27 ms·

Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance

164 points by andygambles 11y ago

danvoell 11y ago
"We have some ideas, but would love to hear from you as well." - I didn't hear any ideas in that article, let's hear some.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
The title says it all: Silicon Valley is arrogant, and it's success insulates itself from introspection. That's pretty much it. The rest of the article goes off about how universal basic income is good, or bad, or liberating, or condescending. Then concludes saying "I sure sure stung SV where it hurts, huh? Now everybody suggest better ideas than UBI because I haven't got any but I still want to feel edgy and validated."
- mason240 11y ago
  Does the author not know that UBI is a pretty popular idea among people in the tech industry, or is he just trolling for clicks and self-validation? EDIT: I think I get it now, the author is a socialist type who is troubled by a capitalistic solution for post-labor society.
  - ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
    Honest question, is UBI considered a capitalistic solution? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      Richard Nixon hailed it as a conservative answer to poverty because instead of picking-and-choosing people who needed help and those who didn't, and measuring exactly how much help they needed (food stamps yes, welfare check no, housing voucher yes, and so on...), it simply provides for a standard of living that allows people to choose for themselves how to allocate it, instead of being determined by bean-counting bureaucrats.
    - mason240 11y ago
      I think the answer to that depends on whether or not you think the current economies of the US/Canada/Europe/Scandinavia are capitalist or not (I do, and am myself a capitalist). If so, then yes it is. We already tax income for redistribution programs - UBI is just a very large, very even redistribution programs. With UBI, the economy would still based on capitalism, using money, private ownership of capital and property, and using all those things to create profits (which would then be taxed). People will develop marketable skills to earn more money (which would be taxed). All this is the same as it is now.
    - dibujante 11y ago
      Yes. It does not interfere with private ownership or private economy whatsoever. The notion that wealth transfers are socialism / communism is a misunderstanding that has developed due to political rhetoric in the United States. By way of example, if you are trying to ensure that everyone gets a loaf of bread: a communist solution is taking over the bakery and ordering its workers to produce a loaf of bread for everyone. A capitalist solution is taxing the owners of the bakery and then transferring everyone money equal to the price of a loaf of bread. UBI is clearly in the latter camp.
  - hmahncke 11y ago
    One author (Lenny Mendonca) is an ex-senior partner at McKinsey who worked with the finance industry. Pretty sure he's not an anti-capitalist.
- adwf 11y ago
  Yes, the author seems remarkably conflicted over UBI, I'm not sure he entirely understands what it entails. This is aptly demonstrated by his final paragraph where he asks the reader how we can redistribute the wealth from successful companies. Um, universal basic income? It is fundamentally redistributive. How does he think it's going to get funded? It's going to need 60-70% tax rates across the board.
  - anonymousDan 11y ago
    If my reading is correct I think you missed his point. His claim is that most people wouldn't want to be placated with UBI in return for being denied an opportunity to earn their own way because all wealth creation capabilities are concentrated in the hands of the 'Silicon Valley elite'.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      Which is an insanely single-minded view. Wealth is created in all sorts of ways. Culture can never be automated. Fashion is never finished. Food is never finished. Movies, music, art, dance, they are always in a state of transition from one trend to the next. And they make tons of cash.
    - adwf 11y ago
      Oh I agree with that a little, but that's another misunderstanding on his part. Basic income is meant as a minimum upon which you then build your own career. It's not really meant as welfare for the unemployed, that's just an added bonus. Instead of working a crappy job that you hate, you can afford to find a job that you love, even if it's lower pay. eg. If you're working for 15k units of money at a job you hate, under basic income you could keep on earning 15k + say 10k of UBI for total 25k. Or you could switch to 10k UBI + 5k salary at a job you love. The beauty of that system is that currently there are a whole class of jobs that really struggle to exist (like music/arts/etc.), because no-one can afford to work for only 5k a year. It also has an added benefit of improving those terrible jobs in the first place, as no boss can abuse his staff without them walking out (no unions needed!).
- shopkins 11y ago
  I didn't get that impression, but maybe that's because I'm not in the geographical area of the author's vitriol. About halfway through he makes a good point about Uber drivers not making much money from the job. He mentions hypothetically giving drivers equity in the company. I think the end of the article had a pretty clear call-to-action, without gloating. Personally it got me thinking about ways I could change services I've built to pay both myself and users creating content on it. Think about if you could make money by posting great photos on Instagram. Not many SV engineers might care, but for others, that could potentially provide a much-needed source of income and an alternative to the currently non-existent UBI.
  - EdHominem 11y ago
    Of course Uber drivers make way more than cabbies in 80% of circumstances, but yes - let's attack the only free-market company in he mix. Two issues about the ownership: 1) They're being paid in transferable tokens which are redeemable for stock (ie, money) if they desire. 2) Uber isn't worth its valuation so they're better off with money.
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > About halfway through he makes a good point about Uber drivers not making much money from the job. He mentions hypothetically giving drivers equity in the company. Which, if you think about it, clearly doesn't work. The driver already gets the large majority of the fare. It's just that the driver gets most of one fare whereas Uber gets a small slice of every fare so the driver makes $8 once and Uber makes $2 times a billion. Even if you gave every single share of the company to the drivers and left nothing for any other investors, they would only get the small remaining slice of the fare after whatever administrative overhead the company has. In other words they would get the equivalent of like a 10% raise. It doesn't fix anything. The fundamental problem is that the market is highly competitive so it drives down fares/wages. If you want to get paid more, you have to do some other kind of work. > Personally it got me thinking about ways I could change services I've built to pay both myself and users creating content on it. Think about if you could make money by posting great photos on Instagram. Which is exactly the same problem. When you post a picture on Instagram, Instagram on average makes a few cents. They're a billion dollar company because it's a few cents times a billion people. If you gave all the money to the people posting pictures they would still be making far less than minimum wage.
DickingAround 11y ago
It's hilariously wrong. Tech is scooping people up from all over the world. And it's having to pay super high salaries because the supply is so limited. I guess maybe startup funding only goes to a few, but there's a lot of programmers from every walk of life who do a lot of work and are all getting good money. The idea that drivers are going to be left aside by automation is 100% true. The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech. Now some tech people foresee the world with good automation and want to try to help others, and suddenly they're being condescending for not recognize their privileged? This word drawn in the article don't match up with facts. It is based on so many falsehoods it's factually incorrect.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > And it's having to pay super high salaries because the supply is so limited. No, it is having to pay super high salaries because it insists on forcing people to all move to the same place, which both artificially limits the talent pool and drives the cost of living there higher. > The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech. The result is that self-taught people have an ever-harder hill to climb to even get interviews, let alone get hired. How many times have we had discussions here wherein people said their job postings were inundated with unqualified and barely-qualified boot camp grads?
  - DickingAround 11y ago
    Well, as someone working in tech and making good money outside the valley I think the SF-cost-of-living-problem is a bit of a misnomer for the wider tech community. People all over the world are getting big rich off of tech. And I think the inundation of underqualified is just the cost of sorting out the good people. I've personally hired two people who never went to college. And I know a lot of people with unrelated and/or BS-only degrees who went big. You can get a laptop that does fine for $300 + internetCost. Getting an education that could earn 6-figures if you're good at it has never been easier. Maybe not perfect, but never easier.
golemotron 11y ago
I can deal with SV's arrogance but I have trouble dealing with bloggers' unchecked scolding. That article was shrill, it impugned motive, and it attempted to stigmatize. This is more of threat than people who are earnestly trying to help but who may be missing part of the picture. See: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
- ndesaulniers 11y ago
  That's a good read, thanks for sharing.
- fabulist 11y ago
  Very interesting article, you should submit it.
  - golemotron 11y ago
    It's been submitted many times.
    - DrScump 11y ago
      And this main article is the ninth submittal of it in less than 2 days. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%E2%80%99s%20Unchecked%20Arrogance&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%E2%80%99s%20U...
adrianN 11y ago
The article insinuates somehow that making jobs obsolete and thinking about a basic income is arrogant and bad. This is, in my opinion, completely misguided. Making jobs obsolete is the very definition of progress. Being forced to work >40 hours of a week for most of your live in a job you might not even enjoy to maintain a basic standard of living seems pretty horrible to me.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
strommen 11y ago
Silicon Valley's raison d'etre is to leverage computers to make our lives easier. It's a confluence of people who are good at software (and the business of software) - nothing more, nothing less. Apart from the means to throw vast amounts of money at the problem, there's no reason that Silicon Valley nerds should be expected to solve squishy human problems like inequality. Those require a greater understanding of people and society. And to borrow an analogy from John Oliver, expecting tech entrepreneurs to possess this is like expecting a vegan to be good at karate - there's no cause and effect between these two, and the correlation usually goes the other way.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > Apart from the means to throw vast amounts of money at the problem, there's no reason that Silicon Valley nerds should be expected to solve squishy human problems like inequality. Conversely, there's no reason reaching your exit should be so profitable. Leverage computers, while government raises capital gains tax to income levels to even the playing field (which, coincidentally, is a great way to capture efficiency gains and distribute to social safety nets).
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > there's no reason that Silicon Valley nerds should be expected to solve squishy human problems like inequality. Change isn't predictable[1], so it is misguided to expect that anybody will be able to solve difficult problems like inequality. However, we can and should expect "Silicon Valley nerds" to at least follow the principle of failing safely when designing new technology. Technology can provide incredible benefits to society, but harmful effects can also be amplified. While we shouldn't expect a solution to hard problems, we should be assigning liability and charges of negligence when someone makes the these problems worse. [1] For detail, see James Burke's non-teleological interpretation of history.
- d--b 11y ago
  > nothing more, nothing less. That's not quite true. There definitely is a culture that is specific to Silicon Valley. Of course, not everyone in the valley matches that culture, but on average there are some values and a certain rhetoric that comes out of that area that is very recognizable. You can see that by watching the silicon valley show, the guys in the show represent the different stereotypes of people that you encounter all the time in the valley. This is important to the argument here, because one aspect of the silicon valley rhetoric is that its objective is to do good, to make the world a better place, to not be evil. It is that rhetoric that pisses off people. The fact that ruthless businessmen (because they are ruthless businessmen) put themselves on the right side of morality. It is going way further than Wall Street's "greed is good". At least the Wall Street guys had some actual cynicism behind it. Here, you get people who actually believe that they are making the world a better place, and that humanity owes them the insane amount of wealth they're getting out of it. And that's where the arrogance comes from. Instead of telling the world: 'we're making life a little bit more convenient' they say 'we embody human evolution, we are progress and progress is good'
saturdaysaint 11y ago
Is the tyranny of location really Silicon Valley's fault? I didn't read anything here that circumvents the fact that any big new idea in technology is going to need a deep pool of technical experts that's going to be hard to find outside of a few areas. And Valley companies are doing just about everything they can to work on spreading the expertise via online education, telepresence, open source, etc.
batz 11y ago
So he's saying that decades of poor public education based on creating docile worker drones is creating an underclass that is increasingly separate from the people who had access to better, rebelled against, or beat it. People are poor because they are lied to about how the world works. They are lied to by the true believers whose paychecks depend on them repeating the same tired post-modern bunk. Poor kids drop out of school because they know they are being lied to, but don't have the tools to manage the cognitive dissonance - because they point of most public education these days is to indoctrinate kids into accepting and submitting to dissonance instead of reasoning about it. I will help anyone who wants out, but anyone who wants me back in can drop dead.
Sven7 11y ago
I fully agree with this piece. I am sick of the Larry Ellison type role model of leadership that is encouraged and celebrated. Mindless ambition is not a bad thing if you want to climb a mountain or walk to the north pole in winter on your own. But if you want to rule the world you will do harm in unimaginable ways.
vox_mollis 11y ago
As per usual, another article that ignores or denies the obvious impact of raw g factor on wealth. Silicon Valley represents a concentration of high IQ. You can't magic-up or educate-up technological wealth creators from lower-IQ populations. Five decades of miserably failed social policy is quite clear on this point. Cognitive horsepower MATTERS and although UBI is unpalatable to the science-denying blank slatists, it's likely the only way to keep the IQ lottery losers living comfortably in a future where wealth is generated nearly exclusively by technology.
- nevir 11y ago
  > it's likely the only way to keep the IQ lottery losers living comfortably Or, perhaps, by elevating them via better education
  - justin_vanw 11y ago
    You can't elevate people. Communities get the best education they can provide, some communities have no idea how education works and sabotage it through their ignorance. There is no way to provide 'better education' to a group of people when a large subset of that group attack teachers, commit felonies in the school such as assaulting teachers and other students, especially when laws prevent any attempt to separate violent and disruptive students. Of course many students come from families where education is considered pointless, have no books in their houses, have no well educated role models in their family or even among all the people they have ever known well. So it's very easy (not to mention ignorant) to just say 'just give everyone a great education', but frankly it is a really ignorant thing to say. People are trying very hard to do exactly what you are recommending, massive amounts of money are being spent, and yet they are failing. For example, Washington DC spends over $30,000 per year PER STUDENT. Despite this, they have something like an 20% literacy rate. I would love to hear your plan? Should we spend $60,000 a year and get that literacy rate up to 21%? What is your plan to 'elevate' these students??
    - sklogic 11y ago
      > You can't elevate people. If you're not bound by morals and all that crap, there are some ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Makarenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Makarenko
justin_vanw 11y ago
It's not arrogance if it is true. The trend is very clear: the list of tasks which can be automated is getting longer. The list of jobs being done by unskilled and/or nontechnical workers is getting shorter. This is a trend noted by economists for many decades (we've all heard about how most jobs in America are now 'service jobs', that is just one example). It is very lazy to do what this author is doing. See success, demand charity via a convoluted argument which boils down to "instead of solving everyone's problems, listen to my populist bullshit and solve them in this obviously unworkable way that is based on ignorance and doesn't challenge any assumptions that are widely held. Change is scary and not guaranteed to make every single thing better, so we should fight it."
- kordless 11y ago
  > It's not arrogance if it is true. Trust is a slippery thing, given it can be swayed by biases. So is blaming others, which is exactly what you are doing with your comment. Arrogance comes from blame based on a comparison operation to the one doing the comparison. There's clearly biases involved in that operation. The quotes you are using in your third paragraph are a way for you to speak for others, which is exactly the type of arrogance being referred to in the article. Let others speak for their own thoughts and actions. Stick to your own and we'll all get along!
  - justin_vanw 11y ago
    If you define arrogance too broadly, then every person who ever tried to do anything competitive is arrogant. Starting a company is arrogant, because to be successful you will have to be better than your competition, and since maybe you are just biased and maybe you aren't actually better than your competition, automatically you are arrogant? Your definition makes almost every single thing every person does (apart from watching TV) arrogance. Edit: trimmed this to my core response
    - restalis 11y ago
      "Your definition makes almost every single thing every person does (apart from watching TV) arrogance." I think that watching TV has no inherent prevention from being arrogant, so TV watchers must be arrogant too! (Armchair quarterbacks anyone? Hell, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the article itself was written by some sort of armchair [whatever]!)
canistr 11y ago
So given that YC wants to fund studies on UBI and Ontario recently announced that it begin looking into implementing it, wouldn't it be best if YC assisted in funding the Ontario experiment? Even though it's outside the natural scope of the YC (that being a Canadian-based study vs US-based), there's no reason why this can't be done. Particularly with the cultural similarities between Ontario (at least Southern Ontario) with parts of the US.
- jdoliner 11y ago
  Why would that be better? There's huge value in having 2 independent studies that can check each other's assumptions than putting all our eggs in one basket.
mindslight 11y ago
BI reeks of the same lazy centralized thinking responsible for the very trends that cause BI to seem necessary. After feedback, BI will just raise rents a corresponding amount - broken monetary policy simply speeds up the debt treadmill to funnel the added surplus upwards. And income always comes with strings attached, so increased centralized command would be inevitable. The end result is an even larger underclass being socially engineered from Washington. Restore sane monetary policy so most people can accumulate wealth. Rebuke the broken Silicon Valley VC model of proprietary systems that further concentrate the N^2 wealth from Metcalfe's law into a few rendezvous bottlenecks. Only then can we have a chance at a functioning economy in the face of increasing technological progress.
- drabiega 11y ago
  Consider that BI has been agreed to be a good idea by a variety of well regarded intelligent people on both sides of the political spectrum. If anything, offhand dismissal is the lazy attitude here. > After feedback, BI will just raise rents a corresponding amount Basic Income is inherently redistributive. The prices of goods are inherently based on the distribution of income. It is pretty reasonable to expect the balance of prices to adjust given the income redistribution. > And income always comes with strings attached The point of BI is income without strings, so could you explain how this is impossible? > Restore sane monetary policy Could you explain what you regard as sane monetary policy?
  - mindslight 11y ago
    (My criticism could seem like "offhand dismissal" because you're quickly reading it, not because I spent little time thinking about it.) > Could you explain what you regard as sane monetary policy? Restoring the ability for non-upper-class people to save. Specifically, ending the policy of forced inflation that prevents the lower class from saving in cash, and pushes the middle class into simulated "investments" to slow the erosion. Technological progress means prices should be getting ever-cheaper, so the effects of forced inflation get ever-worse - an economic treadmill that favors income (with accompanying requirements) over minor wealth (which can be wielded as one pleases). > The point of BI is income without strings That is the initial intention and design, but all systems evolve. BI creates an income stream at the mercy of politics, which are the biggest strings that can be attached. Imagine the same "drug users on welfare" rhetoric applied to even more people. > Basic Income is inherently redistributive But still subject to the rent treadmill, which will simply recollect the distributed money upwards to the money printers and associated artificial industries (eg by increasing the arbitrary capital cost of a place to live, raising the carrying cost aka rent). BI seems like a solution because it goes right along with the trends of centralization, but it's those very trends that are causing the economic pain in the first place!
clumsysmurf 11y ago
Douglas Rushkoff touches on parallel themes in his new book. I haven't finished it yet but recommend it so far. "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617230170 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617230170
api 11y ago
Unchecked arrogance vs... Wall St.? DC? Do those power centers help people build wealth? I see a bit of East side West side rivalry in this stuff. Silicon Valley didn't implement regressive taxation and unfair trade policies in the 1970s, and that's when the great liquidation of the American working class started. SV is being blamed for a trend that pre-dates its ascendance to the world stage by 25 years.
subdane 11y ago
<opinion> The problem I see w/ UBI is that contrary to popular belief, people aren't lazy, they're industrious. People like to feel useful. And people long for meaning in their lives and their work. Entrepreneurs define this stuff for themselves, but most people aren't comfortable with the risk and ambiguity necessary to be an entrepreneur. We're really talking about finding ways to give structure and meaning to those folks, the large middle class in America. And the ways we did this in the 20th C aren't working, for myriad reasons, some of them technological. UBI is a way to address loss of income without actually addressing the need for structure, meaning, and belonging to a larger project. I realize this is beyond the scope of government, but I actually think we simply handed this conversation over to the free market in the 20th C and that answer isn't going to work in this century. And this question about work/income and supporting your family, which was obscured by a strong jobs market will be thrown into relief. </opinion>
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  It's hard to measure economic output of people who do things that don't make money. If a stay-at-home parent helps raise children and run errands, and as a result the breadwinner is more capable in their job and the children grow up to be stable and successful, shouldn't that kind of work be compensated? Likewise a community volunteer can do a lot of good if they are not burdened by living expenses, yet often communities that could benefit most from volunteering are those which lack the funds to pay people outright. It would also be a hell of a lot easier if I could work 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 working on my business without worrying about making ends meet and contributing to my retirement accounts.
  - brooklyndavs 11y ago
    "Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans." - Robert F Kennedy
joshstrange 11y ago
I don't disagree that engineers solve problems they know, there is no doubt in my mind this is true and maybe we can do better at trying to "know" more about these immediate problems that author mentions so that we can solve those problems (Like Flint). But aside from that this author is way off base. If it's arrogant to see that automation will undoubtedly consume a large number of jobs and we need to have a plan for that then yes I'm arrogant and I stand fully behind basic income. Also BI solves way more problems than just "Automation took my job" which the author briefly mentions then acts like they aren't important. This article was a waste of time.
Wintamute 11y ago
What, exactly is Silicon Valley in this argument? The article does not provide a definition, and seems to repeatedly make the hilarious mistake that Silicon Valley can be "personally" deserving of the sort of moralistic/authoritarian pseudo liberal browbeating that's so common in the media nowadays. It isn't a person that can be shamed on social media. It isn't a nation, a government body, a think tank or any other sort of institution that owes you or society a damn thing. If it even can be viewed collectively it's an expression of capitalism and technological progress that is single mindedly interested in providing value to shareholders.
- deleted 11y ago
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logicallee 11y ago
In my personal opinion the problem is a lack of arrogance throughout the rest of the world. In most geographic areas, you can clearly describe a specific set of actions that will result in a material creation of utility for huge numbers of people, and people will not only not support you in executing those actions, nor join you in building it, but they will tell you to get a grip on yourself and not to do it.[1] This isn't conjecture on my part, I've personally witnessed this. In fact, a study of startup markets shows that an extremely large percentage of founders in other cities are transplants from Silicon Valley (or lived there in the past). Why is that? I would bet that when it came to pure ability, 80% of the people reading this post have what it takes to potentially do something used by millions of people. Though we can't learn it, it is a matter of cold data where anyone who actually will do so is located. That data is very skewed geographically, and in my personal estimation, it is skewed toward Silicon Valley. This could probably be demonstrated. [1] articles about the "arrogance of Silicon Valley" can themselves be construed as being someone telling people to get a grip on themselves and to stop changing the world. "You're not special enough to change the world" means: stop doing it
TTPrograms 11y ago
Wow is that ever a click-baity title for an article primarily about difference in perspectives between classes.
brandonmenc 11y ago
If you've ever spent time working "among the people" - like, in a factory, or running a cash register, or cleaning toilets - you'd know that most people aren't smart enough to "build wealth for themselves." In fact, most of them (and likely also you) are alive only because modern society is full of rubber bumpers and safety nets. I don't mean things like Social Security - I mean things like grocery stores and municipal water. This isn't a bad thing, and it doesn't mean those people aren't good, or not worthy of basic human care and comfort. After the robots take their jobs, we need to give them a guaranteed basic income or they'll be dying in the streets. There's nothing arrogant about acknowledging that - I think it's arrogant to assume that every person is smart enough (like you) to take care of themselves in a shockingly changed economy.
- hmahncke 11y ago
  Pretty sure everyone on HN is only alive because modern society is full of rubber bumpers and safety nets like grocery stores and municipal water.
  - disgruntledphd2 11y ago
    The water and sanitation, particularly.
  - brandonmenc 11y ago
    Exactly. But that stuff isn't free - you still need money to exchange for groceries because you've spent generations specializing in factory work and forgot how to hunt. A lot of people are going to need hand outs so they can maintain access to these "rubber bumpers" that they're unable to provide for themselves.
- James001 11y ago
  My, don't you sound like an arrogant twat
  - brandonmenc 11y ago
    I don't know, here I am on HN admitting that (many years ago) I did janitorial work third shift. Am I still arrogant?
msvan 11y ago
I don't think we'll be running out of jobs anytime soon, though I do worry about the social and economical consequences of technology. I agree that technology has disturbing effects on society. But this article gets it wrong. > In its mind, Silicon Valley creates the future, while the rest of the world will soon become the “idle class.” What if they instead helped people build wealth for themselves? The idle class is a desirable end state. I for one would take that deal immediately if offered: to have the rest of my existence unconditionally funded, without anyone forcing me to do work I don't want to do. I think there are many people who would be happy to not have to sell their labor to survive. The authors' premise clings to the idea that everyone needs to derive their self-worth from the illusion of providing for oneself. Everyone who grows up in the Western world owes their survival to their family, society and the government. In reality, you are not independent. Selling your labor on a market is just one way of partaking in the enormous system you were born into. In the future, you'll be able to work on whatever you want, irrespective of the market, and that's how you'll contribute back. Make art. Organize communities. Study the nooks and crannies of the universe. Play sports. Live. > And you wonder why political candidates on both sides are tapping into anti-elitist anger with great success. It is only elitism if it denigrates. On the contrary, automation is supposed to be relief from drudgery. If anything, it denigrates the work, not the person. The major challenge is to have our political systems keep up with the pace of change. This is a huge challenge. > The idea here is borne from an underlying assumption that capitalism has winners and losers, and the victors have a responsibility to take care of the rest. Instead, we’d posit that many of the “winners” in Silicon Valley are part of a faux meritocracy — being born into the right city or social network. The system can be unfair and still have winners and losers. I think most people in SV understand how exceptionally lucky they are to not have been born into slavery in Mauretania, even though they don't exactly go out of their way to show it. The authors are right: SV is not meritocratic in any sane definition of the word. SV is unfair. It should be improved upon, but it's never going to be perfect. In the authors' view, you are not being taken care of by your society if you sell your labor. I disagree. > When India didn’t go for a Silicon Valley-led internet proposal, Marc Andreessen gained global denunciation (including from Silicon Valley CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg) for a tweet This is a cheap attack on Andreessen. His comment, while horrendously worded, was clearly meant as a complaint against knee-jerk reactions. (That said, I think India made the right choice in rejecting Free Basics.) > the world will eventually be out of work and become a burden on the enlightened few Hopefully, by the time we get there, redistribution will be extensive enough that everyone can live a lavish life. > the resulting social unrest Probably. The political climate will not adjust lightly. > Snapchat may be solving an important problem for well-connected young people in America who don’t have to worry about basic needs. But whether it’s unemployed young people in St. Louis looking for their next paycheck or a family in Flint, Michigan worried about clean water, many Americans have more immediate problems. There is a difference between problems that capitalism can solve and problems that politics can solve. Capitalism solves market problems. Politics solves the rest. St. Louis and Flint are political problems. The problem is politics, not tech. Imagine if politics were more efficient. > What if a percentage of the $50B valuation were shared among the drivers, based on a merit-based system? This would be a nightmare to implement, notwithstanding that it's a terrible way to influence the market. The market is good at figuring out what things are worth. It often makes very unfair decisions, and in those cases politics should come in and rescue the day. The American model is increasingly incompatible with technology, which is increasingly demanding more redistribution. Why try to shoehorn a very complex equity-sharing system into the market, when some simple redistribution could achieve the same end? It's all for the sake of preserving the faux ideal of being independent. > But the conclusion — that the automation of these jobs will create a lot of wealth for a few people (of course the brilliant ones in Silicon Valley) but leave most out of work (the rest of us) — is reflective of Silicon Valley’s arrogance. Politics. We'll just take the money from them :) > How do we change ownership structures to prevent Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp from distributing billion-dollar windfalls among only a couple dozen people? Whatever the imagined solution is, it is redistribution. You can dress it up in a wig and an evening dress, but it is still redistribution. The only difference is perception. Redistribution via UBI is seen as robbing people of their independence, whereas redistribution via unspecified market intervention is not. Technology is going to go the way it wants to. I've said it a million times but I'll say it a million times more: politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics.
tetrep 11y ago
>How do we change ownership structures to prevent Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp from distributing billion-dollar windfalls among only a couple dozen people? This seems to be the crux of the argument, that concentrated wealth is bad but direct redistribution via taxes/Government is also bad. The "proposed" solution in the article is to construct a most certainly complex set of laws/regulations such that companies themselves are forced to redistribute their wealth amongst their employees, which only works if you have employees to share with. If 3 people make an awesome mobile game that makes millions of dollars, even split evenly, they're helping virtually nobody with their product yet accumulating a very non-trivial amount of wealth. UBI or similar tax schemes would naturally capture this wealth and redistribute it, I'm not aware of a cleaner/simpler alternative than that. Note: I think the discussion this article is creating is good, but that the article itself is quite poor.
pascalxus 11y ago
It's a typical response of denial from someone who's job is at risk: the journalist. First of all, before any of this can come to pass, SV will have to deal with the government. They control over a third of the country's spending. And they're not just going to allow subcontractors to automate all those jobs away to the most cost effective bidders/ most efficient solutions. Ever hear of no-bid contracts - they're the norm. There's no rule that says Government has to use tax money in an efficient manner, just look at what's going on right now. There will eventually be some degree of automation. But, unfortunately for society, I don't think it will ever become as widespread as alluded to in the article.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  This article is about you.
jpgvm 11y ago
Very poor article. I doubt anyone in Silicon Valley, especially Y-Combinator is postulating that the rest of the world isn't capable of being successful or any other nonsense like that. All that is being observed is that the natural tendency for technology is remove the need for manual labor. This first happened to agriculture, then manufacturing and now the push is to automate services that can be. Over time this naturally leads to people needing to move into work that creates this new technology or create new industries in order to work in. If indeed they need to work. The idea that technology will eventually power our basic needs without human assistance isn't that far from reality, sure we may still be decades away but decades aren't really that long. We need to think about the problem well before then because even small amounts of unemployment (10-15% or greater) causes serious problems given societies current structure. It's not just work that breaks down on this automation horizon though but also money/wealth/capitalism. Whatever you call the current state of affairs. People will still need to live, do something day to day etc but they will no longer need to work just for society to function. So money as an incentive doesn't really need to exist at that point. Ofcourse this is very pie in the sky but even so I don't think people realise this is a very real possibility and may happen sooner than many of us think, not in it's completion but sufficiently to force significant numbers of people out of work and make people consider it as a real future.
evook 11y ago
An article about being smarter than the rest of the world and UBI written without mentioning Milton Friedmans concept of negative income tax or Götz Werner's basic income concept left me skeptical about the scientific entitlement of Ross Baird and Lenny Mendonca. E.g. Falsely crediting Nixon makes me furious. IMHO this Click-Baiting pseudo journalism constitutes a lot more about silicon valleys ignorance instead of its arrogance.
antoinevg 11y ago
In the headlong rush towards exploiting the easy and trivial gains one can pilfer from the cost reductions achieved through automation I fear many of you fine HN folk may have forgotten other applications of technology in the workplace that can both uplift the human spirit and create super-fulfilling jobs. Come on hacker folk… you can (and have!) reach higher than this. Oh… and before you hit that vote or reply button… take a deep breath and read through some of Papert's earlier works. It's easy to take an intellectual position on your reading of the (assumed) flaws in a critics commentary but, as most smart kids learn sooner or later, once the tide turns against you it becomes a lot harder to win people's trust.
KirinDave 11y ago
I couldn't help but laugh incredulously as I read this article. It checks all the boxes I'd expect it to check. You can practically shout "bingo!" at the end. • "Silicon Valley isn't spending time working on stuff _I_ think is valuable." • "So what if kids find Snapchat to be critical. Those kids are "connected" and therefore don't matter! _I_ don't get it, therefore it's dumb!" (Even though it's very easy to demonstrate many social networks do in fact engage with and edify kids in low income families because of specific allotments of social media time in schools.) • "Universal Basic Income is bad because people have a deep seated desire to work and their basic needs aren't being met, so rather than triaging that problem and lifting them out of the toxic debt spirals that entrap them in this state, we should focus on _educating them._" • "Taxpayers as a whole have no business helping the less fortunate. This is the sole responsibility business." (Even as we then mock them." • "Therefore businesses should have the mandate to make people's lives better, rather than offering them better solutions. That's not presumptuous at all." These are all implications of the worldview of this article. It's cleverly couched in terms mocking Sam Altman's naive view of the world and then somehow using that to pave over the huge amount of work all over the country on technology centering around education, medical treatment, financial improvement, legal automation, etc. And in the end, of course, this article is about... DISRUPTING VENTURE CAPITALISM. Because again, THAT top-down view of the world is bad, but OUR top-down plan will be totally great.
hacknat 11y ago
The criticism that Y Combinator tells companies that "they have to move to SV" is misleading. That quote is about being a part of Y Combinator. You are free to leave once you graduate your cohort and get funding, and many have...
jpadkins 11y ago
One huge fallacy in the article: "Instead, we’d posit that many of the “winners” in Silicon Valley are part of a faux meritocracy — being born into the right city or social network." Vast majority of those who work in SV were not born there or started in some social network. They moved there because they were highly skilled, and then they entered the social network.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  In order to develop those skills, most of them had to be at least born to families that weren't poor. The number of true 'rags to riches' stories is small.
  - jpadkins 11y ago
    relative to US middle class? Sorry I have too many friends from Asia and Eastern Europe who were born into a much lower standard of living than US middle class who are now successful in SV. I was raised by a single working mother, and went to a state university. Not rags to riches, but definitely not a life of privilege. Meritocracy in SV isn't perfect, especially when you consider the supply feeding into it. But it's the best example of meritocracy the human race has.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      Meritocracy in SV is a myth. Some of the highest paid executives in SV are some of the most intellectually handicapped people I've ever encountered. Irresponsibility, blowing more money than I've ever even seen in my life on frivolous pursuits. Petty squabbles throwing years of progress down the drain. Sundar Pichai, now the highest paid CEO in the US, set Android platform development back two or three years due to his own vanity. I'm sad at how much could be accomplished with the waste created by SV incompetence. It's incredible how little merit people have considering the amount of money they're paid. I feel like the compulsive gambler is the best analog to Silicon Valley: Blowing every last penny you have, over and over, on the belief that you'll someday strike it rich.
danielrm26 11y ago
This piece skirts perilously close to ad hominem. There is no actual addressing of the central point: that few people will have the money and most will not. Does anyone actually disagree with this? And if not, why write an attack against that position?
arh68 11y ago
As bad as the article makes it sound, it's not like Sam's ignoring the problem entirely. Awareness is half the battle. Funding's the other half. In fact, there's an explicit request [1] for startups to solve this problem, check it out: We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million jobs. There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to divide labor between humans and computers-—we are very good at some things computers are terrible at and vice versa—-and some of these require huge amounts of human resources. This is both good for the world and likely a good business strategy—-as existing jobs go away, a company that creates a lot of new jobs should be able to get a lot of talented people. That's putting money where your mouth is. No, automation and SV2SV startups are not the solution, but you can't put the future on hold until someone figures this out. [1] http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million

164 points by andygambles 11y ago

"We have some ideas, but would love to hear from you as well." - I didn't hear any ideas in that article, let's hear some.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

The title says it all: Silicon Valley is arrogant, and it's success insulates itself from introspection. That's pretty much it. The rest of the article goes off about how universal basic income is good, or bad, or liberating, or condescending. Then concludes saying "I sure sure stung SV where it hurts, huh? Now everybody suggest better ideas than UBI because I haven't got any but I still want to feel edgy and validated."

mason240 11y ago
Does the author not know that UBI is a pretty popular idea among people in the tech industry, or is he just trolling for clicks and self-validation? EDIT: I think I get it now, the author is a socialist type who is troubled by a capitalistic solution for post-labor society.
- ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
  Honest question, is UBI considered a capitalistic solution? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Richard Nixon hailed it as a conservative answer to poverty because instead of picking-and-choosing people who needed help and those who didn't, and measuring exactly how much help they needed (food stamps yes, welfare check no, housing voucher yes, and so on...), it simply provides for a standard of living that allows people to choose for themselves how to allocate it, instead of being determined by bean-counting bureaucrats.
  - mason240 11y ago
    I think the answer to that depends on whether or not you think the current economies of the US/Canada/Europe/Scandinavia are capitalist or not (I do, and am myself a capitalist). If so, then yes it is. We already tax income for redistribution programs - UBI is just a very large, very even redistribution programs. With UBI, the economy would still based on capitalism, using money, private ownership of capital and property, and using all those things to create profits (which would then be taxed). People will develop marketable skills to earn more money (which would be taxed). All this is the same as it is now.
  - dibujante 11y ago
    Yes. It does not interfere with private ownership or private economy whatsoever. The notion that wealth transfers are socialism / communism is a misunderstanding that has developed due to political rhetoric in the United States. By way of example, if you are trying to ensure that everyone gets a loaf of bread: a communist solution is taking over the bakery and ordering its workers to produce a loaf of bread for everyone. A capitalist solution is taxing the owners of the bakery and then transferring everyone money equal to the price of a loaf of bread. UBI is clearly in the latter camp.
- hmahncke 11y ago
  One author (Lenny Mendonca) is an ex-senior partner at McKinsey who worked with the finance industry. Pretty sure he's not an anti-capitalist.
adwf 11y ago
Yes, the author seems remarkably conflicted over UBI, I'm not sure he entirely understands what it entails. This is aptly demonstrated by his final paragraph where he asks the reader how we can redistribute the wealth from successful companies. Um, universal basic income? It is fundamentally redistributive. How does he think it's going to get funded? It's going to need 60-70% tax rates across the board.
- anonymousDan 11y ago
  If my reading is correct I think you missed his point. His claim is that most people wouldn't want to be placated with UBI in return for being denied an opportunity to earn their own way because all wealth creation capabilities are concentrated in the hands of the 'Silicon Valley elite'.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Which is an insanely single-minded view. Wealth is created in all sorts of ways. Culture can never be automated. Fashion is never finished. Food is never finished. Movies, music, art, dance, they are always in a state of transition from one trend to the next. And they make tons of cash.
  - adwf 11y ago
    Oh I agree with that a little, but that's another misunderstanding on his part. Basic income is meant as a minimum upon which you then build your own career. It's not really meant as welfare for the unemployed, that's just an added bonus. Instead of working a crappy job that you hate, you can afford to find a job that you love, even if it's lower pay. eg. If you're working for 15k units of money at a job you hate, under basic income you could keep on earning 15k + say 10k of UBI for total 25k. Or you could switch to 10k UBI + 5k salary at a job you love. The beauty of that system is that currently there are a whole class of jobs that really struggle to exist (like music/arts/etc.), because no-one can afford to work for only 5k a year. It also has an added benefit of improving those terrible jobs in the first place, as no boss can abuse his staff without them walking out (no unions needed!).
shopkins 11y ago
I didn't get that impression, but maybe that's because I'm not in the geographical area of the author's vitriol. About halfway through he makes a good point about Uber drivers not making much money from the job. He mentions hypothetically giving drivers equity in the company. I think the end of the article had a pretty clear call-to-action, without gloating. Personally it got me thinking about ways I could change services I've built to pay both myself and users creating content on it. Think about if you could make money by posting great photos on Instagram. Not many SV engineers might care, but for others, that could potentially provide a much-needed source of income and an alternative to the currently non-existent UBI.
- EdHominem 11y ago
  Of course Uber drivers make way more than cabbies in 80% of circumstances, but yes - let's attack the only free-market company in he mix. Two issues about the ownership: 1) They're being paid in transferable tokens which are redeemable for stock (ie, money) if they desire. 2) Uber isn't worth its valuation so they're better off with money.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > About halfway through he makes a good point about Uber drivers not making much money from the job. He mentions hypothetically giving drivers equity in the company. Which, if you think about it, clearly doesn't work. The driver already gets the large majority of the fare. It's just that the driver gets most of one fare whereas Uber gets a small slice of every fare so the driver makes $8 once and Uber makes $2 times a billion. Even if you gave every single share of the company to the drivers and left nothing for any other investors, they would only get the small remaining slice of the fare after whatever administrative overhead the company has. In other words they would get the equivalent of like a 10% raise. It doesn't fix anything. The fundamental problem is that the market is highly competitive so it drives down fares/wages. If you want to get paid more, you have to do some other kind of work. > Personally it got me thinking about ways I could change services I've built to pay both myself and users creating content on it. Think about if you could make money by posting great photos on Instagram. Which is exactly the same problem. When you post a picture on Instagram, Instagram on average makes a few cents. They're a billion dollar company because it's a few cents times a billion people. If you gave all the money to the people posting pictures they would still be making far less than minimum wage.

DickingAround 11y ago

It's hilariously wrong. Tech is scooping people up from all over the world. And it's having to pay super high salaries because the supply is so limited. I guess maybe startup funding only goes to a few, but there's a lot of programmers from every walk of life who do a lot of work and are all getting good money. The idea that drivers are going to be left aside by automation is 100% true. The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech. Now some tech people foresee the world with good automation and want to try to help others, and suddenly they're being condescending for not recognize their privileged? This word drawn in the article don't match up with facts. It is based on so many falsehoods it's factually incorrect.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> And it's having to pay super high salaries because the supply is so limited. No, it is having to pay super high salaries because it insists on forcing people to all move to the same place, which both artificially limits the talent pool and drives the cost of living there higher. > The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech. The result is that self-taught people have an ever-harder hill to climb to even get interviews, let alone get hired. How many times have we had discussions here wherein people said their job postings were inundated with unqualified and barely-qualified boot camp grads?
- DickingAround 11y ago
  Well, as someone working in tech and making good money outside the valley I think the SF-cost-of-living-problem is a bit of a misnomer for the wider tech community. People all over the world are getting big rich off of tech. And I think the inundation of underqualified is just the cost of sorting out the good people. I've personally hired two people who never went to college. And I know a lot of people with unrelated and/or BS-only degrees who went big. You can get a laptop that does fine for $300 + internetCost. Getting an education that could earn 6-figures if you're good at it has never been easier. Maybe not perfect, but never easier.

golemotron 11y ago

I can deal with SV's arrogance but I have trouble dealing with bloggers' unchecked scolding. That article was shrill, it impugned motive, and it attempted to stigmatize. This is more of threat than people who are earnestly trying to help but who may be missing part of the picture. See: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

ndesaulniers 11y ago
That's a good read, thanks for sharing.
fabulist 11y ago
Very interesting article, you should submit it.
- golemotron 11y ago
  It's been submitted many times.
  - DrScump 11y ago
    And this main article is the ninth submittal of it in less than 2 days. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%E2%80%99s%20Unchecked%20Arrogance&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%E2%80%99s%20U...

adrianN 11y ago

The article insinuates somehow that making jobs obsolete and thinking about a basic income is arrogant and bad. This is, in my opinion, completely misguided. Making jobs obsolete is the very definition of progress. Being forced to work >40 hours of a week for most of your live in a job you might not even enjoy to maintain a basic standard of living seems pretty horrible to me.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

strommen 11y ago

Silicon Valley's raison d'etre is to leverage computers to make our lives easier. It's a confluence of people who are good at software (and the business of software) - nothing more, nothing less. Apart from the means to throw vast amounts of money at the problem, there's no reason that Silicon Valley nerds should be expected to solve squishy human problems like inequality. Those require a greater understanding of people and society. And to borrow an analogy from John Oliver, expecting tech entrepreneurs to possess this is like expecting a vegan to be good at karate - there's no cause and effect between these two, and the correlation usually goes the other way.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> Apart from the means to throw vast amounts of money at the problem, there's no reason that Silicon Valley nerds should be expected to solve squishy human problems like inequality. Conversely, there's no reason reaching your exit should be so profitable. Leverage computers, while government raises capital gains tax to income levels to even the playing field (which, coincidentally, is a great way to capture efficiency gains and distribute to social safety nets).
pdkl95 11y ago
> there's no reason that Silicon Valley nerds should be expected to solve squishy human problems like inequality. Change isn't predictable[1], so it is misguided to expect that anybody will be able to solve difficult problems like inequality. However, we can and should expect "Silicon Valley nerds" to at least follow the principle of failing safely when designing new technology. Technology can provide incredible benefits to society, but harmful effects can also be amplified. While we shouldn't expect a solution to hard problems, we should be assigning liability and charges of negligence when someone makes the these problems worse. [1] For detail, see James Burke's non-teleological interpretation of history.
d--b 11y ago
> nothing more, nothing less. That's not quite true. There definitely is a culture that is specific to Silicon Valley. Of course, not everyone in the valley matches that culture, but on average there are some values and a certain rhetoric that comes out of that area that is very recognizable. You can see that by watching the silicon valley show, the guys in the show represent the different stereotypes of people that you encounter all the time in the valley. This is important to the argument here, because one aspect of the silicon valley rhetoric is that its objective is to do good, to make the world a better place, to not be evil. It is that rhetoric that pisses off people. The fact that ruthless businessmen (because they are ruthless businessmen) put themselves on the right side of morality. It is going way further than Wall Street's "greed is good". At least the Wall Street guys had some actual cynicism behind it. Here, you get people who actually believe that they are making the world a better place, and that humanity owes them the insane amount of wealth they're getting out of it. And that's where the arrogance comes from. Instead of telling the world: 'we're making life a little bit more convenient' they say 'we embody human evolution, we are progress and progress is good'

saturdaysaint 11y ago

Is the tyranny of location really Silicon Valley's fault? I didn't read anything here that circumvents the fact that any big new idea in technology is going to need a deep pool of technical experts that's going to be hard to find outside of a few areas. And Valley companies are doing just about everything they can to work on spreading the expertise via online education, telepresence, open source, etc.

batz 11y ago

So he's saying that decades of poor public education based on creating docile worker drones is creating an underclass that is increasingly separate from the people who had access to better, rebelled against, or beat it. People are poor because they are lied to about how the world works. They are lied to by the true believers whose paychecks depend on them repeating the same tired post-modern bunk. Poor kids drop out of school because they know they are being lied to, but don't have the tools to manage the cognitive dissonance - because they point of most public education these days is to indoctrinate kids into accepting and submitting to dissonance instead of reasoning about it. I will help anyone who wants out, but anyone who wants me back in can drop dead.

Sven7 11y ago

I fully agree with this piece. I am sick of the Larry Ellison type role model of leadership that is encouraged and celebrated. Mindless ambition is not a bad thing if you want to climb a mountain or walk to the north pole in winter on your own. But if you want to rule the world you will do harm in unimaginable ways.

vox_mollis 11y ago

As per usual, another article that ignores or denies the obvious impact of raw g factor on wealth. Silicon Valley represents a concentration of high IQ. You can't magic-up or educate-up technological wealth creators from lower-IQ populations. Five decades of miserably failed social policy is quite clear on this point. Cognitive horsepower MATTERS and although UBI is unpalatable to the science-denying blank slatists, it's likely the only way to keep the IQ lottery losers living comfortably in a future where wealth is generated nearly exclusively by technology.

nevir 11y ago
> it's likely the only way to keep the IQ lottery losers living comfortably Or, perhaps, by elevating them via better education
- justin_vanw 11y ago
  You can't elevate people. Communities get the best education they can provide, some communities have no idea how education works and sabotage it through their ignorance. There is no way to provide 'better education' to a group of people when a large subset of that group attack teachers, commit felonies in the school such as assaulting teachers and other students, especially when laws prevent any attempt to separate violent and disruptive students. Of course many students come from families where education is considered pointless, have no books in their houses, have no well educated role models in their family or even among all the people they have ever known well. So it's very easy (not to mention ignorant) to just say 'just give everyone a great education', but frankly it is a really ignorant thing to say. People are trying very hard to do exactly what you are recommending, massive amounts of money are being spent, and yet they are failing. For example, Washington DC spends over $30,000 per year PER STUDENT. Despite this, they have something like an 20% literacy rate. I would love to hear your plan? Should we spend $60,000 a year and get that literacy rate up to 21%? What is your plan to 'elevate' these students??
  - sklogic 11y ago
    > You can't elevate people. If you're not bound by morals and all that crap, there are some ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Makarenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Makarenko

justin_vanw 11y ago

It's not arrogance if it is true. The trend is very clear: the list of tasks which can be automated is getting longer. The list of jobs being done by unskilled and/or nontechnical workers is getting shorter. This is a trend noted by economists for many decades (we've all heard about how most jobs in America are now 'service jobs', that is just one example). It is very lazy to do what this author is doing. See success, demand charity via a convoluted argument which boils down to "instead of solving everyone's problems, listen to my populist bullshit and solve them in this obviously unworkable way that is based on ignorance and doesn't challenge any assumptions that are widely held. Change is scary and not guaranteed to make every single thing better, so we should fight it."

kordless 11y ago
> It's not arrogance if it is true. Trust is a slippery thing, given it can be swayed by biases. So is blaming others, which is exactly what you are doing with your comment. Arrogance comes from blame based on a comparison operation to the one doing the comparison. There's clearly biases involved in that operation. The quotes you are using in your third paragraph are a way for you to speak for others, which is exactly the type of arrogance being referred to in the article. Let others speak for their own thoughts and actions. Stick to your own and we'll all get along!
- justin_vanw 11y ago
  If you define arrogance too broadly, then every person who ever tried to do anything competitive is arrogant. Starting a company is arrogant, because to be successful you will have to be better than your competition, and since maybe you are just biased and maybe you aren't actually better than your competition, automatically you are arrogant? Your definition makes almost every single thing every person does (apart from watching TV) arrogance. Edit: trimmed this to my core response
  - restalis 11y ago
    "Your definition makes almost every single thing every person does (apart from watching TV) arrogance." I think that watching TV has no inherent prevention from being arrogant, so TV watchers must be arrogant too! (Armchair quarterbacks anyone? Hell, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the article itself was written by some sort of armchair [whatever]!)

canistr 11y ago

So given that YC wants to fund studies on UBI and Ontario recently announced that it begin looking into implementing it, wouldn't it be best if YC assisted in funding the Ontario experiment? Even though it's outside the natural scope of the YC (that being a Canadian-based study vs US-based), there's no reason why this can't be done. Particularly with the cultural similarities between Ontario (at least Southern Ontario) with parts of the US.

jdoliner 11y ago
Why would that be better? There's huge value in having 2 independent studies that can check each other's assumptions than putting all our eggs in one basket.

mindslight 11y ago

BI reeks of the same lazy centralized thinking responsible for the very trends that cause BI to seem necessary. After feedback, BI will just raise rents a corresponding amount - broken monetary policy simply speeds up the debt treadmill to funnel the added surplus upwards. And income always comes with strings attached, so increased centralized command would be inevitable. The end result is an even larger underclass being socially engineered from Washington. Restore sane monetary policy so most people can accumulate wealth. Rebuke the broken Silicon Valley VC model of proprietary systems that further concentrate the N^2 wealth from Metcalfe's law into a few rendezvous bottlenecks. Only then can we have a chance at a functioning economy in the face of increasing technological progress.

drabiega 11y ago
Consider that BI has been agreed to be a good idea by a variety of well regarded intelligent people on both sides of the political spectrum. If anything, offhand dismissal is the lazy attitude here. > After feedback, BI will just raise rents a corresponding amount Basic Income is inherently redistributive. The prices of goods are inherently based on the distribution of income. It is pretty reasonable to expect the balance of prices to adjust given the income redistribution. > And income always comes with strings attached The point of BI is income without strings, so could you explain how this is impossible? > Restore sane monetary policy Could you explain what you regard as sane monetary policy?
- mindslight 11y ago
  (My criticism could seem like "offhand dismissal" because you're quickly reading it, not because I spent little time thinking about it.) > Could you explain what you regard as sane monetary policy? Restoring the ability for non-upper-class people to save. Specifically, ending the policy of forced inflation that prevents the lower class from saving in cash, and pushes the middle class into simulated "investments" to slow the erosion. Technological progress means prices should be getting ever-cheaper, so the effects of forced inflation get ever-worse - an economic treadmill that favors income (with accompanying requirements) over minor wealth (which can be wielded as one pleases). > The point of BI is income without strings That is the initial intention and design, but all systems evolve. BI creates an income stream at the mercy of politics, which are the biggest strings that can be attached. Imagine the same "drug users on welfare" rhetoric applied to even more people. > Basic Income is inherently redistributive But still subject to the rent treadmill, which will simply recollect the distributed money upwards to the money printers and associated artificial industries (eg by increasing the arbitrary capital cost of a place to live, raising the carrying cost aka rent). BI seems like a solution because it goes right along with the trends of centralization, but it's those very trends that are causing the economic pain in the first place!

clumsysmurf 11y ago

Douglas Rushkoff touches on parallel themes in his new book. I haven't finished it yet but recommend it so far. "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617230170 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617230170

api 11y ago

Unchecked arrogance vs... Wall St.? DC? Do those power centers help people build wealth? I see a bit of East side West side rivalry in this stuff. Silicon Valley didn't implement regressive taxation and unfair trade policies in the 1970s, and that's when the great liquidation of the American working class started. SV is being blamed for a trend that pre-dates its ascendance to the world stage by 25 years.

subdane 11y ago

<opinion> The problem I see w/ UBI is that contrary to popular belief, people aren't lazy, they're industrious. People like to feel useful. And people long for meaning in their lives and their work. Entrepreneurs define this stuff for themselves, but most people aren't comfortable with the risk and ambiguity necessary to be an entrepreneur. We're really talking about finding ways to give structure and meaning to those folks, the large middle class in America. And the ways we did this in the 20th C aren't working, for myriad reasons, some of them technological. UBI is a way to address loss of income without actually addressing the need for structure, meaning, and belonging to a larger project. I realize this is beyond the scope of government, but I actually think we simply handed this conversation over to the free market in the 20th C and that answer isn't going to work in this century. And this question about work/income and supporting your family, which was obscured by a strong jobs market will be thrown into relief. </opinion>

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
It's hard to measure economic output of people who do things that don't make money. If a stay-at-home parent helps raise children and run errands, and as a result the breadwinner is more capable in their job and the children grow up to be stable and successful, shouldn't that kind of work be compensated? Likewise a community volunteer can do a lot of good if they are not burdened by living expenses, yet often communities that could benefit most from volunteering are those which lack the funds to pay people outright. It would also be a hell of a lot easier if I could work 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 working on my business without worrying about making ends meet and contributing to my retirement accounts.
- brooklyndavs 11y ago
  "Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans." - Robert F Kennedy

joshstrange 11y ago

I don't disagree that engineers solve problems they know, there is no doubt in my mind this is true and maybe we can do better at trying to "know" more about these immediate problems that author mentions so that we can solve those problems (Like Flint). But aside from that this author is way off base. If it's arrogant to see that automation will undoubtedly consume a large number of jobs and we need to have a plan for that then yes I'm arrogant and I stand fully behind basic income. Also BI solves way more problems than just "Automation took my job" which the author briefly mentions then acts like they aren't important. This article was a waste of time.

Wintamute 11y ago

What, exactly is Silicon Valley in this argument? The article does not provide a definition, and seems to repeatedly make the hilarious mistake that Silicon Valley can be "personally" deserving of the sort of moralistic/authoritarian pseudo liberal browbeating that's so common in the media nowadays. It isn't a person that can be shamed on social media. It isn't a nation, a government body, a think tank or any other sort of institution that owes you or society a damn thing. If it even can be viewed collectively it's an expression of capitalism and technological progress that is single mindedly interested in providing value to shareholders.

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logicallee 11y ago

In my personal opinion the problem is a lack of arrogance throughout the rest of the world. In most geographic areas, you can clearly describe a specific set of actions that will result in a material creation of utility for huge numbers of people, and people will not only not support you in executing those actions, nor join you in building it, but they will tell you to get a grip on yourself and not to do it.[1] This isn't conjecture on my part, I've personally witnessed this. In fact, a study of startup markets shows that an extremely large percentage of founders in other cities are transplants from Silicon Valley (or lived there in the past). Why is that? I would bet that when it came to pure ability, 80% of the people reading this post have what it takes to potentially do something used by millions of people. Though we can't learn it, it is a matter of cold data where anyone who actually will do so is located. That data is very skewed geographically, and in my personal estimation, it is skewed toward Silicon Valley. This could probably be demonstrated. [1] articles about the "arrogance of Silicon Valley" can themselves be construed as being someone telling people to get a grip on themselves and to stop changing the world. "You're not special enough to change the world" means: stop doing it

TTPrograms 11y ago

Wow is that ever a click-baity title for an article primarily about difference in perspectives between classes.

brandonmenc 11y ago

If you've ever spent time working "among the people" - like, in a factory, or running a cash register, or cleaning toilets - you'd know that most people aren't smart enough to "build wealth for themselves." In fact, most of them (and likely also you) are alive only because modern society is full of rubber bumpers and safety nets. I don't mean things like Social Security - I mean things like grocery stores and municipal water. This isn't a bad thing, and it doesn't mean those people aren't good, or not worthy of basic human care and comfort. After the robots take their jobs, we need to give them a guaranteed basic income or they'll be dying in the streets. There's nothing arrogant about acknowledging that - I think it's arrogant to assume that every person is smart enough (like you) to take care of themselves in a shockingly changed economy.

hmahncke 11y ago
Pretty sure everyone on HN is only alive because modern society is full of rubber bumpers and safety nets like grocery stores and municipal water.
- disgruntledphd2 11y ago
  The water and sanitation, particularly.
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  Exactly. But that stuff isn't free - you still need money to exchange for groceries because you've spent generations specializing in factory work and forgot how to hunt. A lot of people are going to need hand outs so they can maintain access to these "rubber bumpers" that they're unable to provide for themselves.
James001 11y ago
My, don't you sound like an arrogant twat
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  I don't know, here I am on HN admitting that (many years ago) I did janitorial work third shift. Am I still arrogant?

msvan 11y ago

I don't think we'll be running out of jobs anytime soon, though I do worry about the social and economical consequences of technology. I agree that technology has disturbing effects on society. But this article gets it wrong. > In its mind, Silicon Valley creates the future, while the rest of the world will soon become the “idle class.” What if they instead helped people build wealth for themselves? The idle class is a desirable end state. I for one would take that deal immediately if offered: to have the rest of my existence unconditionally funded, without anyone forcing me to do work I don't want to do. I think there are many people who would be happy to not have to sell their labor to survive. The authors' premise clings to the idea that everyone needs to derive their self-worth from the illusion of providing for oneself. Everyone who grows up in the Western world owes their survival to their family, society and the government. In reality, you are not independent. Selling your labor on a market is just one way of partaking in the enormous system you were born into. In the future, you'll be able to work on whatever you want, irrespective of the market, and that's how you'll contribute back. Make art. Organize communities. Study the nooks and crannies of the universe. Play sports. Live. > And you wonder why political candidates on both sides are tapping into anti-elitist anger with great success. It is only elitism if it denigrates. On the contrary, automation is supposed to be relief from drudgery. If anything, it denigrates the work, not the person. The major challenge is to have our political systems keep up with the pace of change. This is a huge challenge. > The idea here is borne from an underlying assumption that capitalism has winners and losers, and the victors have a responsibility to take care of the rest. Instead, we’d posit that many of the “winners” in Silicon Valley are part of a faux meritocracy — being born into the right city or social network. The system can be unfair and still have winners and losers. I think most people in SV understand how exceptionally lucky they are to not have been born into slavery in Mauretania, even though they don't exactly go out of their way to show it. The authors are right: SV is not meritocratic in any sane definition of the word. SV is unfair. It should be improved upon, but it's never going to be perfect. In the authors' view, you are not being taken care of by your society if you sell your labor. I disagree. > When India didn’t go for a Silicon Valley-led internet proposal, Marc Andreessen gained global denunciation (including from Silicon Valley CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg) for a tweet This is a cheap attack on Andreessen. His comment, while horrendously worded, was clearly meant as a complaint against knee-jerk reactions. (That said, I think India made the right choice in rejecting Free Basics.) > the world will eventually be out of work and become a burden on the enlightened few Hopefully, by the time we get there, redistribution will be extensive enough that everyone can live a lavish life. > the resulting social unrest Probably. The political climate will not adjust lightly. > Snapchat may be solving an important problem for well-connected young people in America who don’t have to worry about basic needs. But whether it’s unemployed young people in St. Louis looking for their next paycheck or a family in Flint, Michigan worried about clean water, many Americans have more immediate problems. There is a difference between problems that capitalism can solve and problems that politics can solve. Capitalism solves market problems. Politics solves the rest. St. Louis and Flint are political problems. The problem is politics, not tech. Imagine if politics were more efficient. > What if a percentage of the $50B valuation were shared among the drivers, based on a merit-based system? This would be a nightmare to implement, notwithstanding that it's a terrible way to influence the market. The market is good at figuring out what things are worth. It often makes very unfair decisions, and in those cases politics should come in and rescue the day. The American model is increasingly incompatible with technology, which is increasingly demanding more redistribution. Why try to shoehorn a very complex equity-sharing system into the market, when some simple redistribution could achieve the same end? It's all for the sake of preserving the faux ideal of being independent. > But the conclusion — that the automation of these jobs will create a lot of wealth for a few people (of course the brilliant ones in Silicon Valley) but leave most out of work (the rest of us) — is reflective of Silicon Valley’s arrogance. Politics. We'll just take the money from them :) > How do we change ownership structures to prevent Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp from distributing billion-dollar windfalls among only a couple dozen people? Whatever the imagined solution is, it is redistribution. You can dress it up in a wig and an evening dress, but it is still redistribution. The only difference is perception. Redistribution via UBI is seen as robbing people of their independence, whereas redistribution via unspecified market intervention is not. Technology is going to go the way it wants to. I've said it a million times but I'll say it a million times more: politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics politics.

tetrep 11y ago

>How do we change ownership structures to prevent Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp from distributing billion-dollar windfalls among only a couple dozen people? This seems to be the crux of the argument, that concentrated wealth is bad but direct redistribution via taxes/Government is also bad. The "proposed" solution in the article is to construct a most certainly complex set of laws/regulations such that companies themselves are forced to redistribute their wealth amongst their employees, which only works if you have employees to share with. If 3 people make an awesome mobile game that makes millions of dollars, even split evenly, they're helping virtually nobody with their product yet accumulating a very non-trivial amount of wealth. UBI or similar tax schemes would naturally capture this wealth and redistribute it, I'm not aware of a cleaner/simpler alternative than that. Note: I think the discussion this article is creating is good, but that the article itself is quite poor.

pascalxus 11y ago

It's a typical response of denial from someone who's job is at risk: the journalist. First of all, before any of this can come to pass, SV will have to deal with the government. They control over a third of the country's spending. And they're not just going to allow subcontractors to automate all those jobs away to the most cost effective bidders/ most efficient solutions. Ever hear of no-bid contracts - they're the norm. There's no rule that says Government has to use tax money in an efficient manner, just look at what's going on right now. There will eventually be some degree of automation. But, unfortunately for society, I don't think it will ever become as widespread as alluded to in the article.

emodendroket 11y ago
This article is about you.

jpgvm 11y ago

Very poor article. I doubt anyone in Silicon Valley, especially Y-Combinator is postulating that the rest of the world isn't capable of being successful or any other nonsense like that. All that is being observed is that the natural tendency for technology is remove the need for manual labor. This first happened to agriculture, then manufacturing and now the push is to automate services that can be. Over time this naturally leads to people needing to move into work that creates this new technology or create new industries in order to work in. If indeed they need to work. The idea that technology will eventually power our basic needs without human assistance isn't that far from reality, sure we may still be decades away but decades aren't really that long. We need to think about the problem well before then because even small amounts of unemployment (10-15% or greater) causes serious problems given societies current structure. It's not just work that breaks down on this automation horizon though but also money/wealth/capitalism. Whatever you call the current state of affairs. People will still need to live, do something day to day etc but they will no longer need to work just for society to function. So money as an incentive doesn't really need to exist at that point. Ofcourse this is very pie in the sky but even so I don't think people realise this is a very real possibility and may happen sooner than many of us think, not in it's completion but sufficiently to force significant numbers of people out of work and make people consider it as a real future.

evook 11y ago

An article about being smarter than the rest of the world and UBI written without mentioning Milton Friedmans concept of negative income tax or Götz Werner's basic income concept left me skeptical about the scientific entitlement of Ross Baird and Lenny Mendonca. E.g. Falsely crediting Nixon makes me furious. IMHO this Click-Baiting pseudo journalism constitutes a lot more about silicon valleys ignorance instead of its arrogance.

antoinevg 11y ago

In the headlong rush towards exploiting the easy and trivial gains one can pilfer from the cost reductions achieved through automation I fear many of you fine HN folk may have forgotten other applications of technology in the workplace that can both uplift the human spirit and create super-fulfilling jobs. Come on hacker folk… you can (and have!) reach higher than this. Oh… and before you hit that vote or reply button… take a deep breath and read through some of Papert's earlier works. It's easy to take an intellectual position on your reading of the (assumed) flaws in a critics commentary but, as most smart kids learn sooner or later, once the tide turns against you it becomes a lot harder to win people's trust.

KirinDave 11y ago

I couldn't help but laugh incredulously as I read this article. It checks all the boxes I'd expect it to check. You can practically shout "bingo!" at the end. • "Silicon Valley isn't spending time working on stuff _I_ think is valuable." • "So what if kids find Snapchat to be critical. Those kids are "connected" and therefore don't matter! _I_ don't get it, therefore it's dumb!" (Even though it's very easy to demonstrate many social networks do in fact engage with and edify kids in low income families because of specific allotments of social media time in schools.) • "Universal Basic Income is bad because people have a deep seated desire to work and their basic needs aren't being met, so rather than triaging that problem and lifting them out of the toxic debt spirals that entrap them in this state, we should focus on _educating them._" • "Taxpayers as a whole have no business helping the less fortunate. This is the sole responsibility business." (Even as we then mock them." • "Therefore businesses should have the mandate to make people's lives better, rather than offering them better solutions. That's not presumptuous at all." These are all implications of the worldview of this article. It's cleverly couched in terms mocking Sam Altman's naive view of the world and then somehow using that to pave over the huge amount of work all over the country on technology centering around education, medical treatment, financial improvement, legal automation, etc. And in the end, of course, this article is about... DISRUPTING VENTURE CAPITALISM. Because again, THAT top-down view of the world is bad, but OUR top-down plan will be totally great.

hacknat 11y ago

The criticism that Y Combinator tells companies that "they have to move to SV" is misleading. That quote is about being a part of Y Combinator. You are free to leave once you graduate your cohort and get funding, and many have...

jpadkins 11y ago

One huge fallacy in the article: "Instead, we’d posit that many of the “winners” in Silicon Valley are part of a faux meritocracy — being born into the right city or social network." Vast majority of those who work in SV were not born there or started in some social network. They moved there because they were highly skilled, and then they entered the social network.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
In order to develop those skills, most of them had to be at least born to families that weren't poor. The number of true 'rags to riches' stories is small.
- jpadkins 11y ago
  relative to US middle class? Sorry I have too many friends from Asia and Eastern Europe who were born into a much lower standard of living than US middle class who are now successful in SV. I was raised by a single working mother, and went to a state university. Not rags to riches, but definitely not a life of privilege. Meritocracy in SV isn't perfect, especially when you consider the supply feeding into it. But it's the best example of meritocracy the human race has.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Meritocracy in SV is a myth. Some of the highest paid executives in SV are some of the most intellectually handicapped people I've ever encountered. Irresponsibility, blowing more money than I've ever even seen in my life on frivolous pursuits. Petty squabbles throwing years of progress down the drain. Sundar Pichai, now the highest paid CEO in the US, set Android platform development back two or three years due to his own vanity. I'm sad at how much could be accomplished with the waste created by SV incompetence. It's incredible how little merit people have considering the amount of money they're paid. I feel like the compulsive gambler is the best analog to Silicon Valley: Blowing every last penny you have, over and over, on the belief that you'll someday strike it rich.

danielrm26 11y ago

This piece skirts perilously close to ad hominem. There is no actual addressing of the central point: that few people will have the money and most will not. Does anyone actually disagree with this? And if not, why write an attack against that position?

arh68 11y ago

As bad as the article makes it sound, it's not like Sam's ignoring the problem entirely. Awareness is half the battle. Funding's the other half. In fact, there's an explicit request [1] for startups to solve this problem, check it out: We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million jobs. There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to divide labor between humans and computers-—we are very good at some things computers are terrible at and vice versa—-and some of these require huge amounts of human resources. This is both good for the world and likely a good business strategy—-as existing jobs go away, a company that creates a lot of new jobs should be able to get a lot of talented people. That's putting money where your mouth is. No, automation and SV2SV startups are not the solution, but you can't put the future on hold until someone figures this out. [1] http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million