Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I cannot fathom going out of my way to create chaos, to be cruel, to make lives miserable for millions of people, and worst of all, call it "progress". I just don't understand how these people think. Maybe I am just too poor, too dumb...
I would buy a small house near forrest & mountains.
A lot of it stems from EA (effective altruism) - paraphrased very roughly, it could argue that you are being immoral or selfish by not using the million dollars to invest and make a humanity changing discovery (FWIW I don't believe this, I'm explaining how they view things).
If they harm a billion people, but it benefits trillions in some theoretical glorious future, then it's the right thing to do. Of course it's all bullshit and they bake in a ton of assumptions at the core of their arguments that make the math of greed 'feel' okay, or at least palatable.
By the same logic, if harming one billionaire benefits million normal people, will they be okay with it? None of this makes any sense. Who gave them the right to decide all of this anyway?
It's the job of the rest of us to restructure the system to prevent this kind of pathological runaway power accumulation. It means new laws, but also a more enlightened culture.
This is the multi-polar (or Moloch) problem, where (ruthless) individual rationality leads to collective ruin.
Unless the system makes it unprofitable, ruthlessness will always out-perform good behavior. Players who make suboptimal (ethical) decisions will lose over time. Corruption will outperform unless the cost of that corruption outweighs the benefit of it. The root cause isn't a moral failing of the players.
If incentives are aligned so that the winnginest behavior is also the most desirable, it doesn't matter if there are defective or unscrupulous players. We can harness selfish ambition for the collective good.
E.g. CEO compensation and behavior differences between Japan/USA, Potlatch (wealth redistribution) festivals among the Pacific Northwest indigenous.
So peacefully sitting on millions and not billions may be winning strategy even from sociopath's point of view. Those people who wants billions likely have some other mental differences (getting adrenaline rush from power they can't get from other activities, etc)
What's left are the folks for whom power and influence is a game. If they were to fuck off to the sunset and live a quiet life which harms nobody, they'd be abandoning the game. And it's become such a part of their identity that they can't live without that anymore.
Ironically, these folks are the best argument for replacing human decision making with machines. Cold, logical, emotionless machines that don't have identities or a need to win the game. Then all the folks whose sole purpose in life is controlling others would either need to find another purpose or off themself.
So the best way forward is to succumb to the tech oligarchs' plan?
I strongly disagree. Machines aren't neutral nor fair. They exist to impose the will of the people operating them. Have you already forgotten what social media algorithms, that "cold, logical, emotionless machines" that you speak so highly of, did to our society?
is exactly how people described those who did the dirty work in the concentration camps
And if the so-called democracy —where it truly exists— is a heuristic method for distributing power across such a broad base that the level of corruption per capita remains below a critical threshold, a point at which moral and cultural antibodies can still function?
Who knows.
But it's also different this time because these maniacs come with the power of perverse amounts of money and control over actual technology.
We let them become that big and powerful and I have an inkling we might come to regret it.
Imagine if that been mass culture! Imagine Doubleclick never getting off the ground, so it would have been unable to kill Google and walk around wearing its skin as a costume. Imagine if when all of the tech companies wanted profitability, they had to ask for subscription fees in exchange for providing actual value, rather than merely optimizing for "engagement" (aka time wasted).
Without thinking too long or too hard I can most definitively think of some dominant individuals that should be replaced. As in, ASAP.
better way is regulated capitalism. Its just citizens don't stand ground when capitalists compromise regulation, and our regulated capitalism becomes not regulated.
We can't even keep laws on the books that were passed as a result of the Great Depression or Great Recession. All normal people agreed that we should not repeat those catastrophes, and yet the rules were repealed because they inconvenienced the rich people who wanted to make more money, and what they say goes.
We need a system without coercive hierarchy, and without a system of haves with power and have-nots without it.
If citizens stand ground I think we can. I consider Scandinavian socialist capitalism as success. If citizens don't care then capitalists do regulatory capture as you described.
Some kind of eudaimonia metric with the whole cohort of people happy, healthy and thriving reducing the variance.
We can’t even solve 1 year problems as a nation, so the probability of global human community aligning to stall our breakneck self destruction via AGW or war is zero.
Humans have only dominated the planet for 250,000 years, who says we’re supposed to continue that?
Dinosaurs dominated for millions and they are gone there’s no universal mandate that humans are the final form of intelligence and no reason to believe we are.
Last I checked we’re all extinct within 1Billion years and humans can’t survive mass migration off of earth because there’s nowhere to go.
This is the only option
As someone brighter than me put it, let's colonize Antarctica first. We're nowhere near being able to survive there, now, without regular support ships. Even with those, it would be considered a miserable existence by the vast majority of people. Tell me, where in the world would you go?
…And even if you did all you did was move human problems to some other place we weren’t built for
Sounds like you’re suggesting colonizing space with biological humans and I’m not sure why that would be preferable
Is that the goal? Immortal humans? Seems less plausible in every possible dimension (and undesirable imo) than making superhuman machines
You’ve also not solved anything like food/water etc…there’s an entropy problem that isn’t solvable.
The universe is hostile to a stable species and we’re not even stable genetically what exactly is the future people are thinking is possible?
It is literally not.
You are free to delete yourself. Don't impose it on others.
Computers getting more powerful in a Moore's law like way has been going on for decades and if human brains are something like computers of somewhat constant abilities it's inevitable the computers would overtake at some point. It's not really sci fi or an oligarch plan or especially new - I wrote about it for my uni entrance exam 45 years ago and the ideas go back at least to Turing.
Most of the stuff mentioned will inevitably happen, oligarchs or not and we should plan to make the best of it. Some of the things - merge, immortality and super intelligence could be quite cool. I imagine it'll be voluntary and some people will live traditionally, some will embrace the tech.
> I imagine it'll be voluntary
But sure my sweet summer child, just come in and take a seat...