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The tech industry’s God complex is getting out of control

12 points by radmuzom 12y ago

invalidOrTaken 12y ago
I disagree strongly with this article. Yes, sure, there are probably some in our culture that think they can do no wrong. But life has a way of disabusing us of these illusions. But this article isn't attempting to change their minds. Rather, it's attempting to instill paranoia into the minds of non-technical readers. So, I mean, good luck with that. Maybe he'll succeed (probably not, it's one article). But I have a hard time taking this extended sidelong remark seriously.
xiaoma 12y ago
Marc Andreessen pioneered the web browser and contributed greatly to the very platform we're using to have this discussion. After that, he became half of the pre-eminent VC firm that funded so many later developments in web tech. That's why I assign weight to his opinions and tweet sets. Why should I assign weight to the opinions of the author of this rambling piece? >"Marc Andreesen tweets that tech superpowers “upgrade us as creators, builders, inventors, designers, artists: producers.” And it is certainly true that the smartphone — infinitely more accessible and far cheaper than the personal computers of yesterday — democratizes access to the information age. But what he fails to mention is that, when everyone has superpowers, that’s the same as nobody having superpowers, and the same social inequities that give some people advantages over others will reassert themselves. The advantages of class, wealth and location don’t vanish." This is a huge logical jump. Everyone having superpowers is not the same as nobody having them. Yes there are some positional goods but there are also many, many others that aren't. Consider the typical person's existence now compared to 50 years ago when most the world lived in poverty. Or compare it to 4000 years ago when lives were shorter, more violent and offered fewer options. Simply put the difference between everyone or no one having superpowers is the difference between a life of abundance and one of scarcity.
Zigurd 12y ago
If you think of the dangers and flaws in technology today as a big bug list full of critical showstopper issues, this article is a bug report that not very clearly describes issues that have repeatedly been closed as "not a bug" or "will not fix."
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
The article splits into two streams on the "God Complex" subject and fails to address them separately, which would be the proper treatment. There's the god complex of thinking that your latest social-mobile-local disrupt-a-service-industry start-up is world-changingly important and entitles you to be a douchebag to everyone else around you. Yeah, that's just hubris; I say "just" hubris because if you go around thinking like that, the business cycle can and will punish you for your overly inflated view of yourself. It is a temporary inconvenience but an eventually self-correcting problem. The rest of us just have to keep our money in index funds long enough to remain solvent until the markets stop being irrational. (Mind, so far the markets have actually behaved rationally, as technological innovation is cheaper when capital is cheaper, and when there's no place else for capital to go for high returns, it floods into low-impact consumer technology for socially suboptimal but economically rational reasons. Anyway!) And then there's the god complex in which we are actually playing God. You know: genetic engineering, pervasive surveillance, greenhouse-gas emissions, automation destroying jobs, anything and everything to which the adjective "transhuman" can be attached, all that stuff. In an economically "ironic" way, most of these require both massively more capital investment to work than VCs are prepared to part with at once, but all stand to have utterly massive historical impacts. Also, these are real technologies, not consumerist gimmicks: the markets will not automatically punish us for spreading Roundup Ready genes across a continent's worth of crops or building a human-unfriendly artificial general intelligence. We will merely suffer the natural consequences of our own actions. So in the first category, we in the tech industry are hubristic and irresponsible if we believe ourselves godlike, while in the second category we are hubristic and irresponsible if we believe ourselves mere mortals. We ought to remember that Oppenheimer, too, was a mere mortal.

12 points by radmuzom 12y ago

I disagree strongly with this article. Yes, sure, there are probably some in our culture that think they can do no wrong. But life has a way of disabusing us of these illusions. But this article isn't attempting to change their minds. Rather, it's attempting to instill paranoia into the minds of non-technical readers. So, I mean, good luck with that. Maybe he'll succeed (probably not, it's one article). But I have a hard time taking this extended sidelong remark seriously.

xiaoma 12y ago

Marc Andreessen pioneered the web browser and contributed greatly to the very platform we're using to have this discussion. After that, he became half of the pre-eminent VC firm that funded so many later developments in web tech. That's why I assign weight to his opinions and tweet sets. Why should I assign weight to the opinions of the author of this rambling piece? >"Marc Andreesen tweets that tech superpowers “upgrade us as creators, builders, inventors, designers, artists: producers.” And it is certainly true that the smartphone — infinitely more accessible and far cheaper than the personal computers of yesterday — democratizes access to the information age. But what he fails to mention is that, when everyone has superpowers, that’s the same as nobody having superpowers, and the same social inequities that give some people advantages over others will reassert themselves. The advantages of class, wealth and location don’t vanish." This is a huge logical jump. Everyone having superpowers is not the same as nobody having them. Yes there are some positional goods but there are also many, many others that aren't. Consider the typical person's existence now compared to 50 years ago when most the world lived in poverty. Or compare it to 4000 years ago when lives were shorter, more violent and offered fewer options. Simply put the difference between everyone or no one having superpowers is the difference between a life of abundance and one of scarcity.

Zigurd 12y ago

If you think of the dangers and flaws in technology today as a big bug list full of critical showstopper issues, this article is a bug report that not very clearly describes issues that have repeatedly been closed as "not a bug" or "will not fix."

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

The article splits into two streams on the "God Complex" subject and fails to address them separately, which would be the proper treatment. There's the god complex of thinking that your latest social-mobile-local disrupt-a-service-industry start-up is world-changingly important and entitles you to be a douchebag to everyone else around you. Yeah, that's just hubris; I say "just" hubris because if you go around thinking like that, the business cycle can and will punish you for your overly inflated view of yourself. It is a temporary inconvenience but an eventually self-correcting problem. The rest of us just have to keep our money in index funds long enough to remain solvent until the markets stop being irrational. (Mind, so far the markets have actually behaved rationally, as technological innovation is cheaper when capital is cheaper, and when there's no place else for capital to go for high returns, it floods into low-impact consumer technology for socially suboptimal but economically rational reasons. Anyway!) And then there's the god complex in which we are actually playing God. You know: genetic engineering, pervasive surveillance, greenhouse-gas emissions, automation destroying jobs, anything and everything to which the adjective "transhuman" can be attached, all that stuff. In an economically "ironic" way, most of these require both massively more capital investment to work than VCs are prepared to part with at once, but all stand to have utterly massive historical impacts. Also, these are real technologies, not consumerist gimmicks: the markets will not automatically punish us for spreading Roundup Ready genes across a continent's worth of crops or building a human-unfriendly artificial general intelligence. We will merely suffer the natural consequences of our own actions. So in the first category, we in the tech industry are hubristic and irresponsible if we believe ourselves godlike, while in the second category we are hubristic and irresponsible if we believe ourselves mere mortals. We ought to remember that Oppenheimer, too, was a mere mortal.