8 ms·

Two Kinds of Techno-Optimism

160 points by simonebrunozzi 3y ago

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
datadrivenangel 3y ago
Accelerating through self parody we arrive at sincerity: one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready now go cat go. Andreessen shows that he's struggling to get past step two and is ready to make it out of the near-future in a Landian sense.
davidw 3y ago
This one was also a good critique: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-techno-optimists-fallacy https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-techno-optimists-fallacy
- gooseus 3y ago
  Also this one https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-cant-our-tech-billionaires-learn https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-cant-our-tech-billionai...
  - kaycebasques 3y ago
    Thanks. That guy seems well-read: lots of interesting cross-references. I was getting fascist vibes from Andreesen for example and it was helpful to see the historical connections. Technological Pragmatism is an ethos I can probably get behind [1]. It ties in well with the book [2] that's had the most impact on me, which basically says that the best path to increasing self-esteem is to honestly appreciate your good side and honestly reckon with your bad side. I also like this approach because it acknowledges that good / bad / ugly all contain information. Andreesen, with his refusal to look at bad / ugly, is basically blocking himself off from two sources of information. The same goes for toxic positivity people who block out painful emotions. My best chance of success in general is to stay open to all the info available to me. [1] If there was a way to also work in the idea that I believe I'm better off leaning optimist rather than pessimist then it would be perfect for me. But that's probably too complicated / nuanced. [2] The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem. I'm aware the author has some dubious historical connections himself (he was "Ayn Rand's lover", his own words) but nonetheless I still stand firm in saying that this book had the most positive impact on my life of any book I've read.
  - kamikaz1k 3y ago
    This one feels a bit overstated. Yglesias focused on attacking blind optimism, which makes sense. Karpf is engaging in character attacks. It’s okay to not like Andreeson, not trying to say otherwise. But this essay reads more like a class warfare piece than a good argument for why techno optimism is bad. Hollowing out of the American middle class isn’t Google’s fault. My read, anyway.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      I appreciate your comment, because even though I came to the opposite conclusion, I like seeing how our own experiences color our interpretations. First off, the thing I really connected to with Karpf's piece was how this techno-optimist manifesto might have made sense in the mid 90s, but it seems baffling to write this with 30 years of hindsight. And as someone who was a techno-optimist in the mid 90s, I don't just see how you couldn't be at least moderately disillusioned with the promise of tech. But to your point specifically, "Hollowing out of the American middle class isn’t Google’s fault" - yeah, it kinda is, at least partially. Tech isn't the only reason for the decline of the middle class, but the Internet specifically has made markets huge and is directly responsible for "winner take all" dynamics in these larger markets. There used to be "regional winners" in lots of different retail categories, for example, and thus there were many smaller and midsized cities with vibrant main streets where the money went back to local proprietors. Now most of that goes to Amazon (or Walmart before that, but Walmart is still tech).
      - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
        Do you consider Google to be responsible for "winner take all" dynamics? I also think they have contributed to it, but my intuition says this dynamics would have happened even without Google. Before Google, there were other dominant search engines and portals.
        hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
        Yes, to be clear, I don't blame Google specifically, and I agree the Internet would have created this dynamic regardless. But, for one specific example, Google vacuumed up a huge amount of advertising dollars that used to support local journalism and advertising jobs. The death of local journalism has been written about many, many times, so no need to rehash that. I'm also not saying Google is "evil" for being a better advertising platform than local classifieds, but I'm just saying a natural consequence of this tech change is more concentration of wealth (small number of high paid Google employees but way less middle class newspaper and support jobs).
  - balaji1 3y ago
    I may be reading the critiques rather than the original "techno-optimist manifest". Either way, I want to avoid the original article for some reason. "Optimists" may just be inevitable. But we need a few generations of intentional stewards. We need to engineer resilience and sustainability in our systems. Else we would have to rely on "Apollo missions" in the future (government setting the specific moonshot goals and creating highways to achieve those); rather than on "optimists" inside the macroeconomic structures to achieve those.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      >Either way, I want to avoid the original article for some reason. Because you might form your own thoughts and realize all of the people spilling ink over a billionaire’s pro capitalist position are mainly overblown to generate clicks and “contrarian thought lead” from the side lines?
    - fch42 3y ago
      The hope/belief "stewards" may steer things to where "we" cannot is also a form of optimism. It reminds me strongly of Asimov's "Foundation" novels and their "psychohistory" concept.
    - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
      To borrow from Samuel Johnson, it's worth having read, but not worth reading.
      - balaji1 3y ago
        Also Samuel Johnson "A second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience." totally unrelated but still, heard this recently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
26fingies 3y ago
Unfortunately for Gary, the capitalist regime humanity currently finds itself under ensures that Andreesen is the more correct one. The things that are not profitable do not matter.
- 6510 3y ago
  ha-ha, we are all infidels and heretics now.
moribvndvs 3y ago
I was discussing the manifesto off-handedly with a friend and had a brain fart on what it was called. I went with techno-narcissism, and quite frankly, I think it’s more fitting.
- thebigman433 3y ago
  Its the perfect description of it. Andreessen and his crowd are insanely narcissistic and imo, that brand of techbro is one of the reasons people dont have purely good thoughts when they think of tech. His whole schtick about people looking down on tech now is really lost imo. People still absolutely admire technology, but now its plainly obvious how the major techbros/CEOs/etc arent the smartest people on the planet, and dont deserve god-like status. Plus people see rich tech workers come into their neighborhood and can understandably be put off by that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
summerlight 3y ago
I also want to mention that the manifesto itself sounds like yet another libertarian propaganda, sugarcoated with a techno-optimist brand.
rgmerk 3y ago
All billionaires need somebody whose job it is to tell them their ideas are f***g idiotic to their face periodically. Kinda like “momento mori” without the incentive to go and invent tech to make them immortal.
- echelon 3y ago
  I want billionaires to spend their entire wealth trying to solve disease, disablement, and aging. It works to the benefit of all of us. A billionaire becoming a paraplegic would invest so much money in solving nerve and limb repair. A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of. I'm committing right now to putting my money to work in these areas if I ever make it.
  - __loam 3y ago
    What if there were no billionaires and we did this with publicly funded research instead.
    - echelon 3y ago
      Capitalism can hill climb most gradients incredibly fast. War and existential threats can do so even faster. Publicly funded research does a great job of finding the slopes that would ordinarily be overlooked.
      - scarmig 3y ago
        Capitalism is excellent at local gradient descent, better at it than governments. But it gets caught in suboptimal local minima (and, worse than that, it tends to warp the space in its current local neighborhood to make escaping that dip harder). But the more capital you have accessible, the more you can overcome steeper wells. Effective governments can deploy resources to get out of very steep wells.
        latency-guy2 3y ago
Animats 3y ago
Is that just the intro? Where's the other kind of techno-optimism? There needs to be about a thousand lines more for the author to make his case. The main problem with the "techno-optimism" manifesto is the "free market" section. That's faith-based economics. The big problems we face today as a society come from the fact that we have no clue how to run either the economic system or the political system well.
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  I understood it as agreeing with the main point ("technology is good, it's something we should work towards, AI can improve society") while acknowledging the caveats ("technology isn't always good, we should be careful introducing it, and definitely no 100% free market") Because technology has made the world significantly better place in the long term. But that doesn't mean it will continue to do so. Moreover, despite the fact that average QOL today is generally regarded as much better than anytime sans maybe the last 10 years, it's still much lower than it can and should be, and partly so due to processes which technology and free market have enabled.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    "AI can improve society" reminds me of "Principles of Economics, Translated" (a great 5min video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4) - "\#5: Trade can make everyone better off." The same translation can be applied, methinks.
- 6510 3y ago
  The free market is a formula to network people into one giant brain, one giant organism! Sadly it isn't a very sophisticated brain (I hope the formula is the issue) You can see it isn't very sophisticated in the way it wants to eat it's own children. We've seen this issue with very primitive evolution algo's
  - latency-guy2 3y ago
    I suppose technobabble is what this thread is all about because I literally do not understand what the hell you're getting at. Can you expand on any part of your comment? You have 4 distinct things, supposedly everyone else in the world is supposed to get what you mean when you introduce these things, one after the other, and then engage your comment. You're asking for the impossible.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
This was a good read. When I first read Andreessen's manifesto, I came to believe that one of the following must be true: 1. Andreessen is literally unwell - it reminded me of the paranoid tendencies that reared their head in 2 of my grandparents in the early/mid stages of dementia. 2. Being a billionaire can actually be so isolating, and you constantly have people blowing sunshine up your ass, that you actually start to believe that all your ideas are infallible and that anyone not in agreement with you is a worthless peon. I mean, even if you agreed with Andreessen's point of view, presumably he wrote and posted that manifesto to persuade, as a call-to-action. Yet I don't see how anyone could read that (or write that) and not see how the blowback would be intense, and it's had the exact opposite effect of the (presumed) intent. Of course, Andreessen could just be a collosal "rules for thee but not for me" asshole. He was crowing about free markets and "liberating" people, and about how "it's time to build", but he and his wife turned out to be the ultimate NIMBYs when it was actually their backyard: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andreessens-opposition-housing-project-nimby/671061/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  "but he and his wife turned out to be the ultimate NIMBYs when it was actually their backyard: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre..." This episode is all you need to know about Andreesen. Disruption is only good for others.
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    That link seems to be broken.
    - saghm 3y ago
      It seems like it got truncated when they copied it. Plugging it into google, I think I found the full link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andreessens-opposition-housing-project-nimby/671061/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
throw0101a 3y ago
I think this piece by Noah Smith fleshes out the different types of techno-optimism better: * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thoughts-on-techno-optimism https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thoughts-on-techno-optimism They are in a 2x2 matrix per him: * active-positive: There are plenty of technologies left to discover, if we adopt the right policies. * active-normative: Technology will improve the world, if we adopt the right policies. * passive-positive: Technological innovation is just going to keep happening no matter what we do. * passive-normative: New technology will improve the world no matter what policies we enact. He generally leans towards: > Personally, I subscribe to both positive and normative techno-optimism, but with reservations in both cases. I think there are plenty of new important discoveries out there to be made, but I do think it’s likely that they’ve become more expensive to find. I also think technology usually ends up making life better for most people, but that this isn’t always the case. > In both cases, though, I’m more of an active than a passive optimist. Whether it comes to sustaining the rate of innovation or making sure that innovations benefit humankind, I think that choosing the right policies is very important. He thinks government is an important part of the equation in technological progress, but that bureaucracy can be a hindrance at times, as well as monopolies.
- MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  I would like to suggest a fifth kind of techno-optimism: maybe those robots will spare Humanity and keep us as pets.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - DalasNoin 3y ago
    My parents' cat has been castrated, what about your pets?
    - MichaelMoser123 3y ago
      i hope the robots won't do that to their pets. That's part of my optimism.
greenie_beans 3y ago
i like murray bookchin's version: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-bookchin-towards-a-liberatory-technology https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-...
- monkaiju 3y ago
  Oh cool, looking forward to reading this!
0dayz 3y ago
Another thing is the fact that we're already are at neck breaking speed of adoption an embrace of new tech, to the point I'm sick of it or rather I wished we start focus on our decaying communities, socialization, lack of unity and no sense of belonging. The tell tale sign in my book that we ought to focus on other areas in society, is the fact we are very far behind legislatively on how to handle tech.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > The tell tale sign in my book that we ought to focus on other areas in society, is the fact we are very far behind legislatively on how to handle tech. The recent "Senator, we run ads"[1] moment made this point excruciatingly clear. Congress is totally out of touch and outmatched by tech, and seemingly incapable of even grasping it, let alone regulating it. They are no more savvy than they were with Series Of Tubes[2] almost twenty years ago. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTWUOxkfGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTWUOxkfGQ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - thebigman433 3y ago
    Cops have gotten raises every single year, even in your "woke" cities. Should we be giving them even bigger raises? How much? If we keep giving them raises, but (as you say) crime keeps going up, doesnt that seem like we're wasting money? Also can you specifically name the socialist policies that are ruining SF? Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole
    - systemvoltage 3y ago
      Pretty much all progressive policies of SF have been a total and utter disaster. While Asian countries adopt Capitalism, we're here nibbling our way into full blown communism–intermediary stage being socialism.
harimau777 3y ago
It seems to me that any theory of techno-optimism needs to have a plan for enshitifcation. As far as I can tell, at least in information technology, what we've lost to enshitification has mostly matched or exceeded what we've gained in the last ten to twenty years. Due to SEO and Google dumbing down search, discoverability on the web is mostly dead. Wikipedia's insular obsession with being "encyclopedic" has destroyed much of what made it special and useful. We've mostly fallen back to "AOL Instant Messenger 2.0" in the form of Discord as the best we can do for social media. Reddit has become virtually the one place left where an average person can find information that isn't just SEO spam; however, Reddit's owners seem dead set on destroying it's usability as quickly as possible.
- tern 3y ago
  SaaS is pretty good though: anyone running a corporation can do so more efficiently, using automated payroll, hiring, accounting, etc. and collaborating with powerful coding, writing and design tools. Marketing and advertising is way easier to do at scale. Getting a message out to the world is incredibly easier. All of these things have costs, but I can't deny that if you want to get things done in the world, subject to certain parameters, the wheels are greased compared to the past.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    I fail to see why payroll needs to be SaaS, or even hiring pipelines.
    - Animats 3y ago
      Payroll has been software as a service since before computers. That's where ADP started, with plugboard-wired tabulating machines.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    I see what you are saying; however, it doesn't seem that any of that has actually improved things. Online services may be easier to roll out and be more efficient; however, it doesn't seem like the quality of those services has actually increased.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"In an essay that declares that "we believe in ... testing ideas empirically", not one empirical study is cited."
kaycebasques 3y ago
The first discussion 8 days ago on Andreesen's manifesto is worth a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899993
bavaria666 3y ago
[dead]
renewiltord 3y ago
Ultimately, all the techno optimists are out there living great lives and all the pessimists are on the internet lamenting the breakdown of culture and the loneliness epidemic and shit like that. Choose your path by seeing how people turn out. The world is better because one group modified it and the other group is just there as a moaner brigade. Everyone knows it.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  Except it’s not a dichotomy like that, there are more strands than just optimistic and pessimistic, and different ways of approaching those topics. Further people may be more or less optimistic about different areas of technology. And that’s without considering views outside of technology! So trying to draw correlation between potential for success and opinion seems prone to give incorrect results. Likewise the characterisation also seems more like a safety blanket against criticism then a sensible way to consider the world.
- malermeister 3y ago
  Have you considered it might be the other way around? The people that things happened to work out for now feel optimistic out of survivorship bias?
hammon 3y ago
[dead]
hoseja 3y ago
Fifth paragraph and it's already an emotional appeal to overblown pet problems of authoritarian scolds.
nologic01 3y ago
Today is United Nations day. Which reminds me that the self-appointed techno-optimism Pope has declared Sustainable Development Goals the enemy. I don't know what is brewing in VC land, probably something totally inane like assuming eternal zero interest rates, but I kinda like its impact. If the supposed pinnacle of that clan is reduced to incoherent rants and a long list of cliche discredited slogans that make no sense and are devoid of any empathy for the human condition that can only be a good thing. But it is indeed a call to every decent soul out there to replace that anti-humanist manifesto with true techno-optimism. For it is obvious that what past and current technology have broken can only be fixed by using at least some technology. And that alternate future technologies are needed to get us to safe and enjoyable places. And that these technologies, adapted to serve rather than abuse humanity, need not be boring but can get the blood of any true technologist going. Technologies, btw, like wikipedia, which the other sociopath du-jour has declared a dickipedia. We need to reclaim everything that is important in technology from the minority of these odious people that equate their ego with our collective destiny. But that task cannot happen without reclaiming first social technologies. Things like accounting and money and corporate structures and securities markets and contracts and regulations and incentives. We need to make these tools sociopath-proof. Society's rewards should not accrue to the most cynical and exploitative of human weakness.
nickpp 3y ago
A more in-depth discussion of the original Manifesto can be found in Marc & Ben's show: https://youtu.be/HCfwKBwxLYk https://youtu.be/HCfwKBwxLYk
fch42 3y ago
The point could well be made that they're two kinds of optimism about anything. The first is dismissive of individual influence ("no matter what I do, things will get better over time"). The second is self-aware ("I can make a difference when ..."). In technology, the "hope for the best" (_future_ tech will solve ...) is rather common. It scares me a little, because of the implied waiving of individual responsibility. The retrospective look, learning from mistakes, or even investigating how to apply tech to fix bad results or damage from applying tech in the past, would do us well, ethically. It's very comforting, society-wise, if someone admits to, and makes amends over, mistakes they made that hurt others. It's at least better than that person pointing out no amends needed because future-here-tech-there will do fix it anyway.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

datadrivenangel 3y ago

Accelerating through self parody we arrive at sincerity: one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready now go cat go. Andreessen shows that he's struggling to get past step two and is ready to make it out of the near-future in a Landian sense.

davidw 3y ago

This one was also a good critique: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-techno-optimists-fallacy https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-techno-optimists-fallacy

gooseus 3y ago
Also this one https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-cant-our-tech-billionaires-learn https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-cant-our-tech-billionai...
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  Thanks. That guy seems well-read: lots of interesting cross-references. I was getting fascist vibes from Andreesen for example and it was helpful to see the historical connections. Technological Pragmatism is an ethos I can probably get behind [1]. It ties in well with the book [2] that's had the most impact on me, which basically says that the best path to increasing self-esteem is to honestly appreciate your good side and honestly reckon with your bad side. I also like this approach because it acknowledges that good / bad / ugly all contain information. Andreesen, with his refusal to look at bad / ugly, is basically blocking himself off from two sources of information. The same goes for toxic positivity people who block out painful emotions. My best chance of success in general is to stay open to all the info available to me. [1] If there was a way to also work in the idea that I believe I'm better off leaning optimist rather than pessimist then it would be perfect for me. But that's probably too complicated / nuanced. [2] The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem. I'm aware the author has some dubious historical connections himself (he was "Ayn Rand's lover", his own words) but nonetheless I still stand firm in saying that this book had the most positive impact on my life of any book I've read.
- kamikaz1k 3y ago
  This one feels a bit overstated. Yglesias focused on attacking blind optimism, which makes sense. Karpf is engaging in character attacks. It’s okay to not like Andreeson, not trying to say otherwise. But this essay reads more like a class warfare piece than a good argument for why techno optimism is bad. Hollowing out of the American middle class isn’t Google’s fault. My read, anyway.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I appreciate your comment, because even though I came to the opposite conclusion, I like seeing how our own experiences color our interpretations. First off, the thing I really connected to with Karpf's piece was how this techno-optimist manifesto might have made sense in the mid 90s, but it seems baffling to write this with 30 years of hindsight. And as someone who was a techno-optimist in the mid 90s, I don't just see how you couldn't be at least moderately disillusioned with the promise of tech. But to your point specifically, "Hollowing out of the American middle class isn’t Google’s fault" - yeah, it kinda is, at least partially. Tech isn't the only reason for the decline of the middle class, but the Internet specifically has made markets huge and is directly responsible for "winner take all" dynamics in these larger markets. There used to be "regional winners" in lots of different retail categories, for example, and thus there were many smaller and midsized cities with vibrant main streets where the money went back to local proprietors. Now most of that goes to Amazon (or Walmart before that, but Walmart is still tech).
    - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
      Do you consider Google to be responsible for "winner take all" dynamics? I also think they have contributed to it, but my intuition says this dynamics would have happened even without Google. Before Google, there were other dominant search engines and portals.
      - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
        Yes, to be clear, I don't blame Google specifically, and I agree the Internet would have created this dynamic regardless. But, for one specific example, Google vacuumed up a huge amount of advertising dollars that used to support local journalism and advertising jobs. The death of local journalism has been written about many, many times, so no need to rehash that. I'm also not saying Google is "evil" for being a better advertising platform than local classifieds, but I'm just saying a natural consequence of this tech change is more concentration of wealth (small number of high paid Google employees but way less middle class newspaper and support jobs).
- balaji1 3y ago
  I may be reading the critiques rather than the original "techno-optimist manifest". Either way, I want to avoid the original article for some reason. "Optimists" may just be inevitable. But we need a few generations of intentional stewards. We need to engineer resilience and sustainability in our systems. Else we would have to rely on "Apollo missions" in the future (government setting the specific moonshot goals and creating highways to achieve those); rather than on "optimists" inside the macroeconomic structures to achieve those.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    >Either way, I want to avoid the original article for some reason. Because you might form your own thoughts and realize all of the people spilling ink over a billionaire’s pro capitalist position are mainly overblown to generate clicks and “contrarian thought lead” from the side lines?
  - fch42 3y ago
    The hope/belief "stewards" may steer things to where "we" cannot is also a form of optimism. It reminds me strongly of Asimov's "Foundation" novels and their "psychohistory" concept.
  - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
    To borrow from Samuel Johnson, it's worth having read, but not worth reading.
    - balaji1 3y ago
      Also Samuel Johnson "A second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience." totally unrelated but still, heard this recently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

26fingies 3y ago

Unfortunately for Gary, the capitalist regime humanity currently finds itself under ensures that Andreesen is the more correct one. The things that are not profitable do not matter.

6510 3y ago
ha-ha, we are all infidels and heretics now.

moribvndvs 3y ago

I was discussing the manifesto off-handedly with a friend and had a brain fart on what it was called. I went with techno-narcissism, and quite frankly, I think it’s more fitting.

thebigman433 3y ago
Its the perfect description of it. Andreessen and his crowd are insanely narcissistic and imo, that brand of techbro is one of the reasons people dont have purely good thoughts when they think of tech. His whole schtick about people looking down on tech now is really lost imo. People still absolutely admire technology, but now its plainly obvious how the major techbros/CEOs/etc arent the smartest people on the planet, and dont deserve god-like status. Plus people see rich tech workers come into their neighborhood and can understandably be put off by that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

summerlight 3y ago

I also want to mention that the manifesto itself sounds like yet another libertarian propaganda, sugarcoated with a techno-optimist brand.

rgmerk 3y ago

All billionaires need somebody whose job it is to tell them their ideas are f***g idiotic to their face periodically. Kinda like “momento mori” without the incentive to go and invent tech to make them immortal.

echelon 3y ago
I want billionaires to spend their entire wealth trying to solve disease, disablement, and aging. It works to the benefit of all of us. A billionaire becoming a paraplegic would invest so much money in solving nerve and limb repair. A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of. I'm committing right now to putting my money to work in these areas if I ever make it.
- __loam 3y ago
  What if there were no billionaires and we did this with publicly funded research instead.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Capitalism can hill climb most gradients incredibly fast. War and existential threats can do so even faster. Publicly funded research does a great job of finding the slopes that would ordinarily be overlooked.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      Capitalism is excellent at local gradient descent, better at it than governments. But it gets caught in suboptimal local minima (and, worse than that, it tends to warp the space in its current local neighborhood to make escaping that dip harder). But the more capital you have accessible, the more you can overcome steeper wells. Effective governments can deploy resources to get out of very steep wells.
      - latency-guy2 3y ago

Animats 3y ago

Is that just the intro? Where's the other kind of techno-optimism? There needs to be about a thousand lines more for the author to make his case. The main problem with the "techno-optimism" manifesto is the "free market" section. That's faith-based economics. The big problems we face today as a society come from the fact that we have no clue how to run either the economic system or the political system well.

armchairhacker 3y ago
I understood it as agreeing with the main point ("technology is good, it's something we should work towards, AI can improve society") while acknowledging the caveats ("technology isn't always good, we should be careful introducing it, and definitely no 100% free market") Because technology has made the world significantly better place in the long term. But that doesn't mean it will continue to do so. Moreover, despite the fact that average QOL today is generally regarded as much better than anytime sans maybe the last 10 years, it's still much lower than it can and should be, and partly so due to processes which technology and free market have enabled.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  "AI can improve society" reminds me of "Principles of Economics, Translated" (a great 5min video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4) - "\#5: Trade can make everyone better off." The same translation can be applied, methinks.
6510 3y ago
The free market is a formula to network people into one giant brain, one giant organism! Sadly it isn't a very sophisticated brain (I hope the formula is the issue) You can see it isn't very sophisticated in the way it wants to eat it's own children. We've seen this issue with very primitive evolution algo's
- latency-guy2 3y ago
  I suppose technobabble is what this thread is all about because I literally do not understand what the hell you're getting at. Can you expand on any part of your comment? You have 4 distinct things, supposedly everyone else in the world is supposed to get what you mean when you introduce these things, one after the other, and then engage your comment. You're asking for the impossible.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

This was a good read. When I first read Andreessen's manifesto, I came to believe that one of the following must be true: 1. Andreessen is literally unwell - it reminded me of the paranoid tendencies that reared their head in 2 of my grandparents in the early/mid stages of dementia. 2. Being a billionaire can actually be so isolating, and you constantly have people blowing sunshine up your ass, that you actually start to believe that all your ideas are infallible and that anyone not in agreement with you is a worthless peon. I mean, even if you agreed with Andreessen's point of view, presumably he wrote and posted that manifesto to persuade, as a call-to-action. Yet I don't see how anyone could read that (or write that) and not see how the blowback would be intense, and it's had the exact opposite effect of the (presumed) intent. Of course, Andreessen could just be a collosal "rules for thee but not for me" asshole. He was crowing about free markets and "liberating" people, and about how "it's time to build", but he and his wife turned out to be the ultimate NIMBYs when it was actually their backyard: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andreessens-opposition-housing-project-nimby/671061/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...

rqtwteye 3y ago
"but he and his wife turned out to be the ultimate NIMBYs when it was actually their backyard: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre..." This episode is all you need to know about Andreesen. Disruption is only good for others.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  That link seems to be broken.
  - saghm 3y ago
    It seems like it got truncated when they copied it. Plugging it into google, I think I found the full link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andreessens-opposition-housing-project-nimby/671061/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...

throw0101a 3y ago

I think this piece by Noah Smith fleshes out the different types of techno-optimism better: * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thoughts-on-techno-optimism https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thoughts-on-techno-optimism They are in a 2x2 matrix per him: * active-positive: There are plenty of technologies left to discover, if we adopt the right policies. * active-normative: Technology will improve the world, if we adopt the right policies. * passive-positive: Technological innovation is just going to keep happening no matter what we do. * passive-normative: New technology will improve the world no matter what policies we enact. He generally leans towards: > Personally, I subscribe to both positive and normative techno-optimism, but with reservations in both cases. I think there are plenty of new important discoveries out there to be made, but I do think it’s likely that they’ve become more expensive to find. I also think technology usually ends up making life better for most people, but that this isn’t always the case. > In both cases, though, I’m more of an active than a passive optimist. Whether it comes to sustaining the rate of innovation or making sure that innovations benefit humankind, I think that choosing the right policies is very important. He thinks government is an important part of the equation in technological progress, but that bureaucracy can be a hindrance at times, as well as monopolies.

MichaelMoser123 3y ago
I would like to suggest a fifth kind of techno-optimism: maybe those robots will spare Humanity and keep us as pets.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DalasNoin 3y ago
  My parents' cat has been castrated, what about your pets?
  - MichaelMoser123 3y ago
    i hope the robots won't do that to their pets. That's part of my optimism.

greenie_beans 3y ago

i like murray bookchin's version: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-bookchin-towards-a-liberatory-technology https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-...

monkaiju 3y ago
Oh cool, looking forward to reading this!

0dayz 3y ago

Another thing is the fact that we're already are at neck breaking speed of adoption an embrace of new tech, to the point I'm sick of it or rather I wished we start focus on our decaying communities, socialization, lack of unity and no sense of belonging. The tell tale sign in my book that we ought to focus on other areas in society, is the fact we are very far behind legislatively on how to handle tech.

ryandrake 3y ago
> The tell tale sign in my book that we ought to focus on other areas in society, is the fact we are very far behind legislatively on how to handle tech. The recent "Senator, we run ads"[1] moment made this point excruciatingly clear. Congress is totally out of touch and outmatched by tech, and seemingly incapable of even grasping it, let alone regulating it. They are no more savvy than they were with Series Of Tubes[2] almost twenty years ago. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTWUOxkfGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTWUOxkfGQ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
systemvoltage 3y ago
[flagged]
- thebigman433 3y ago
  Cops have gotten raises every single year, even in your "woke" cities. Should we be giving them even bigger raises? How much? If we keep giving them raises, but (as you say) crime keeps going up, doesnt that seem like we're wasting money? Also can you specifically name the socialist policies that are ruining SF? Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole
  - systemvoltage 3y ago
    Pretty much all progressive policies of SF have been a total and utter disaster. While Asian countries adopt Capitalism, we're here nibbling our way into full blown communism–intermediary stage being socialism.

harimau777 3y ago

It seems to me that any theory of techno-optimism needs to have a plan for enshitifcation. As far as I can tell, at least in information technology, what we've lost to enshitification has mostly matched or exceeded what we've gained in the last ten to twenty years. Due to SEO and Google dumbing down search, discoverability on the web is mostly dead. Wikipedia's insular obsession with being "encyclopedic" has destroyed much of what made it special and useful. We've mostly fallen back to "AOL Instant Messenger 2.0" in the form of Discord as the best we can do for social media. Reddit has become virtually the one place left where an average person can find information that isn't just SEO spam; however, Reddit's owners seem dead set on destroying it's usability as quickly as possible.

tern 3y ago
SaaS is pretty good though: anyone running a corporation can do so more efficiently, using automated payroll, hiring, accounting, etc. and collaborating with powerful coding, writing and design tools. Marketing and advertising is way easier to do at scale. Getting a message out to the world is incredibly easier. All of these things have costs, but I can't deny that if you want to get things done in the world, subject to certain parameters, the wheels are greased compared to the past.
- kortilla 3y ago
  I fail to see why payroll needs to be SaaS, or even hiring pipelines.
  - Animats 3y ago
    Payroll has been software as a service since before computers. That's where ADP started, with plugboard-wired tabulating machines.
- harimau777 3y ago
  I see what you are saying; however, it doesn't seem that any of that has actually improved things. Online services may be easier to roll out and be more efficient; however, it doesn't seem like the quality of those services has actually increased.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"In an essay that declares that "we believe in ... testing ideas empirically", not one empirical study is cited."

kaycebasques 3y ago

The first discussion 8 days ago on Andreesen's manifesto is worth a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899993

bavaria666 3y ago

[dead]

renewiltord 3y ago

Ultimately, all the techno optimists are out there living great lives and all the pessimists are on the internet lamenting the breakdown of culture and the loneliness epidemic and shit like that. Choose your path by seeing how people turn out. The world is better because one group modified it and the other group is just there as a moaner brigade. Everyone knows it.

meheleventyone 3y ago
Except it’s not a dichotomy like that, there are more strands than just optimistic and pessimistic, and different ways of approaching those topics. Further people may be more or less optimistic about different areas of technology. And that’s without considering views outside of technology! So trying to draw correlation between potential for success and opinion seems prone to give incorrect results. Likewise the characterisation also seems more like a safety blanket against criticism then a sensible way to consider the world.
malermeister 3y ago
Have you considered it might be the other way around? The people that things happened to work out for now feel optimistic out of survivorship bias?

hammon 3y ago

[dead]

hoseja 3y ago

Fifth paragraph and it's already an emotional appeal to overblown pet problems of authoritarian scolds.

nologic01 3y ago

Today is United Nations day. Which reminds me that the self-appointed techno-optimism Pope has declared Sustainable Development Goals the enemy. I don't know what is brewing in VC land, probably something totally inane like assuming eternal zero interest rates, but I kinda like its impact. If the supposed pinnacle of that clan is reduced to incoherent rants and a long list of cliche discredited slogans that make no sense and are devoid of any empathy for the human condition that can only be a good thing. But it is indeed a call to every decent soul out there to replace that anti-humanist manifesto with true techno-optimism. For it is obvious that what past and current technology have broken can only be fixed by using at least some technology. And that alternate future technologies are needed to get us to safe and enjoyable places. And that these technologies, adapted to serve rather than abuse humanity, need not be boring but can get the blood of any true technologist going. Technologies, btw, like wikipedia, which the other sociopath du-jour has declared a dickipedia. We need to reclaim everything that is important in technology from the minority of these odious people that equate their ego with our collective destiny. But that task cannot happen without reclaiming first social technologies. Things like accounting and money and corporate structures and securities markets and contracts and regulations and incentives. We need to make these tools sociopath-proof. Society's rewards should not accrue to the most cynical and exploitative of human weakness.

nickpp 3y ago

A more in-depth discussion of the original Manifesto can be found in Marc & Ben's show: https://youtu.be/HCfwKBwxLYk https://youtu.be/HCfwKBwxLYk

fch42 3y ago

The point could well be made that they're two kinds of optimism about anything. The first is dismissive of individual influence ("no matter what I do, things will get better over time"). The second is self-aware ("I can make a difference when ..."). In technology, the "hope for the best" (_future_ tech will solve ...) is rather common. It scares me a little, because of the implied waiving of individual responsibility. The retrospective look, learning from mistakes, or even investigating how to apply tech to fix bad results or damage from applying tech in the past, would do us well, ethically. It's very comforting, society-wise, if someone admits to, and makes amends over, mistakes they made that hurt others. It's at least better than that person pointing out no amends needed because future-here-tech-there will do fix it anyway.