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I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation
by mabub24 9y ago
I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation", entrepreneurship, and technology.
They basically all repeated a number of the same points.
1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.
2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.
3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.
4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.
5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.
There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.
- pcunite 9y agoIts part of the game: Stand up and shout loudly. You'll be taken seriously by some, given money or resources by others, talked about, and blogged about. Now, use that energy flowing your direction to create books, talks, and materials.
- projectramo 9y agoWhy can't you just enjoy the disruptive potential of complex algo-intelligence deployed for the incremental betterment of a functioning economy? (Looking for an agent)
- maxxxxx 9y agoCan I preorder your book?
- projectramo 9y agoI'll give you a discount if you can nominate me for TED.
- harry8 9y agoWhy are you looking for a person when the future is intelligent agents acting as agents using a deep learning AI approach to disrupt the cosy middle-man economy to enhance our societal well-being on a functional level? Maybe you don't really believe?
- Animats 9y agoWhat conference?
- wmeredith 9y agoThese are thought followers, and by definition there are more of them than leaders.
- mabub24 9y agoThat is true. One caveat, though: these people were all CEOs or senior consultants or occupying high level cabinet positions in federal and provincial governments (some were actually premiers). These people, if not "thought leaders" are certainly modelling themselves in that image and, perhaps worse, unlike "thought leaders" they are the people at the steering wheel of many important things -- they are leaders. One would hope they would be less suceptible to fads, but alas.
- paulsutter 9y agoThink how difficult it would be for a young Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page to advance within that group of people. It would be impossible. That's because these "elite" circles favor political skills, extroverted people with low conviction. Peter Thiel points out that most original thinkers are introverted with high conviction, like Mark or Larry. That seems to be the formula for success in technology.
- vldx 9y agoYes, that is interesting thought; in fact, he even goes further and consider Aspergers as an advantage in this context. This is more or less validated by the OCEAN/5 factor model -- low agreeableness and low extroversion might be proxy for not being influenced by the convention.
- mistermann 9y agoSocial intelligence seems to be what's typically need to rise to the top of the management or political hierarchy, unlike intelligence as it would be defined here.I can't think of too many politicians I consider even remotely smart these days.
- emodendroket 9y ago
- emodendroket 9y agoSounds like most of them are really more thought followers, then.
- RUTHLESS_RUFUS 9y agoTo borrow from the article, it sounds like you experienced another "TED talk on a recursive loop."
- Spooky23 9y agoYou're misunderstanding what a think tank is. It's a place that gets money from places and is a parking lot for displaced political people. They aren't there to have original thoughts -- they are there to support the perspective of whomever is signing the checks. What they say isn't very important, but what they don't say is critical. Ditto for political people like cabinet members and CEO types. In public, their outward messaging needs to be tightly controlled. Behind the scenes for smart ones, their personal thoughts or agendas are often very different.
- hitekker 9y agoAs someone once said to me, "Think tanks don't think; they justify."
- devoply 9y agoWell that's the article's point, a think tank serves one of the factions of the plutocracy and on the global and national stage public intellectuals have also been replaced by puppets of the plutocracy. They all serve money and people who hold it, just different factions. While at the same time the intellectuals in universities have become more and more divorced from reality, embracing ideologies that are excessively liberal and left leaning rather than centrist.
- ProAm 9y agoI think it is still summed up with the statement "Cash is King"
- honestoHeminway 9y agoWe used to decapitate the king anually and call that taxes.
- devoply 9y agoThe King realizing this created a fake person called a corporation that gives the people jobs. Good luck killing any of those.
- draw_down 9y ago> They basically all repeated a number of the same points. Well, now you know what a think tank is for! :)
- ilamont 9y agoWho were the speakers?
- kevmo 9y agoI live in Washington, DC. The tiny bandwidth of acceptable opinion here would be hilarious if these people weren't running the country. When I go to parties and meet people with powerful jobs, it's appalling how poorly thought out their analyses of many situations are. Being here for the last 2 years has given me a lot of insight into how and why America is being run into the ground.
- booleandilemma 9y agoBut I bet they're all very eloquent.
- kevmo 9y agoInitially. They tend to get pretty flustered if you simultaneously remain calm and knowledgeably begin discussing how you disagree with a premise (when people get heated, they're much easier to dismiss). Especially in the current climate. Donald has really rattled their worldviews by seizing control of the throne.
- brianberns 9y agoExample, please? Without naming names. I'm a bit skeptical that you're so much smarter and more insightful than all of these successful people you're meeting at parties in DC.
- gaius 9y agoWell you know about computers presumably if you're here, so think about how computers, hacking, mainframes etc are portrayed on TV and in movies. Ludicrous, right? Now consider that a doctor thinks the same about medical dramas, cops and lawyers think that way about crime shows, even pastry chefs probably think that about pastry chefs on TV. Yet the people who star in and who produce these shows are wildly successful and rich. Politics is the same.
- throwanem 9y agoThe implication that intelligence and insight are necessarily other than orthogonal to success seems to me optimistic.
- IsaacL 9y agoGreat list. I've seen lots of these ideas float around certain circles. As an example of the kind of person who spreads such ideas: a few years ago I knew a recent university graduate who was very friendly, enthusiastic and reasonably intelligent. He was interested in entrepreneurship, but non-technical, and focused mainly on networking and building connections. One conversation I had with him concerned online advertising. He was convinved Facebook would never make money and that no-one clicked on ads online. I know a lot of people believe this, but I pointed out Google makes $20 billion revenue/year or whatever, and there's whole industries devoted to optimising PPC ads. "Nah that is just people who click by accident. Believe me it's completely nonsensical." Thinking him to be an non-serious person I didn't stay in touch but kept him on Facebook. Next I see he's doing a masters degree in internet innovation in Oxford. Then he's at Harvard for a while. Now I see he's back in Oxford starting an academic career. A while ago I saw him post an article on the awesome power of "nudges" to his FB feed. I know not everyone in academia is like this, but academia doesn't awe me any more now that I know the bar is not that high.
- opportune 9y agoThis sounds exactly like every person I've ever met who is in to "business". They don't specialize in any particular industry, and aren't actually doing business related things, but participate in some farcical, nebulous buzzword-centric concept of it. I would liken it to business-theater. There's a reason people like this stay in academia.
- NeutronBoy 9y agoTo be fair, that's my impression of a number of people who introduce themselves as 'entrepreneurs'. The people who run a business, or are building something or are otherwise working, will say that. People who say they're in 'business' or are an 'entrepreneur' are the ones who haven't figured out exactly what they're up to.
- lgleason 9y agoThis sounds like a large percentage of tech conferences today which have become thinly veiled political organizations.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago>2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea. This one particularly annoys me. Anytime you hear it you can be almost certain the person saying it has no actual experience in innovation/wealth/job creation. I prefer Andy Grove's take on it: "Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grove-how-america-can-create-jobs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grov...
- sadfjhsdf66 9y agoNow consider for a moment that is exactly what conversations sound like all over our key institutions. "Jump through these hoops with little understanding, little discourse around their value and ramifications." Politicians memorize the books that "political thought leaders" have written that were based upon the previous "political thought leaders". And much of their thoughts generalize to "America... strong man politics... Constitution... capitalism... free markets!" Cultural stagnation results when you're just navel gazing at the details of your own history, and not pulling from them new ideas. Eventually the world throws up its collective hands and says "Fuck these idiots going in circles. We have shit to do."
- uberstuber 9y ago"Typically, the IYI [Intellectual Yet Idiot] get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains." https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
- RUTHLESS_RUFUS 9y agoThe words "think tank" bring to mind a gigantic behemoth with treads, rolling forward inexorably to trample and destroy thought. The real world has yet to offer up a counterexample to my childish whimsy.