-china-s-...
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you design a system that can only really last for a single generation or two it's not really an appropriate model for a civilization is it? The USSR had 3 decades of solid growth? That's cute. The U.S. has been booming for hundreds of years at this point. The US economy is not centrally planned. Government expenditure is 37 percent of GDP, not even a majority. Even much of the government expenditures that do occur…
> The U.S. may have had bread lines at the time, but people weren't dying of mass starvation. Only if you consider the millions that suffered mass extermination, incarceration and forced labor in the US not to be humans.
Mass extermination never occurred in the United States, what are you even talking about?
Forced labor, in the 1930s through 1960s? No. Just no.
Half of the early U.S. had slavery up til 1865 when a brutal Civil War that cost 600K plus people their lives settled the question. That was all the way back in the 1800s when Russia was still a medieval serfdom indistinguishable from a slave based economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia), which it had conducted for over 700 years.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this being written by Andreesen is a non-starter for me. I have no interest in what he has to say at this point - hard pass.
C'mon. We dont hate people we hate bad ideas. He's not wrong about that.
Who's to say that's a good idea? I beg to differ.