Silicon or Carbon? | Hacker News Reader

Silicon or Carbon?

thepointmag.com

42 pointsjger1515 comments

An oddly parochial article, and arguably a misinterpretation of what Balaji was going for in the first place. Some of the points he tried to make are:

- The American system of government is ill-suited to the strange times that lie ahead of us, and is becoming an increasingly poor role-model in general.

- Smart people are increasingly checked-out where matters of governance and power are concerned, moving frequently to other nations where they can live in somewhat greater comfort, despite having no involvement in political processes, just as he himself moved to Singapore.

- Manufacturing will happen wherever it makes sense for it to happen. This is increasingly, and to some extent irreversibly, outside the US. ("China is just better at deployment in the physical world than the US government or military.)

- Ultimately, it's not _about_ America. America is the past. What the future looks like is, to some extent, in our hands.

To turn all of that around and say, "hey, the Atoms tribe are trying to re-shore the USA and make it stronger, and here's how they can work together with Balaji's conception of the Digital tribe to make the USA stronger and reinforce the American Dream!" This seems like it badly misses the point, and is rather backwards-looking.

When you say "he", do you mean Balaji?

This author is female, if that's who you meant.

Yeah, Balaji. Those are points that Boss Balaji made in his book, "The Networked State." The author of the article tries to make it all about the USA, but Balaji's book is, rather explicitly, about a post-US future -- about innovation in self-directed governance from the ground up, in a way that is more or less neutral where existing nation states are concerned. (Which is to say that what it has to say doesn't apply to the USA any more than it might apply to Switzerland, Egypt, or Indonesia.)

Thanks for clarifying - I wasn't quite clear if you were reiterating what the article author was trying to communicate, or what the previous source material was! But I'm not quite awake, either.

> Smart people are increasingly checked-out where matters of governance and power are concerned, moving frequently to other nations where they can live in somewhat greater comfort, despite having no involvement in political processes, just as he himself moved to Singapore.

It's a point I have often seen made by people who chose to move to Singapore but I have always seen it as a kind of distortion they setup to justify to themselves choosing money above liberal values. Few want to face the fact that they are mercenaries. Plus, these people tend to gravitate towards the same places and end up amongst each others shielded from the rest of the population.

I don't think it holds true from a general point of view.

This article feels 10 years too late. This might have been a reasonable article before the collapse of cryptocurrency, the invasion of Ukraine, and the geopolitical jockeying with China.

The real world (the Atoms as the articles call it) always has a way of coming in.

Even the most hardcore digital people have a significant percentage that want to have a partner and have kids. Kids are very much Carbon.

I don’t think there is as much of a separation between the Atoms and Bits with regards to people and that most people live in the physical world and see the digital world as just an extension.

Srinivasan whom the article references a lot, looking at his startups, seems like a world class BS’er who has made a lot of money in the Atomic world hyping up the digital world.

The author sounds like they aren’t very well traveled. There are a lot of countries that are much more culturally open to new technology than San Francisco, and San Francisco is unusual in its openness within USA. Viewing SF as still this place of global innovation and openness to new ideas only holds up if it isn’t a truly global comparison and instead is focusing on Europe and North America. Most of the big ideas in both bits and atoms today come from regions within the belt spanning Middle East through South and East Asia. Adoption rates for cryptocurrency, ai, urban smart cities, and more are much higher across these regions than in the 90s tech centers.

The reality is that there are very STILL very few places (none?) that combine the openness (don't have to be third generation), non repression (ok if you are gay), reasonable labor laws (can fire someone that has been underperforming for four months), world class universities (trained workforce) and capital the way Silicon Valley does.

This is fairly correct from my perspective. I think what's very neat about our current location in spacetime is that places and communities now transcend physical location. It's possible to be in a community or collective that has all of these properties while being physically nested in countless communities which do not. At least, for some definition of internet access.

At this point it doesn't feel like there is much going on in Silicon Valley that warrants physical presence, though I recognize it's a controversial topic. At least for me, Silicon Valley has ascended and now lives in the ether. I left long ago but I'm still in Silicon Valley every day.

You forgot climate, which in my opinion is the only real advantage - those things you describe can be found elsewhere even in places that your favorite western newspaper describe as undemocratic. The only places with as pleasant a climate as California are parts of Chile, Portugal, and Morocco- all of which do present trade offs.

You’re also assuming that new technology looks like the technology of the past, big mega corps in a physical location hiring from a local worker pool. The biggest innovators don’t look like this. Most blockchain projects are run by globally distributed non profits, most interesting urban innovation is state sponsored with international contractors.

It’s wishful thinking that humans could somehow shift their essential being to some digital frontier independent of crufty “old world” governments. That’s not how power works. We are still earthly beings bound to place, and thus subject to governmental power backed by physical force. Call me when we can digitize consciousness, until then this is just a daydream.

"... must be willing to revisit how the physical world is governed". Yes, indeed, how is the physical world to be governed? I'm down with the atoms; there's a reality that the 1's and 0's don't quite get. We are where we are, and eventually the intersecting where's end up with where we actually are - home, work, church, group, tribe, country. That's the governance & culture element. Maybe the bits will work that out, but I'd rather go with a messy, fractious, imperfect, but earnest democracy than anything that's been proposed as an alternative.

I question the taste of someone that thinks SF is a great place, honestly. They were supremely lucky many tech companies were born there and have completely squandered the advantage.

this isn't a materials science article, as it turns out.

if you've already read your three free articles, https://archive.is/VcIcJ

thought it was an interesting perspective, though it's a bit naive or maybe idealistic and it glosses over a lot of the negative harms of some technologies (and factors, economic and otherwise, that motivate these kinds of technologies).

Si and C are both elements. Not bits vs atoms.

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