8 ms·

The new tech worldview

52 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

andsoitis 4y ago
Without paywall: https://archive.ph/2022.12.27-170022/https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/the-new-tech-worldview https://archive.ph/2022.12.27-170022/https://www.economist.c...
andsoitis 4y ago
1) Imagine an expansive future for the world, built upon science, free thought and free speech. 2)Don’t be nihilistic about dark parts of western culture.
thinkingkong 4y ago
This piece seems like little more than a reminder that having billions of dollars allows you to engage in your interests. If your interests or priorities are to invest in hard tech, thats awesome. Lots of other billionares do nothing. Some of them build yachts. Otherwise there are lots of more interesting people with ideas about why large systems arent working. Suggesting free market ideaology is the part thats “missing” from anything ignores the part about the free market not being one in the first place.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > Lots of other billionares do nothing. They still invest their money. It isn't placed in a Scrooge McDuck cash vault.
  - some_furry 4y ago
    They invest in companies with a safe ROI, borrow against their assets, and live off their loans until they die to avoid taxation. That's not quite comparable.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Um, the assets they borrow against are invested. They run out of money if those investments are unsuccessful, or if they borrow too much. > That's not quite comparable Yeah, it is the same thing. Saying labor is what adds value is just another facet of the "Labor Theory of Value" which has been thoroughly discredited.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - vouaobrasil 4y ago
    If all billionaires actually did place all their money in a Scrooge McDuck cash vault and locked it there for good like Scrooge did, it would actually be good for the rest of us in one way: the value of our money would go up. To illustrate this, imagine an expensive sports car. It's only expensive because there are people that can pay for it. If everyone who could afford it locked their money up and stopped spending, the person who wanted to sell that car would have to sell it at a much lower price if they wanted to sell it at all.
    - cowpig 4y ago
      No it wouldn't, the movement of money is what drives an economy. Think of it this way: Alice has a dollar, gives it to person Bob for the food they grow, who gives it to person Clarice for the clothes they make, who gives it to person A again for their art. Each of Alice, Bob, and Clarice made a dollar and got something they wanted for that dollar. If Alice instead decides to hoard the dollar, nobody makes any income and there is no economy.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        What happens under those circumstances is they barter. Barter is inefficient, but it's better than nothing.
      - vouaobrasil 4y ago
        I didn't say if everyone locked their money away it would be good, just if billionaires did it. Alice and Bob would still buy clothes and food. 99% (or some high percentage) of the world would still be buying and selling stuff, just not billionaires under my thought experiment. There would still be a large movement of money.
        tmikaeld 4y ago
        Then you'd take away the demand for such luxury items, they wouldn't be made, so who benefits?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- divergentnote 4y ago
  Even if a billionaire did nothing but build yachts, they would still be doing something for the economy, and likely a more positive thing than what an average person does with their daily activities.
BirAdam 4y ago
I seriously doubt that humanity is anywhere close to having invented AGI. However, modern AI is way better than regex at pattern recognition, so that’s cool.
- josephg 4y ago
  Its more than that. Have a play with ChatGPT and you'll see. A friend of mine said that she had a sinking feeling in her stomach when she talked to it, like "oh no, there's something big here". I made an account and had a conversation with it about a field I know a lot. I asked "Explain the difference between CRDTs and OT algorithms". Its answer was remarkably good. Then I followed up "Implement an OT algorithm for text editing in python with these characteristics...". There were a few bugs in the code, but it managed to fix the bugs after I pointed them out. ChatGPT can program about the level of a good junior engineer. My partners' sister is a psychology professor. She asked it an essay question she'd given her students. The answer was better than about 85% of her students would deliver. My mum works in education in the developing world. She asked it to explain albinism in Uganda and it gave a fantastic response. My nephew asked for a story of two pokemon battling each other. The response was great. Its not perfect yet. But its a lot more than a clever regex engine. Have a play, and there's a good chance you'll have that sinking feeling in your stomach too.
  - bluefone 4y ago
    Whats good about it? How does that help anyone? Oh it's a dancing toy! It dances too!! Oh, it sings too!!! No kid, you can't eat toys. Spit it out. Grow up. Understand what you need for you as a human.
    - josephg 4y ago
      I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Are you trying to argue that this technology will have no impact on the world around us, because its a "toy"? That's clearly, already not true. I have a software engineering friend who exclusively programs with an AI assistant now. He says when he's programming "offline" it feels like a limb is cut off. There's plenty of stories floating around already of people using stable diffusion (and friends) so they don't have to hire artists. > It dances too!! Oh, it sings too!!! 2 more generations down the line it'll probably be better than most humans at most things humans do. It'll program better than most programmers. It'll drive better than most drivers. It'll do your taxes better than most accountants. It'll architect buildings better than most architects. No mere toy can do that. I could be wrong, but the next few decades will probably be wild.
yedava 4y ago
Seeing the grand ambitions of these 'builders', the first thing that pops up in my mind is, how do I protect my freedoms from these people? The only political power I have is a vote and some measly donations to candidates who have my best interests at heart. But how can that compete with the immense political power that these guys wield with their money, media control and lobbying power?
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  Although I question how you think your freedoms are going to be robbed by the men quoted in the article, everything you've said is just as applicable to government. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" as the saying goes.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > how do I protect my freedoms from these people? The Bill of Rights. Which has (so far) withstood constant and unrelenting attacks, from all sides, since it was enacted.
  - paulpauper 4y ago
    As the 'online space' becomes more important and bigger relative to 'meat space', this matters. There re many choices of food and cars, far fewer choices of popular social networks, payment processors.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      There can't be a wide choice of popular anything. The whole idea of the "popular" is something that nearly everyone flocks to. There can't be a variety of top spots. Things like social networks are governed by the same power laws as, say, soda brands: there can't be a large variety of brands as popular as Coca-Cola. There is, of course, a wide variety of smaller brands, from pretty large to tiny, to cater for all tastes. Same for social networks. We are not talking on Facebook or Twitter right now.
somrand0 4y ago
I see nothing in that article that says anything about a world view. not in a deep actually useful way. i see shallow fluff.
- geekbird 4y ago
  All I see is the display of the egos and so-called philosophy of a bunch of rich "libertarian" punks who's basic MO is "I've got mine, screw the rest of you." They are as altruistic as a hungry bear. If one of them walked up to me and said "I'm going to make your life better!" I'd have two questions: "How do you define better?" and "What's the catch?" These are the type of people that push crypto cons and other destructive things. They want to make the world better? Start by addressing the income disparity between rentiers like themselves and the people who actually build what they claim to have "invented".
hardwaresofton 4y ago
We need more interesting people to be obscenely rich. Not a dig against the people in the article, but basically we need more people that are nothing like them, from other walks of life to be extremely rich and free to pursue things. Also a lot of problems in society seem to be linked to wealth disparity. Dystopian visions of the future are almost always dystopian due to wealth disparity. Who’s working on solving that?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > Who’s working on solving that? The communists. Didn't work out well. Edit: Don't believe me? Check out the history of communist countries.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    Communists weren't the only movement specifically working on wealth disparities. Eugenicists attacked the same problem from the other side, by trying to eliminate the poor.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      The eugenicist movement appears to be quite dead, and good riddance.
      - bessiesboobies 4y ago
        ;)
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    That's a pretty weird way to answer! Communism is not the only solution to the problems facing current revisions of capitalism. The solution is allowed to be different capitalism. I saw a comment on HN that actually put it wonderfully just the other day (will try and find it) -- the crux was that the real core of government policy failing is corruption, and Capitalism is the most robust to corruption socioeconomic and political structure we've seen so far, because of things like "free market" competition, etc. Turns out if you view it with this lens, monarchies, communism and other forms of government that we've seen fail are quite easily explained at least at a basic level. I think of capitalism like a greed/ambition driven engine. It turns greed into progress of many kinds -- we just need to tweak the inputs/gears of the engine. Clearly a certain amount of greed will lead to proletariat revolt (some people might be fine with that since at some point the proletariat probably won't be able to revolt), and clearly some amount of unchecked greed/ambition is necessary for societal advancement in aggregate. [EDIT] I couldn't find what I was looking for, maybe it wasn't on HN -- this was the closest thing I found[0]... Wealth disparity under the current system has fluctuated over the last 50-100 years -- it is controllable. We know some of the knobs. I just never see anyone trying explicitly to figure out what the right setting for those knobs are, it's always obscured in one way or another. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24194806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24194806
seydor 4y ago
we learn nothing from this article
rektide 4y ago
Omg. Representing a recently emerged plutocratic class as "new tech worldview" is a gross mis-service to this world & especially tech. It's a hard dilemna. Tech is indeed a new vanguard force for fatcat imperalism like these filthy-rich virtually-monocole-wearer navel-gazers who "measure their status not so much in mansions and yachts as in engagement with their blog posts and essays". But I don't think that at all represents the actual belief of 99.999% of technologists & techies. Apologies to Stephen O'Grady in advance for again hammering on this, but "The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World" is- even in the title- about how hopeful & idealistic believers made other people rich beyond belief, is about the can-do builder who made these rich kings. But what has been done with tech does not represent the tech view, what we hope for, what tech wants: it's about the views of these often-libertarian old-world-style lieges who have the money and leverage to dictate & control the techies, that have the extreme privilege to define what new world systems emerge, which they do not do for progressive gain, but for individual libertarian benefit. > You might think these men have little in common. But they are both part of what Mr Lonsdale calls a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, This is a hard problem: tech has a hopeful optimistic worldview that we can do better, but we are, like most of human history, subordinate to the nouveau (or sometimes old) riche who happen to have the McDuck vaults-full-of-gold to swim through. These upstarts happen to be leveraging tech, yes. But to most techies, their world view is undifferentiated & unclear from the other old-world views. Even if it uses new means to achieve dominance, uncontestability. There's not a lot of strong political statements to draw from any of these folk, so apologies here but... how many techies would agree with Lonsdale saying, "Any man in an important position who takes 6 months of leave for a newborn is a loser. In the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future – that’s the correct masculine response." ? This feels so the mode for these folk. Is that the new techie worldview? Personally that feels like a very old worldview to me. And not idealistic in the least. These people don't represent, to me, the potential, the buildingness. Not in any open fashion. They represent control & take-over-ness. They represent the kings, those that the kingmakers have made, those that build for themselves, & to elevate themselves. They have a limited narrow window of idealism, but one that forever perches them & their limited cadre atop & in control of all systems, all data, & leaves the world about floundering for itself. > They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government. All of these folks seem like constrainers of growth. None of them have shown any real commitment or belief in open source & mutual expansion of human destiny, as far as I can tell. They control vast intellectual property empires that funnel information in-ward with great abandon, & almost all contribution out is extremely limited, & typically quite pricey. The vision of what tech has done & is capable of seems limited to the dullest of conceptions. Quoting Altman: > Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said 'OK, now what?' How about we make tech serve people better? Rather than wall up the gardens & enforce harsher terms of service, rather than leave all data in the hands of vast indifferent money-making powers, maybe we should try to put actual humans in control of systems & data? Is that on your radar, any of you? > Some think the transformation wrought by big tech has not lived up to the excitement—and wealth—that it generated. As Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, a payments firm, and mentor to many of these iconoclasts once remarked, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Instead we got vast inhuman systems of top-down surveillance, like Palantir (deeply funded by Thiel & Lonsdale, along with other military info-control startups). Instead we got monitoring & exploitation & attention economies, funded by vast VC's like these folk's (eg: Facebook, where Thiel made most of his money (but personally I think Facebook hatred is somewhat overrated, a scapegoat masking more systematic problems)). I don't see these "new tech" folk as having even the most meager stakes against what they decry: they all seem to want to spit-fire against the scape-goat most-visible names, but are obviously a part of the same system, same game, same villainy, often at more escalated more expansive levels than the semi-controlled affrontery that we've had to endure & have come to be fearful of. > A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, Utterly unclear to me what form of progress these folk seek, other than more get rich, yet more control, and with little government oversight or concern to worry about. I wish I could say clearly & without reserve this article isn't about tech. Alas these folk do have amazing control over the world. There is a certain "new tech" that is embodied by these new plutocratic dominators. They have enormous control over tech, enormous influence. But to me, this is just the new noveau riche world view. This is the view of those who have exploited & trampled humanity, by & large. These people don't have a worldview. They have a "me"-view. They have a hunger for wealth & power & riches that doesn't include most people. If they had a view that encompassed the world, they'd give more away. They'd support & benefit open source. They'd have data-portability broadly everywhere they went. They'd have users owning more data. I don't see that vision, and I don't think their vision of the world includes many of us.
alexashka 4y ago
If only there was a worldview to speak of. Throwing money at a trendy thing to make more money is hardly a worldview.
paulpauper 4y ago
The major difference is how much richer they are. $100 million was still a lot in the late 90s. Now that is just a rounding error. It opens up new possibilities. All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,” he says. It seems like they get rich, but when average people participate, they get poorer. Like Bitcoin, down 75% since it was hyped by Peter Thiel, Chamath, Balaji , and Andreessen. Same for NFTs and Coinbase stock, both down 90% this year. At least with the 90s tech boom average people could invest early, like Cisco, Microsoft, and AOL. Companies wait too long to go public.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Seems like a theme of hype, cash in and bust all over and again.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I wonder when the term "pump and dump" became popular, but I certainly remember it since before crypto. I'm sure it's a scheme that first ran in Mesopotamia or before.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  > Like Bitcoin, down 75% since it was hyped by Peter Thiel > At least with the 90s tech boom average people could invest early, like Cisco, Microsoft, and AOL. ??? If you'd invest in Bitcoin early, then what would have happened?
  - yunwal 4y ago
bluefone 4y ago
Just another poetic essay sounding elite columnist style, more focused on making it an exciting reading and failing to make any point at all. All of these new-age tech "innovations" boil down to making money from advertisements by attracting consumer crowds to the new town-squares filled with freebies (internet-search, photo-share etc). And you ragard these as great as someone who invented steam engine or electricity. ChatGPT, like bitcoin, can only help bad things. AI would confuse people and throw the world into abyss of distrust, paranoa and fear. These so-called inventors and great minds are childish and greedy fools, raised in peace-time affluence, never having an opportunity to mature, with no exposure to ethics or struggle, with no understanding of foundations of humanity and it survival needs. There is a story in Pancha-tantra (Folklore stories of India), which talks about follish but genious brothers who brought a dead tiger to life using their skills, only to be killed by the tiger. You award Nobel to science leading to nuclear weapons and the world is now gripped in more fear. You sing praising these money-hungry tech billionairs as if they give a shit to human progress. Crappy media. The same crappy media makes people think it's a good foreign policy to put fires around the world, take sides in feuds between brothers and neighbors (dozens of cases), sell piles of weapons, claim victories etc. Shame on you, science, media and the childish voters.
simne 4y ago
Really interest article. Not frequently happen occasion, when I have to admit, not every day I hear that somebody really wealthy, cares about really important for world things, even, when I don't fully agree with their ideas. I live in Ukraine, now country is at the edge of conflict between old world and new world, and nearly all our wealthy persons, just avoid to make any really interest initiative on these matters. Unfortunately, when nobody powerful make real initiative, this not lead to solution, but lead to worse. Sometimes, things could become so bad, that better to implement (save) some old world solution with few new tech enhancements, than wait for born of new solution from nowhere.

52 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

Without paywall: https://archive.ph/2022.12.27-170022/https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/the-new-tech-worldview https://archive.ph/2022.12.27-170022/https://www.economist.c...

andsoitis 4y ago

1) Imagine an expansive future for the world, built upon science, free thought and free speech. 2)Don’t be nihilistic about dark parts of western culture.

thinkingkong 4y ago

This piece seems like little more than a reminder that having billions of dollars allows you to engage in your interests. If your interests or priorities are to invest in hard tech, thats awesome. Lots of other billionares do nothing. Some of them build yachts. Otherwise there are lots of more interesting people with ideas about why large systems arent working. Suggesting free market ideaology is the part thats “missing” from anything ignores the part about the free market not being one in the first place.

WalterBright 4y ago
> Lots of other billionares do nothing. They still invest their money. It isn't placed in a Scrooge McDuck cash vault.
- some_furry 4y ago
  They invest in companies with a safe ROI, borrow against their assets, and live off their loans until they die to avoid taxation. That's not quite comparable.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Um, the assets they borrow against are invested. They run out of money if those investments are unsuccessful, or if they borrow too much. > That's not quite comparable Yeah, it is the same thing. Saying labor is what adds value is just another facet of the "Labor Theory of Value" which has been thoroughly discredited.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  If all billionaires actually did place all their money in a Scrooge McDuck cash vault and locked it there for good like Scrooge did, it would actually be good for the rest of us in one way: the value of our money would go up. To illustrate this, imagine an expensive sports car. It's only expensive because there are people that can pay for it. If everyone who could afford it locked their money up and stopped spending, the person who wanted to sell that car would have to sell it at a much lower price if they wanted to sell it at all.
  - cowpig 4y ago
    No it wouldn't, the movement of money is what drives an economy. Think of it this way: Alice has a dollar, gives it to person Bob for the food they grow, who gives it to person Clarice for the clothes they make, who gives it to person A again for their art. Each of Alice, Bob, and Clarice made a dollar and got something they wanted for that dollar. If Alice instead decides to hoard the dollar, nobody makes any income and there is no economy.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      What happens under those circumstances is they barter. Barter is inefficient, but it's better than nothing.
    - vouaobrasil 4y ago
      I didn't say if everyone locked their money away it would be good, just if billionaires did it. Alice and Bob would still buy clothes and food. 99% (or some high percentage) of the world would still be buying and selling stuff, just not billionaires under my thought experiment. There would still be a large movement of money.
      - tmikaeld 4y ago
        Then you'd take away the demand for such luxury items, they wouldn't be made, so who benefits?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
divergentnote 4y ago
Even if a billionaire did nothing but build yachts, they would still be doing something for the economy, and likely a more positive thing than what an average person does with their daily activities.

BirAdam 4y ago

I seriously doubt that humanity is anywhere close to having invented AGI. However, modern AI is way better than regex at pattern recognition, so that’s cool.

josephg 4y ago
Its more than that. Have a play with ChatGPT and you'll see. A friend of mine said that she had a sinking feeling in her stomach when she talked to it, like "oh no, there's something big here". I made an account and had a conversation with it about a field I know a lot. I asked "Explain the difference between CRDTs and OT algorithms". Its answer was remarkably good. Then I followed up "Implement an OT algorithm for text editing in python with these characteristics...". There were a few bugs in the code, but it managed to fix the bugs after I pointed them out. ChatGPT can program about the level of a good junior engineer. My partners' sister is a psychology professor. She asked it an essay question she'd given her students. The answer was better than about 85% of her students would deliver. My mum works in education in the developing world. She asked it to explain albinism in Uganda and it gave a fantastic response. My nephew asked for a story of two pokemon battling each other. The response was great. Its not perfect yet. But its a lot more than a clever regex engine. Have a play, and there's a good chance you'll have that sinking feeling in your stomach too.
- bluefone 4y ago
  Whats good about it? How does that help anyone? Oh it's a dancing toy! It dances too!! Oh, it sings too!!! No kid, you can't eat toys. Spit it out. Grow up. Understand what you need for you as a human.
  - josephg 4y ago
    I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Are you trying to argue that this technology will have no impact on the world around us, because its a "toy"? That's clearly, already not true. I have a software engineering friend who exclusively programs with an AI assistant now. He says when he's programming "offline" it feels like a limb is cut off. There's plenty of stories floating around already of people using stable diffusion (and friends) so they don't have to hire artists. > It dances too!! Oh, it sings too!!! 2 more generations down the line it'll probably be better than most humans at most things humans do. It'll program better than most programmers. It'll drive better than most drivers. It'll do your taxes better than most accountants. It'll architect buildings better than most architects. No mere toy can do that. I could be wrong, but the next few decades will probably be wild.

yedava 4y ago

Seeing the grand ambitions of these 'builders', the first thing that pops up in my mind is, how do I protect my freedoms from these people? The only political power I have is a vote and some measly donations to candidates who have my best interests at heart. But how can that compete with the immense political power that these guys wield with their money, media control and lobbying power?

Dracophoenix 4y ago
Although I question how you think your freedoms are going to be robbed by the men quoted in the article, everything you've said is just as applicable to government. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" as the saying goes.
- deleted 4y ago
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WalterBright 4y ago
> how do I protect my freedoms from these people? The Bill of Rights. Which has (so far) withstood constant and unrelenting attacks, from all sides, since it was enacted.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  As the 'online space' becomes more important and bigger relative to 'meat space', this matters. There re many choices of food and cars, far fewer choices of popular social networks, payment processors.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    There can't be a wide choice of popular anything. The whole idea of the "popular" is something that nearly everyone flocks to. There can't be a variety of top spots. Things like social networks are governed by the same power laws as, say, soda brands: there can't be a large variety of brands as popular as Coca-Cola. There is, of course, a wide variety of smaller brands, from pretty large to tiny, to cater for all tastes. Same for social networks. We are not talking on Facebook or Twitter right now.

somrand0 4y ago

I see nothing in that article that says anything about a world view. not in a deep actually useful way. i see shallow fluff.

geekbird 4y ago
All I see is the display of the egos and so-called philosophy of a bunch of rich "libertarian" punks who's basic MO is "I've got mine, screw the rest of you." They are as altruistic as a hungry bear. If one of them walked up to me and said "I'm going to make your life better!" I'd have two questions: "How do you define better?" and "What's the catch?" These are the type of people that push crypto cons and other destructive things. They want to make the world better? Start by addressing the income disparity between rentiers like themselves and the people who actually build what they claim to have "invented".

hardwaresofton 4y ago

We need more interesting people to be obscenely rich. Not a dig against the people in the article, but basically we need more people that are nothing like them, from other walks of life to be extremely rich and free to pursue things. Also a lot of problems in society seem to be linked to wealth disparity. Dystopian visions of the future are almost always dystopian due to wealth disparity. Who’s working on solving that?

WalterBright 4y ago
> Who’s working on solving that? The communists. Didn't work out well. Edit: Don't believe me? Check out the history of communist countries.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Communists weren't the only movement specifically working on wealth disparities. Eugenicists attacked the same problem from the other side, by trying to eliminate the poor.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    The eugenicist movement appears to be quite dead, and good riddance.
    - bessiesboobies 4y ago
      ;)
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  That's a pretty weird way to answer! Communism is not the only solution to the problems facing current revisions of capitalism. The solution is allowed to be different capitalism. I saw a comment on HN that actually put it wonderfully just the other day (will try and find it) -- the crux was that the real core of government policy failing is corruption, and Capitalism is the most robust to corruption socioeconomic and political structure we've seen so far, because of things like "free market" competition, etc. Turns out if you view it with this lens, monarchies, communism and other forms of government that we've seen fail are quite easily explained at least at a basic level. I think of capitalism like a greed/ambition driven engine. It turns greed into progress of many kinds -- we just need to tweak the inputs/gears of the engine. Clearly a certain amount of greed will lead to proletariat revolt (some people might be fine with that since at some point the proletariat probably won't be able to revolt), and clearly some amount of unchecked greed/ambition is necessary for societal advancement in aggregate. [EDIT] I couldn't find what I was looking for, maybe it wasn't on HN -- this was the closest thing I found[0]... Wealth disparity under the current system has fluctuated over the last 50-100 years -- it is controllable. We know some of the knobs. I just never see anyone trying explicitly to figure out what the right setting for those knobs are, it's always obscured in one way or another. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24194806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24194806

seydor 4y ago

we learn nothing from this article

rektide 4y ago

Omg. Representing a recently emerged plutocratic class as "new tech worldview" is a gross mis-service to this world & especially tech. It's a hard dilemna. Tech is indeed a new vanguard force for fatcat imperalism like these filthy-rich virtually-monocole-wearer navel-gazers who "measure their status not so much in mansions and yachts as in engagement with their blog posts and essays". But I don't think that at all represents the actual belief of 99.999% of technologists & techies. Apologies to Stephen O'Grady in advance for again hammering on this, but "The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World" is- even in the title- about how hopeful & idealistic believers made other people rich beyond belief, is about the can-do builder who made these rich kings. But what has been done with tech does not represent the tech view, what we hope for, what tech wants: it's about the views of these often-libertarian old-world-style lieges who have the money and leverage to dictate & control the techies, that have the extreme privilege to define what new world systems emerge, which they do not do for progressive gain, but for individual libertarian benefit. > You might think these men have little in common. But they are both part of what Mr Lonsdale calls a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, This is a hard problem: tech has a hopeful optimistic worldview that we can do better, but we are, like most of human history, subordinate to the nouveau (or sometimes old) riche who happen to have the McDuck vaults-full-of-gold to swim through. These upstarts happen to be leveraging tech, yes. But to most techies, their world view is undifferentiated & unclear from the other old-world views. Even if it uses new means to achieve dominance, uncontestability. There's not a lot of strong political statements to draw from any of these folk, so apologies here but... how many techies would agree with Lonsdale saying, "Any man in an important position who takes 6 months of leave for a newborn is a loser. In the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future – that’s the correct masculine response." ? This feels so the mode for these folk. Is that the new techie worldview? Personally that feels like a very old worldview to me. And not idealistic in the least. These people don't represent, to me, the potential, the buildingness. Not in any open fashion. They represent control & take-over-ness. They represent the kings, those that the kingmakers have made, those that build for themselves, & to elevate themselves. They have a limited narrow window of idealism, but one that forever perches them & their limited cadre atop & in control of all systems, all data, & leaves the world about floundering for itself. > They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government. All of these folks seem like constrainers of growth. None of them have shown any real commitment or belief in open source & mutual expansion of human destiny, as far as I can tell. They control vast intellectual property empires that funnel information in-ward with great abandon, & almost all contribution out is extremely limited, & typically quite pricey. The vision of what tech has done & is capable of seems limited to the dullest of conceptions. Quoting Altman: > Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said 'OK, now what?' How about we make tech serve people better? Rather than wall up the gardens & enforce harsher terms of service, rather than leave all data in the hands of vast indifferent money-making powers, maybe we should try to put actual humans in control of systems & data? Is that on your radar, any of you? > Some think the transformation wrought by big tech has not lived up to the excitement—and wealth—that it generated. As Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, a payments firm, and mentor to many of these iconoclasts once remarked, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Instead we got vast inhuman systems of top-down surveillance, like Palantir (deeply funded by Thiel & Lonsdale, along with other military info-control startups). Instead we got monitoring & exploitation & attention economies, funded by vast VC's like these folk's (eg: Facebook, where Thiel made most of his money (but personally I think Facebook hatred is somewhat overrated, a scapegoat masking more systematic problems)). I don't see these "new tech" folk as having even the most meager stakes against what they decry: they all seem to want to spit-fire against the scape-goat most-visible names, but are obviously a part of the same system, same game, same villainy, often at more escalated more expansive levels than the semi-controlled affrontery that we've had to endure & have come to be fearful of. > A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, Utterly unclear to me what form of progress these folk seek, other than more get rich, yet more control, and with little government oversight or concern to worry about. I wish I could say clearly & without reserve this article isn't about tech. Alas these folk do have amazing control over the world. There is a certain "new tech" that is embodied by these new plutocratic dominators. They have enormous control over tech, enormous influence. But to me, this is just the new noveau riche world view. This is the view of those who have exploited & trampled humanity, by & large. These people don't have a worldview. They have a "me"-view. They have a hunger for wealth & power & riches that doesn't include most people. If they had a view that encompassed the world, they'd give more away. They'd support & benefit open source. They'd have data-portability broadly everywhere they went. They'd have users owning more data. I don't see that vision, and I don't think their vision of the world includes many of us.

alexashka 4y ago

If only there was a worldview to speak of. Throwing money at a trendy thing to make more money is hardly a worldview.

paulpauper 4y ago

The major difference is how much richer they are. $100 million was still a lot in the late 90s. Now that is just a rounding error. It opens up new possibilities. All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,” he says. It seems like they get rich, but when average people participate, they get poorer. Like Bitcoin, down 75% since it was hyped by Peter Thiel, Chamath, Balaji , and Andreessen. Same for NFTs and Coinbase stock, both down 90% this year. At least with the 90s tech boom average people could invest early, like Cisco, Microsoft, and AOL. Companies wait too long to go public.

grugagag 4y ago
Seems like a theme of hype, cash in and bust all over and again.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I wonder when the term "pump and dump" became popular, but I certainly remember it since before crypto. I'm sure it's a scheme that first ran in Mesopotamia or before.
lostmsu 4y ago
> Like Bitcoin, down 75% since it was hyped by Peter Thiel > At least with the 90s tech boom average people could invest early, like Cisco, Microsoft, and AOL. ??? If you'd invest in Bitcoin early, then what would have happened?
- yunwal 4y ago

bluefone 4y ago

Just another poetic essay sounding elite columnist style, more focused on making it an exciting reading and failing to make any point at all. All of these new-age tech "innovations" boil down to making money from advertisements by attracting consumer crowds to the new town-squares filled with freebies (internet-search, photo-share etc). And you ragard these as great as someone who invented steam engine or electricity. ChatGPT, like bitcoin, can only help bad things. AI would confuse people and throw the world into abyss of distrust, paranoa and fear. These so-called inventors and great minds are childish and greedy fools, raised in peace-time affluence, never having an opportunity to mature, with no exposure to ethics or struggle, with no understanding of foundations of humanity and it survival needs. There is a story in Pancha-tantra (Folklore stories of India), which talks about follish but genious brothers who brought a dead tiger to life using their skills, only to be killed by the tiger. You award Nobel to science leading to nuclear weapons and the world is now gripped in more fear. You sing praising these money-hungry tech billionairs as if they give a shit to human progress. Crappy media. The same crappy media makes people think it's a good foreign policy to put fires around the world, take sides in feuds between brothers and neighbors (dozens of cases), sell piles of weapons, claim victories etc. Shame on you, science, media and the childish voters.

simne 4y ago

Really interest article. Not frequently happen occasion, when I have to admit, not every day I hear that somebody really wealthy, cares about really important for world things, even, when I don't fully agree with their ideas. I live in Ukraine, now country is at the edge of conflict between old world and new world, and nearly all our wealthy persons, just avoid to make any really interest initiative on these matters. Unfortunately, when nobody powerful make real initiative, this not lead to solution, but lead to worse. Sometimes, things could become so bad, that better to implement (save) some old world solution with few new tech enhancements, than wait for born of new solution from nowhere.