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Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions. Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (

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
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    > 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. I'm not sure why you draw a binary here. I have no problems with environmental regulation. You've posted several examples about the benefits of CEQA. I'm also not so young that I don't remember LA being covered in soot. I remember driving down to LA and putting a scarf on my face in the car with my parents as we descended into the valley. But CEQA, today, is being used to block new housing and is calling students "noise pollution." This is the problem. Crafting regulation is very difficult. While the good intentions behind CEQA were realized quickly, NIMBYs also found that they could use CEQA to block development. What I ultimately mean is that this high-level, mile in the sky debate about "techno-optimism" and "techno-pessimism" or "pro-regulation" vs "anti-regulation" is silly. I think almost everyone agrees that we need some form of regulation. The questions to discuss are much thornier: what do we regulate, how much of it do we regulate, what should the penalties be, and how do we enforce the regulation. The problem is that once you get into these details, the general public stops paying attention, and special interest groups (industry leaders, NIMBY neighborhood groups, union leaders, etc) start to weigh in. Most of these internet fights turn into people sparring over vague philosophies, we never get so far as to discuss what and how a regulation should be made!
- api 3y ago
  There's plenty of cautionary tales about mindless techno-optimism, but the role of 70s environmentalism is blocking nuclear power and making climate change orders of magnitude worse is a great cautionary tale on the dangers of pessimism and obstructionism. A big part of the problem with 70s environmentalism is that a lot of it's rooted in the fantasy of returning to some pre-industrial mode of existence. That's never going to happen barring an extinction level event that would do as much harm to the rest of the biosphere as it would to us. We need to be looking at how to make our technological civilization less damaging to our biosphere and more sustainable long term, not wasting time with fantasies.
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.

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
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  > 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. I'm not sure why you draw a binary here. I have no problems with environmental regulation. You've posted several examples about the benefits of CEQA. I'm also not so young that I don't remember LA being covered in soot. I remember driving down to LA and putting a scarf on my face in the car with my parents as we descended into the valley. But CEQA, today, is being used to block new housing and is calling students "noise pollution." This is the problem. Crafting regulation is very difficult. While the good intentions behind CEQA were realized quickly, NIMBYs also found that they could use CEQA to block development. What I ultimately mean is that this high-level, mile in the sky debate about "techno-optimism" and "techno-pessimism" or "pro-regulation" vs "anti-regulation" is silly. I think almost everyone agrees that we need some form of regulation. The questions to discuss are much thornier: what do we regulate, how much of it do we regulate, what should the penalties be, and how do we enforce the regulation. The problem is that once you get into these details, the general public stops paying attention, and special interest groups (industry leaders, NIMBY neighborhood groups, union leaders, etc) start to weigh in. Most of these internet fights turn into people sparring over vague philosophies, we never get so far as to discuss what and how a regulation should be made!
api 3y ago
There's plenty of cautionary tales about mindless techno-optimism, but the role of 70s environmentalism is blocking nuclear power and making climate change orders of magnitude worse is a great cautionary tale on the dangers of pessimism and obstructionism. A big part of the problem with 70s environmentalism is that a lot of it's rooted in the fantasy of returning to some pre-industrial mode of existence. That's never going to happen barring an extinction level event that would do as much harm to the rest of the biosphere as it would to us. We need to be looking at how to make our technological civilization less damaging to our biosphere and more sustainable long term, not wasting time with fantasies.

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.