6 ms·

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to tak

by seu 4y ago

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves and whatever. So, I am confident that the sum total of value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily with welcoming artificial beings into our community of working on things. I think there will be enormous value created from all that. The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic. He seems to ignore a lot about what the living conditions for people were throughout history, and have a blind trust in the positive power of 'human progress'. These people don't stop for a second to question the 'why', just the 'how'. They just assume 'because it will be better' and build their mountains of reasons on top of that, which just crumble and fall down as soon as that basic belief does not hold. I have a LOT of respect for him, and I'm sure he's a very decent, honest human being. But he's unfortunately another believer of the techno-utopianist faith which only asks for more 'blind progress' without questioning whether that is a good thing or not.

nobodyandproud 4y ago
Creative destruction (see https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp) is a core to the United States The problems are the generational suffering that occurs with said creative destruction: There's no incentive to distribute or share out wealth and the results are brutal. On your point: Note that in the US there's a separation of technical and engineering prowess (MIT, Caltech, ...) and power players (Yale, Harvard). It's almost like our system doesn't want our best engineers thinking about consequences or seeing what the political and wealthy are really like.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Ok, let's see your foundation then.
sershe 4y ago
> He seems to ignore a lot about what the living conditions for people were throughout history, and have a blind trust in the positive power of 'human progress'. Eh? A contender for the most self-contradictory sentence I've ever read ;) The best reason to believe in positive power of "human progress" is, specifically, not ignoring "what the living conditions for people were throughout history".
- seu 4y ago
  Let me correct my sentence: there's a blind belief that _technological_ progress automatically equates to better life conditions. And to clarify: I'm not saying "all technology is bad", but rather "not all technological progress is automatically good for humanity". As an example, living conditions of hunter-gatherers were way, way better than living conditions of the first people in cities, and I'd argue, depending on which parameters you use, might still be better than our modern, big-city living conditions (except maybe for the richest 1% of the world)
  - sershe 4y ago
    On average technology has been overwhelmingly good. The GP is too vague, but what is the alternative to blind progress being proposed - some ethicist deciding what's good? When has that ever work out well? I'm pretty sure it has 100% track record of failure, I don't believe modern ethicists will do any better than luddites, inquisition, or Paul Elrich just because they have better manners. In fact I think less of a bioethicist than of an inquisitor, at least the latter had general ignorance as an excuse. I, personally, think "techno-utopianists" don't go far enough. The contributions of some supposed non-technological progress - even to an extent of the institutional progress, but especially of some supposed cultural/ethical values improving, etc. - is overrated. Ultimately, it's all downstream of technology - only the technology enables the complex economy of abundance, and combined they allow good institutions to propagate. Even modern societies, as soon as they become poor, quickly start losing a veneer of "ethical progress". And we don't even usually see actual technological degradation.
    - innagadadavida 4y ago
serverholic 4y ago
I’ve come to strongly resent the techno-utopian mindset that unfortunately plagues the tech world. Tech for the sake of tech with zero thought about how it will affect humanity.
- ncr100 4y ago
  Here, here. I haven't studied it formally and I'm being asked to support techno utopia also. So it feels pretty shaky to me. Certainly my livelihood is based on the premise of it and my dreams which fuel my workplace motivation serve as foundation to you know what I do with 50% of my life, work on technology. So I am biased. Some utopian dystopia discussions here on hacker news sort of boil down to the chaos theory level of assumptions, where you can see people exercising their own defensiveness when they snipe on a naysayer, sniping on their grammatical concerns, but not actually engaging in value-based discussions into the hacker news thread. It's like they're not human, they're only practicing it being devil's advocate technicians. Useful idiots is kind of what I think. We need to have more values discussions, ethics too.
m3kw9 4y ago
If you got less people there is still no guarantee less percentage of people are gonna be suffering. Feeling bad because more people are in your view is “suffering” is all in your head.
_gabe_ 4y ago
> The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic. I'm just curious, do you happen to work in a technical field and consider yourself rational and scientific? And if you do, why do you presuppose that your views are automatically correct? Couldn't it also hold that your views may be ignorant and dogmatic if you apply the same scrutiny to yourself that you do to Carmack? And if you don't work in a technical field, then I guess this is all irrelevant anyways. I just don't like when I see people making these types of arguments where you can't speak on a subject that you're not actively pursuing a PhD in, and then they proceed to do exactly that.
- seu 4y ago
  I have a degree in computer science and worked in a technical field for over 20 years. I don't call myself "rational and scientific", though I do think that the Scientific Method is a great way of creating useful models of the world. But those models - like all models - are wrong. Maybe it's just semantics, but one of my points is exactly that some people believe that they are "rational and scientific" and ignore that we are not just computers; experience, emotions and unconscious bias plays an important role in our decisions. Thinking that the whole world (and themselves) can be perfectly rationalized, makes them miss the point that there are non-rational reasons for them to think the way they do. That's why I refer to when I talk about dogmatism. I suggest everyone (who wants to hear me) to read Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer Power and Human Reason"; he does a much better job than me at raising similar arguments to mine. Also, Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", for the ways in which we _all_ are so _not_ 100% rational in our everyday decisions.
JohnBooty 4y ago
The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic. I mean, what's the alternative? For a guy like Carmack to only comment on narrow areas in his field(s) of expertise? He's a human being; I think he's allowed to comment on other topics and I tend to find his comments interesting because I understand them in IMO the correct context -- they're one guy's musings, not pithy declarations and edicts. The problems arise when folks start to present themselves as experts and try to hold sway over others in areas in which they have no clue. That's not what I see here.
- hipjiveguy 4y ago
  very nicely put. made me rethink somethings :D much appreciated. ie - expand my domains
dadarepublic 4y ago
Without value judgement on the above quotes, I think Carmack is very much aware of his own lane and would say to take any comments outside it with a grain of salt. For instance earlier in the article, he states: >I’m trying not to use the kind of hyperbole of really grand pronouncements, because I am a nuts-and-bolts person. Even with the rocketry stuff, I wasn’t talking about colonizing Mars, I was talking about which bolts I’m using to hold things together. So, I don’t want to do a TED talk going on and on about all the things that might be possible with plausibly cost-effective artificial general intelligence. He likes to figure out new puzzles and how things work. He's an engineer at heart and that's very much his comfort zone. AGI is an exciting new puzzle for him. I'm glad he's taken an interest. (Edit capitalization & punctuation)
martin_drapeau 4y ago
Can you tell us what is wrong with progress? Any examples?
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Define Progress
  - nickersonm 4y ago
    Greater control of our physical environment.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      What if we had control to cause the sun to go supernova by doing something that everyone on earth has access to, like simply arranging a small pile of pebbles in a rough pattern? That would not be good or progress.
  - martin_drapeau 4y ago
    Moving people up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Technology enables that.
  - jareklupinski 4y ago
    my grandparents spent 8 hours sowing and reaped 100g of rice yesterday I spent 8 hours sowing and reaped 200g of rice today I spent 8 hours sowing and I will reap 300g of rice progress
braindead_in 4y ago
>> The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves and whatever. There is a theory that hunter-gatherers were much more happier compared to us because they were more in tune with the natural environment, had fewer sources of stress, and were more connected to their community than modern humans. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187... From the article. > Today people [in Western societies] go to mindfulness classes, yoga classes and clubs dancing, just so for a moment they can live in the present. The Bushmen live that way all the time!
- solarmist 4y ago
  They also happily murdered unaffiliated tribes just because. There are tons of trade offs.
  - zquzra 4y ago
    > They also happily murdered unaffiliated tribes just because. We still do it.
    - solarmist 4y ago
      Many of us don't. In hunter gatherer tribes it was I, possible to not be personally affected though.
- elteto 4y ago
  Idk... I'm very grateful for modern dentistry...
  - serverholic 4y ago
    Why does it have to be a trade off?
    - 4y ago
zquzra 4y ago
>>The world is a hugely better place I don't know. We live more, but a longer life can also be miserable.

by seu 4y ago

nobodyandproud 4y ago

Creative destruction (see https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp) is a core to the United States The problems are the generational suffering that occurs with said creative destruction: There's no incentive to distribute or share out wealth and the results are brutal. On your point: Note that in the US there's a separation of technical and engineering prowess (MIT, Caltech, ...) and power players (Yale, Harvard). It's almost like our system doesn't want our best engineers thinking about consequences or seeing what the political and wealthy are really like.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

Ok, let's see your foundation then.

sershe 4y ago

> He seems to ignore a lot about what the living conditions for people were throughout history, and have a blind trust in the positive power of 'human progress'. Eh? A contender for the most self-contradictory sentence I've ever read ;) The best reason to believe in positive power of "human progress" is, specifically, not ignoring "what the living conditions for people were throughout history".

seu 4y ago
Let me correct my sentence: there's a blind belief that _technological_ progress automatically equates to better life conditions. And to clarify: I'm not saying "all technology is bad", but rather "not all technological progress is automatically good for humanity". As an example, living conditions of hunter-gatherers were way, way better than living conditions of the first people in cities, and I'd argue, depending on which parameters you use, might still be better than our modern, big-city living conditions (except maybe for the richest 1% of the world)
- sershe 4y ago
  On average technology has been overwhelmingly good. The GP is too vague, but what is the alternative to blind progress being proposed - some ethicist deciding what's good? When has that ever work out well? I'm pretty sure it has 100% track record of failure, I don't believe modern ethicists will do any better than luddites, inquisition, or Paul Elrich just because they have better manners. In fact I think less of a bioethicist than of an inquisitor, at least the latter had general ignorance as an excuse. I, personally, think "techno-utopianists" don't go far enough. The contributions of some supposed non-technological progress - even to an extent of the institutional progress, but especially of some supposed cultural/ethical values improving, etc. - is overrated. Ultimately, it's all downstream of technology - only the technology enables the complex economy of abundance, and combined they allow good institutions to propagate. Even modern societies, as soon as they become poor, quickly start losing a veneer of "ethical progress". And we don't even usually see actual technological degradation.
  - innagadadavida 4y ago

serverholic 4y ago

I’ve come to strongly resent the techno-utopian mindset that unfortunately plagues the tech world. Tech for the sake of tech with zero thought about how it will affect humanity.

ncr100 4y ago
Here, here. I haven't studied it formally and I'm being asked to support techno utopia also. So it feels pretty shaky to me. Certainly my livelihood is based on the premise of it and my dreams which fuel my workplace motivation serve as foundation to you know what I do with 50% of my life, work on technology. So I am biased. Some utopian dystopia discussions here on hacker news sort of boil down to the chaos theory level of assumptions, where you can see people exercising their own defensiveness when they snipe on a naysayer, sniping on their grammatical concerns, but not actually engaging in value-based discussions into the hacker news thread. It's like they're not human, they're only practicing it being devil's advocate technicians. Useful idiots is kind of what I think. We need to have more values discussions, ethics too.

m3kw9 4y ago

If you got less people there is still no guarantee less percentage of people are gonna be suffering. Feeling bad because more people are in your view is “suffering” is all in your head.

_gabe_ 4y ago

> The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic. I'm just curious, do you happen to work in a technical field and consider yourself rational and scientific? And if you do, why do you presuppose that your views are automatically correct? Couldn't it also hold that your views may be ignorant and dogmatic if you apply the same scrutiny to yourself that you do to Carmack? And if you don't work in a technical field, then I guess this is all irrelevant anyways. I just don't like when I see people making these types of arguments where you can't speak on a subject that you're not actively pursuing a PhD in, and then they proceed to do exactly that.

seu 4y ago
I have a degree in computer science and worked in a technical field for over 20 years. I don't call myself "rational and scientific", though I do think that the Scientific Method is a great way of creating useful models of the world. But those models - like all models - are wrong. Maybe it's just semantics, but one of my points is exactly that some people believe that they are "rational and scientific" and ignore that we are not just computers; experience, emotions and unconscious bias plays an important role in our decisions. Thinking that the whole world (and themselves) can be perfectly rationalized, makes them miss the point that there are non-rational reasons for them to think the way they do. That's why I refer to when I talk about dogmatism. I suggest everyone (who wants to hear me) to read Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer Power and Human Reason"; he does a much better job than me at raising similar arguments to mine. Also, Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", for the ways in which we _all_ are so _not_ 100% rational in our everyday decisions.

JohnBooty 4y ago

The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic. I mean, what's the alternative? For a guy like Carmack to only comment on narrow areas in his field(s) of expertise? He's a human being; I think he's allowed to comment on other topics and I tend to find his comments interesting because I understand them in IMO the correct context -- they're one guy's musings, not pithy declarations and edicts. The problems arise when folks start to present themselves as experts and try to hold sway over others in areas in which they have no clue. That's not what I see here.

hipjiveguy 4y ago
very nicely put. made me rethink somethings :D much appreciated. ie - expand my domains

dadarepublic 4y ago

Without value judgement on the above quotes, I think Carmack is very much aware of his own lane and would say to take any comments outside it with a grain of salt. For instance earlier in the article, he states: >I’m trying not to use the kind of hyperbole of really grand pronouncements, because I am a nuts-and-bolts person. Even with the rocketry stuff, I wasn’t talking about colonizing Mars, I was talking about which bolts I’m using to hold things together. So, I don’t want to do a TED talk going on and on about all the things that might be possible with plausibly cost-effective artificial general intelligence. He likes to figure out new puzzles and how things work. He's an engineer at heart and that's very much his comfort zone. AGI is an exciting new puzzle for him. I'm glad he's taken an interest. (Edit capitalization & punctuation)

martin_drapeau 4y ago

Can you tell us what is wrong with progress? Any examples?

mrguyorama 4y ago
Define Progress
- nickersonm 4y ago
  Greater control of our physical environment.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    What if we had control to cause the sun to go supernova by doing something that everyone on earth has access to, like simply arranging a small pile of pebbles in a rough pattern? That would not be good or progress.
- martin_drapeau 4y ago
  Moving people up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Technology enables that.
- jareklupinski 4y ago
  my grandparents spent 8 hours sowing and reaped 100g of rice yesterday I spent 8 hours sowing and reaped 200g of rice today I spent 8 hours sowing and I will reap 300g of rice progress

braindead_in 4y ago

>> The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves and whatever. There is a theory that hunter-gatherers were much more happier compared to us because they were more in tune with the natural environment, had fewer sources of stress, and were more connected to their community than modern humans. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187... From the article. > Today people [in Western societies] go to mindfulness classes, yoga classes and clubs dancing, just so for a moment they can live in the present. The Bushmen live that way all the time!

solarmist 4y ago
They also happily murdered unaffiliated tribes just because. There are tons of trade offs.
- zquzra 4y ago
  > They also happily murdered unaffiliated tribes just because. We still do it.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Many of us don't. In hunter gatherer tribes it was I, possible to not be personally affected though.
elteto 4y ago
Idk... I'm very grateful for modern dentistry...
- serverholic 4y ago
  Why does it have to be a trade off?
  - 4y ago

zquzra 4y ago

>>The world is a hugely better place I don't know. We live more, but a longer life can also be miserable.