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Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots.
Did I or did they change?
Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
Technologists used to be smart, now they just have money.
The problem is that we have made the latter condition an alias for the former. Redefining competence and intelligence as "ability to make money" has done untold damage to American society.
A small group of colonies managed to win a war against what was considered at one point the globe's strongest empire. Throughout the history-narrative of America there is a prevailing sense that the underdog can always overcome their circumstances and win the day. That most Americans (myself included) have a semi-deluded sense they "can achieve anything they put their minds to" is a direct manifestation of that narrative-history. It's also why there is so much rampant anti-intellectualism here; think about it, if you can do and are capable of anything - why would you *ever* listen to an expert's opinion? It's also why libertarian-ism is so popular; why would you want the rest of society dragging you down when you yourself are capable of so much more?
I want to be clear as well, there *are* benefits to the can-do attitude, but at this point the cons outweigh the pros, and we are seeing that play out in American society. I'd also like to acknowledge that the current situation is the result of many different factors; but that this one is largely overlooked due to the assumption that it's positives outweigh it's negatives.
Maybe the current AI landscape is a symptom of that mentality - that everyone should just pour as much money and resources into it, never look back, never measure, just keep pushing forward. If you start asking questions, you're in doubt. If you're in doubt, you're a roadblock for progression.
We all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.
He’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected. Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own busines…
Philosophers considered that even before Christ.
https://www.cnbc.com/2011/06/03/the-ancient-and-noble-greek-...
"A fragment of Solon’s poetry describes a situation in which many of the poor “have arrived in foreign lands/sold into slavery, bound in shameful fetters.”"
"In 594 BC, Solon was appointed archon of Athens. His solution to his city’s strife was to cancel both public and private debts and end debt slavery."
> or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs
https://theconversation.com/the-waters-become-corrupt-the-ai...
Pliny the Elder: "We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life."
(The same is true for introspection. It's certainly not a modern invention. Andreessen asserts it's an 1800s/1900s invention, but Shakespeare's fucking famous for "to be or not to be, that is the question"!)
Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it? Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots. Did I or did they change? Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
We all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.
It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising?
We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.