The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

[formthirteen]

I thought I'd share something that is relevant today, more than maybe ever before, because of AI, social media, and other new technologies (CRISPR, etc):

 

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

 

Quote

Our species is 300,000 years old. For the first 290,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting in a way that’s still observable among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo Sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow. A person born in Sumer in 4,000BC would find the resources, work, and technology available in England at the time of the Norman Conquest or in the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus quite familiar. Then, beginning in the 18th Century, many people’s standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why? Marian Tupy

 

For example: AI, other than being a way of tricking gullible investors, will reshape the world. The optimist's take on AI is that it will create jobs, the pessimist's take is that it will destroy jobs. Both sides are probably right to some degree. In any case, I think it's a good idea to think about techno-optimism once in a while. History has not been on the side of techno-pessimists, luddites, for example. However, progress can be stalled for centuries, for example, Heliocentrism and nuclear energy, for good and bad reasons.

 

Quote

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

 

[formthirteen]

A quote from the article:

 

Quote

Centralized planning is doomed to fail, the system of production and consumption is too complex.

 

You could argue that one place where centralized planning did not fail was the Manhattan Project. This is an example where centralized planning does not fail, because until recently no company had the resources to initiate a project like that and attract the talent. Today, for example, OpenAI, Tesla, Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, have the resources to repeat it in AI. I doubt the EU and the US have the resources and will to do it, but the CCP might have.

Edited January 8 by formthirteen

[james22]

 

Edited January 8 by james22
Swapped clip for full version.

[james22]

7 hours ago, formthirteen said:

You could argue that one place where centralized planning did not fail was the Manhattan Project.

 

That's a better example of "necessity being the mother of invention," I think.

[formthirteen]

Here's an article with pretty much the opposite arguments:

https://citationneeded.news/effective-obfuscation/

 

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Silicon Valley's "effective altruism" and "effective accelerationism" only give a thin philosophical veneer to the industry's same old impulses.

 

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Despite the futuristic language of his manifesto, its message is clear: Andreessen wants to go back. Back to a time when technology founders were uncritically revered, and when obstacles between him and staggering profits were nearly nonexistent. When people weren't so mean to billionaires, but instead admired them for "undertaking the Hero's Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community."^c

 

The same is true of the broader effective accelerationism philosophy, which speaks with sneering derision of those who would slow development (and thus profits) or advocate for caution. In a world that is waking up to the externalities of unbridled growth in terms of climate change, and of technology's "build now and work the kinks out later" philosophy in terms of things like online radicalization, negative impacts of social media, and the degree of surveillance creeping into everyday life, effective accelerationists too are yearning for the past.

 

I think she's trying to say that profits should be shared and that there shouldn't be unlimited growth or progress.

[james22]

2 hours ago, formthirteen said:

I think she's trying to say that profits should be shared and that there shouldn't be unlimited growth or progress.

 

She holds left-wing views that skew towards socialism.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_White_(writer)

[ValueArb]

On 1/8/2024 at 2:00 AM, formthirteen said:

I thought I'd share something that is relevant today, more than maybe ever before, because of AI, social media, and other new technologies (CRISPR, etc):

 

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

 

 

For example: AI, other than being a way of tricking gullible investors, will reshape the world. The optimist's take on AI is that it will create jobs, the pessimist's take is that it will destroy jobs. Both sides are probably right to some degree. In any case, I think it's a good idea to think about techno-optimism once in a while. History has not been on the side of techno-pessimists, luddites, for example. However, progress can be stalled for centuries, for example, Heliocentrism and nuclear energy, for good and bad reasons.

 

 

the optimistic take should be that it destroys jobs. Every step of human progress has always involved eliminating or reducing labor required to make (or grow) things. 

[james22]

Time for techno-optimism: My long read Q&A with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen

 

https://fasterplease.substack.com/p/time-for-techno-optimism-my-long

[james22]

 

[Spekulatius]

54 minutes ago, james22 said:

 

Everything will happen eventually, the question is the timeline. I think the Mars colony is the biggest nonsense and won’t happen in my lifetime. We would be better off building a city on the South Pole, since it had better weather (warmer), access to water , plenty of resources in the ground and you actually can bail if things go wrong.

 

The first thing that will explore Mars are autonomous robots. Much cheaper, can be adapted to the environment, don’t need expensive life support systems ) and if things go wrong, nobody dies. We will get a human there to plant a flag, but that’s about it.

[james22]

1 hour ago, Spekulatius said:

Everything will happen eventually, the question is the timeline.

 

Sure.

 

But we underestimate accelerating change.

[nsx5200]

Our best bet, currently, for surviving humanity-level annihilation, or long-distance space travel is to reach the goal of in-vitro conception-to-birth, and encode our humanity in AI-like technologies that will imprint/teach those humanity back to those future generations after birth.  The second part will have a side benefit of cheaper education, which would greatly benefit humanity in the near future.  IMHO, any other solutions involving traversing the vast emptiness of space is just noise.

[DooDiligence]

I'm optimistic about techno.