5 ms·

Techno-optimism needs better defenders. This e/acc stuff reads like it was written by 15 year olds. At least I don't see it anywhere but Xitter which might con

by api 3y ago

Techno-optimism needs better defenders. This e/acc stuff reads like it was written by 15 year olds. At least I don't see it anywhere but Xitter which might contain the damage.

jjtheblunt 3y ago
I wonder what the virtual age of an LLM authored piece would be.
some_furry 3y ago
Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions. Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality). It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. PhilosophyTube recently covered Ethical AI as a broad topic, but a lot of her points also apply to tech outside of the large-scale computing sector. (Things like algorithmic bias, which doesn't require AI/ML to accidentally implement.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M
- specialist 3y ago
  Great share. FWIW, chewing thru History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has deepened my appreciation of PhilosophyTube. (My advice to young me would not skip the humanities.)
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  > And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. Right but the problem with a lot of these positions is obstructionism. Take a look at the '70s environmental movement and the way its legacy, laws like NEPA and CEQA, are used to simply block development. Or look at the discourse around nuclear power. Of course: > Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions. Which I wholeheartedly agree with. It just turns out that tradeoffs are difficult and that the electorate doesn't really care about nuance. They just want to know whether Andreessen is Good (TM) or Bad (TM). Should you clap for him or boo him on stage, that is the question of our times.
  - some_furry 3y ago
    Which of those positions do you believe are plagued by obstructionism, and in what context are they being obstructionist?
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS are all such vague positions that I've seen them used to justify everything from adding gentle taxes to "hanging the billionaires". I think most people agree that some amount of regulation is good. The hard part is agreeing how much, where, and how this regulation is enforced. CEQA is an example of where pro-social, pro-environmental legislation ends up obstructing progress.
      - mcguire 3y ago
        "Comparing California before and after the 1970 passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and benchmarking against performance in the other 49 states, this study finds that 1) California per capita GDP, 2) California housing relative to population, 3) California manufacturing output and 4) California construction activity grew as fast or faster after the passage of CEQA." (https://econ.utah.edu/research/publications/2013_01.pdf https://econ.utah.edu/research/publications/2013_01.pdf) https://www.insider.com/vintage-photos-los-angeles-smog-pollution-epa-2020-1 https://www.insider.com/vintage-photos-los-angeles-smog-poll... https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-the-air-district/history-of-air-district https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-the-air-district/history-of-air... https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjel/article/view/3521 https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjel/article...
  - mcguire 3y ago
    "Right but the problem with a lot of these positions is obstructionism. Take a look at the '70s environmental movement and the way its legacy, laws like NEPA and CEQA, are used to simply block development" One of the difficulties with being young is that one tends to assume that the conditions from the beginning of time were static up until one's childhood memories. Getting older doesn't really help that, but one does remember conditions farther back. Ever seen those pictures of Beijing on a bad air day? With the lovely brown-gray air? Los Angeles was kinda like that in the 1980s. Air quality: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139418/air-pollutant-emissions-by-type-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139418/air-pollutant-em... "Annual emissions estimates are used as one indicator of the effectiveness of our programs. The graph below shows that between 1980 and 2022, gross domestic product increased 196 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 108 percent, energy consumption increased 29 percent, and U.S. population grew by 47 percent. During the same time period, total emissions of the six principal air pollutants dropped by 73 percent. The graph also shows that CO2 emissions, after having risen gradually for decades, have shown an overall decrease since 2007, and in 2021 were 7 percent higher than 1980 levels." (https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary) https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/power-plants https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/power-plants https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/us-air-quality-trends https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/us-air-quality-trends https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary https://www.epa.gov/air-research/history-air-pollution https://www.epa.gov/air-research/history-air-pollution Water quality https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-safe-are-u-s-rivers-50-years-after-the-clean-water-act/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-safe-are-u-s-... (Some good pictures of the Cuyahoga River fire.) https://e360.yale.edu/features/delaware-river-clean-water-act https://e360.yale.edu/features/delaware-river-clean-water-ac... https://acwi.gov/monitoring/webinars/industrial_internet_11242015.pdf https://acwi.gov/monitoring/webinars/industrial_internet_112... https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/history-clean-water-act https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/history-clean-water-act
- 1propionyl 3y ago
  One particular instantiation of... > Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality). ...would be to substitute "technology" with "markets". Karl Polanyi wrote an entire book (The Great Transformation) about precisely this point. > It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. There's a direct parallel here to what Polanyi called "social embededness". Stealing from Wikipedia... > Polanyi argued that in non-market societies there are no pure economic institutions to which formal economic models can be applied. In these cases economic activities such as "provisioning" are "embedded" in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions. And by contrast, that market societies attempt to "disembed" economic action and claim that markets are some Platonic ideal existing outside their social context, which leads to all sorts of irrational and strange outcomes. To tie it back to technology, I think what we're seeing today is precisely the same, but rather than economic action in markets, it is a cluster of affordances from technology at scale (ubiquitous mobile computing, the cloud, etc). Techno-solutionists/optimists want to believe that "technology" exists disembeded from social context, and that it is a pure, higher thing beyond and above the petty squabbles of politics and culture. (And I mean, taking metaphors at face value... it's called THE CLOUD. Even the name suggests it being above and beyond mere human ken.)
  - some_furry 3y ago
    I'm actually not familiar with Karl Polanyi's work. I'll give it a read sometime; thanks for the pointer.
fullshark 3y ago
Theory: A lot of technologists have both the emotional maturity and intellectual maturity of 15 year olds, but they have been compensated handsomely for their technical prowess over the past decade+ and have confused that purely vocational merit with merit in other arenas.
- specialist 3y ago
  w/ 20/20 hindsight, I wish I'd made a foundational contribution to humanity as impactful as naming the image tag.
  - btown 3y ago
    This could be you one day! https://gizmodo.com/the-humble-origins-of-the-html-blink-tag-5903827 https://gizmodo.com/the-humble-origins-of-the-html-blink-tag... > At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife. > Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.
    - specialist 3y ago
      Fun share, thanks. The specification process was no more formal on the IE team, some years later. The span tag, which admittedly was a pretty good idea, was conceived and added to the product over a weekend. I was very conflicted when span's creator (name long forgotten, sorry) shared this story. Young me cared very much about rules, order, specifications, standards, interoperability, QA/test and such. Now? Not so much.
sanderjd 3y ago
Yeah, this. All else equal, I'd say that I am a "techno-optimist". That is, I am optimistic about humanity continuing to invent new technologies, and optimistic that over long time horizons, those technologies will be highly net positive. And I'm excited about continuing to find ways to be involved in some of the technologies that get invented and scaled up during the remainder of my life. But if Andreessen's manifesto is now what the term "techno-optimist" means, then you definitely have to count me out of that. I guess I'm happy to just say "I'm optimistic about technology", without needing new jargon defining it as an identity.
tootie 3y ago
I don't see techno-optimism as being remotely under threat. I think the vast majority of humans are techno-optimist. There's some very real concerns about how AI will change society and whether it will cause some palpable harm especially in the short term. I also think it's pure sophistry to assert that technological progress can only be good. Even when it's a net positive it will still come with costs. All that being said, technological progress is hardly being hampered in any corner of the economy. Congress held some hearings on AI. Did they shut down any program or ban any products? No. Tech is proceeding at an ever faster pace and there is barely anything slowing it down. The biggest anti-tech campaign I've seen in my life was the anti-vaccine campaign of the COVID era.
simonebrunozzi 3y ago
e/acc : for the ones that don't know its meaning [0] yet: "E/acc is an acronym for the phrase Effective Accelerationism, which is an ideology and movement that draws from Nick Land's theories of accelerationism to advocate for the belief that artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) will lead to a post-scarcity technological utopia." [0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/eacc-effective-accelerationism https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/eacc-effective-accel...

by api 3y ago

Techno-optimism needs better defenders. This e/acc stuff reads like it was written by 15 year olds. At least I don't see it anywhere but Xitter which might contain the damage.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

I wonder what the virtual age of an LLM authored piece would be.

some_furry 3y ago

Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions. Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality). It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. PhilosophyTube recently covered Ethical AI as a broad topic, but a lot of her points also apply to tech outside of the large-scale computing sector. (Things like algorithmic bias, which doesn't require AI/ML to accidentally implement.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M

specialist 3y ago
Great share. FWIW, chewing thru History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has deepened my appreciation of PhilosophyTube. (My advice to young me would not skip the humanities.)
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
> And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. Right but the problem with a lot of these positions is obstructionism. Take a look at the '70s environmental movement and the way its legacy, laws like NEPA and CEQA, are used to simply block development. Or look at the discourse around nuclear power. Of course: > Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions. Which I wholeheartedly agree with. It just turns out that tradeoffs are difficult and that the electorate doesn't really care about nuance. They just want to know whether Andreessen is Good (TM) or Bad (TM). Should you clap for him or boo him on stage, that is the question of our times.
- some_furry 3y ago
  Which of those positions do you believe are plagued by obstructionism, and in what context are they being obstructionist?
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS are all such vague positions that I've seen them used to justify everything from adding gentle taxes to "hanging the billionaires". I think most people agree that some amount of regulation is good. The hard part is agreeing how much, where, and how this regulation is enforced. CEQA is an example of where pro-social, pro-environmental legislation ends up obstructing progress.
    - mcguire 3y ago
      "Comparing California before and after the 1970 passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and benchmarking against performance in the other 49 states, this study finds that 1) California per capita GDP, 2) California housing relative to population, 3) California manufacturing output and 4) California construction activity grew as fast or faster after the passage of CEQA." (https://econ.utah.edu/research/publications/2013_01.pdf https://econ.utah.edu/research/publications/2013_01.pdf) https://www.insider.com/vintage-photos-los-angeles-smog-pollution-epa-2020-1 https://www.insider.com/vintage-photos-los-angeles-smog-poll... https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-the-air-district/history-of-air-district https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-the-air-district/history-of-air... https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjel/article/view/3521 https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjel/article...
- mcguire 3y ago
  "Right but the problem with a lot of these positions is obstructionism. Take a look at the '70s environmental movement and the way its legacy, laws like NEPA and CEQA, are used to simply block development" One of the difficulties with being young is that one tends to assume that the conditions from the beginning of time were static up until one's childhood memories. Getting older doesn't really help that, but one does remember conditions farther back. Ever seen those pictures of Beijing on a bad air day? With the lovely brown-gray air? Los Angeles was kinda like that in the 1980s. Air quality: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139418/air-pollutant-emissions-by-type-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139418/air-pollutant-em... "Annual emissions estimates are used as one indicator of the effectiveness of our programs. The graph below shows that between 1980 and 2022, gross domestic product increased 196 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 108 percent, energy consumption increased 29 percent, and U.S. population grew by 47 percent. During the same time period, total emissions of the six principal air pollutants dropped by 73 percent. The graph also shows that CO2 emissions, after having risen gradually for decades, have shown an overall decrease since 2007, and in 2021 were 7 percent higher than 1980 levels." (https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary) https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/power-plants https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/power-plants https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/us-air-quality-trends https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/us-air-quality-trends https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary https://www.epa.gov/air-research/history-air-pollution https://www.epa.gov/air-research/history-air-pollution Water quality https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-safe-are-u-s-rivers-50-years-after-the-clean-water-act/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-safe-are-u-s-... (Some good pictures of the Cuyahoga River fire.) https://e360.yale.edu/features/delaware-river-clean-water-act https://e360.yale.edu/features/delaware-river-clean-water-ac... https://acwi.gov/monitoring/webinars/industrial_internet_11242015.pdf https://acwi.gov/monitoring/webinars/industrial_internet_112... https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/history-clean-water-act https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/history-clean-water-act
1propionyl 3y ago
One particular instantiation of... > Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality). ...would be to substitute "technology" with "markets". Karl Polanyi wrote an entire book (The Great Transformation) about precisely this point. > It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. There's a direct parallel here to what Polanyi called "social embededness". Stealing from Wikipedia... > Polanyi argued that in non-market societies there are no pure economic institutions to which formal economic models can be applied. In these cases economic activities such as "provisioning" are "embedded" in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions. And by contrast, that market societies attempt to "disembed" economic action and claim that markets are some Platonic ideal existing outside their social context, which leads to all sorts of irrational and strange outcomes. To tie it back to technology, I think what we're seeing today is precisely the same, but rather than economic action in markets, it is a cluster of affordances from technology at scale (ubiquitous mobile computing, the cloud, etc). Techno-solutionists/optimists want to believe that "technology" exists disembeded from social context, and that it is a pure, higher thing beyond and above the petty squabbles of politics and culture. (And I mean, taking metaphors at face value... it's called THE CLOUD. Even the name suggests it being above and beyond mere human ken.)
- some_furry 3y ago
  I'm actually not familiar with Karl Polanyi's work. I'll give it a read sometime; thanks for the pointer.

fullshark 3y ago

Theory: A lot of technologists have both the emotional maturity and intellectual maturity of 15 year olds, but they have been compensated handsomely for their technical prowess over the past decade+ and have confused that purely vocational merit with merit in other arenas.

specialist 3y ago
w/ 20/20 hindsight, I wish I'd made a foundational contribution to humanity as impactful as naming the image tag.
- btown 3y ago
  This could be you one day! https://gizmodo.com/the-humble-origins-of-the-html-blink-tag-5903827 https://gizmodo.com/the-humble-origins-of-the-html-blink-tag... > At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife. > Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Fun share, thanks. The specification process was no more formal on the IE team, some years later. The span tag, which admittedly was a pretty good idea, was conceived and added to the product over a weekend. I was very conflicted when span's creator (name long forgotten, sorry) shared this story. Young me cared very much about rules, order, specifications, standards, interoperability, QA/test and such. Now? Not so much.

sanderjd 3y ago

Yeah, this. All else equal, I'd say that I am a "techno-optimist". That is, I am optimistic about humanity continuing to invent new technologies, and optimistic that over long time horizons, those technologies will be highly net positive. And I'm excited about continuing to find ways to be involved in some of the technologies that get invented and scaled up during the remainder of my life. But if Andreessen's manifesto is now what the term "techno-optimist" means, then you definitely have to count me out of that. I guess I'm happy to just say "I'm optimistic about technology", without needing new jargon defining it as an identity.

tootie 3y ago

I don't see techno-optimism as being remotely under threat. I think the vast majority of humans are techno-optimist. There's some very real concerns about how AI will change society and whether it will cause some palpable harm especially in the short term. I also think it's pure sophistry to assert that technological progress can only be good. Even when it's a net positive it will still come with costs. All that being said, technological progress is hardly being hampered in any corner of the economy. Congress held some hearings on AI. Did they shut down any program or ban any products? No. Tech is proceeding at an ever faster pace and there is barely anything slowing it down. The biggest anti-tech campaign I've seen in my life was the anti-vaccine campaign of the COVID era.

simonebrunozzi 3y ago

e/acc : for the ones that don't know its meaning [0] yet: "E/acc is an acronym for the phrase Effective Accelerationism, which is an ideology and movement that draws from Nick Land's theories of accelerationism to advocate for the belief that artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) will lead to a post-scarcity technological utopia." [0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/eacc-effective-accelerationism https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/eacc-effective-accel...