This skims right past one of the most morally difficult pieces of Techno-Optimism as a philosophy. It presumes that "greatest good for the greatest number" is unquestionably desirable, without...
Exemplary
This skims right past one of the most morally difficult pieces of Techno-Optimism as a philosophy. It presumes that "greatest good for the greatest number" is unquestionably desirable, without weighing who gets harmed, how much consent they can give, and what basic human (or species, or ecosystem, or planetary) rights must not be abrogated.
It doesn't matter if most people have greater optionality and more choices, when some people (or species, or systems) are irreparably deprived of choices, injured or killed. Marc Andreeson made it very clear in his Manifesto that he cares nothing for those who oppose the choices he has the ability to make - they're all "enemies". Noah Smith is a little more flexible on this point - the nebulous, faceless "Society" will decide how options are allocated and what controls are applied, leaving aside any contemplation of how power biases social decision-making or what fundamental entitlements should be.
At root, most technologies produce undesirable entropic byproducts. The fruits of the technium are unevenly distributed. Who bears the burden of dealing with the waste, and who benefits, are social choices. And throughout history, we've always seen some group of people arrogate the best choices to themselves, and distribute as little as possible for purposes of maintaining stability, while designating some choiceless outgroup to bear as much of the burden as possible. Even the most overtly "equitable" societies of the modern era chose to punish immigrants, guest workers, the aged/disabled, other countries to which they can export their dirty, hard labor and wastes.
I am a techno-optimist, in the sense of believing that we can always discover and engineer ways to do better than we are now. [I'm still holding out for sustainable, equitable, fully automated luxury communism.] But until we have serious discussions of "better for whom, and does everyone get a choice?", I'm tired of seeing this optimism hijacked for a truly abhorrent political agenda.
What frustrates me is that I keep seeing comments here on Tildes that are like "of course we should be optimistic about technology, it can do so much stuff for us!" without remotely engaging with...
What frustrates me is that I keep seeing comments here on Tildes that are like "of course we should be optimistic about technology, it can do so much stuff for us!" without remotely engaging with the main point at issue here. These so-called "techno-optimists" here are explicitly pushing for less regulation and ethics/risk assessment. Andreeson explicitly says this in his manifesto.
It's not "people who optimistic about technology vs people who are pessimistic about technology", it's rather "ancaps who think the tech industry should be totally unfettered from regulation by anything but the free market vs anyone who thinks we should assess risks and consider ethics in our development and deployment of technology."
That's one interpretation, but another view is that many Western countries have tied themselves down with inefficient regulations that are actively preventing progress. A common example is housing...
That's one interpretation, but another view is that many Western countries have tied themselves down with inefficient regulations that are actively preventing progress. A common example is housing regulations that make it impossible to build the housing that people need.
In the US, one of the most prominent leftists in government called for reassessing sunscreen regulations because the US doesn't have any good UVA blocking sunscreens! The EU and most of Asia have looser regulations that encourage companies to produce better sunscreens. Efficient regulations benefit everyone; there's a happy middle ground here.
I think there is indeed a happy middle ground, but I don't think for most of the tech insustry we're closer to too much regulation than we are to too little.
I think there is indeed a happy middle ground, but I don't think for most of the tech insustry we're closer to too much regulation than we are to too little.
And I daresay I'd rather have too much regulation than not enough. No regulation is how you get buildings that are collapse and fire hazards. Rat feces in your food. Industrial waste in your...
And I daresay I'd rather have too much regulation than not enough.
No regulation is how you get buildings that are collapse and fire hazards. Rat feces in your food. Industrial waste in your drinking water. Global survielance networks in your bedroom.
Bad and excessive regulation can result in these things as well. What's the Marxist refrain? Private property is a legal fiction? Is that not regulation? We waste time and work against our own...
Bad and excessive regulation can result in these things as well. What's the Marxist refrain? Private property is a legal fiction? Is that not regulation? We waste time and work against our own goals when we speak in such black and white terms.
But if we forbid rat feces in food, what happens to the poor people who can only afford to eat rat feces, huh? You've prevented some future scientist from inventing a cure for rat feces-induced...
But if we forbid rat feces in food, what happens to the poor people who can only afford to eat rat feces, huh? You've prevented some future scientist from inventing a cure for rat feces-induced illness. It's over-regulation like this that prevents capitalism from reaching its full potential.
Did you get that from the manifesto or from somewhere else? Because personally I did not get it in the manifesto. I see it as warning against overregulation, because even if current reality is not...
It's not "people who optimistic about technology vs people who are pessimistic about technology", it's rather "ancaps who think the tech industry should be totally unfettered from regulation by anything but the free market
Did you get that from the manifesto or from somewhere else? Because personally I did not get it in the manifesto. I see it as warning against overregulation, because even if current reality is not ideal, regulation over certain amount tends to make things worse in general.
I'm theoretically a fan of regulation (I live in the EU and agree with most of its existing regulation, though I'm strongly against some of it), but in reality my experience has been that anything that involves human behavior is so complex that the side effects of any even miniscule regulation are impossible to predict, some are always negative, and attempts at solving the problems generally involve more regulation with more negative side effects. Also often times the people responsible for writing and analysing laws simply do not care enough or are too ideologically motivated to care.
The downside of overregulated markets is usually that your economy stops being competitive in the global market and citizen's lives get worse as a result. A lot of regulation also disproportionately affects poor people, currently we can see that with ecological regulations for example.
This does not mean that anarcho-capitalism or even some milder form of libertarianism is the answer, but in my experience the best outcomes in reality are achieved when people think about what is the smallest amount of regulation that is truly necessary, and implement that. The manifesto seems relatively in tune with that.
The section titled "The Enemy" includes this paragraph: Now I understand that it's possible for too much or poorly targeted regulation to impede progress. I'm a trans person in the EU, so there...
Did you get that from the manifesto or from somewhere else? Because personally I did not get it in the manifesto.
The section titled "The Enemy" includes this paragraph:
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
Now I understand that it's possible for too much or poorly targeted regulation to impede progress. I'm a trans person in the EU, so there are certainly things I can name off the top of my head that are over-regulated. But within the tech industry, around which Andreeson's manifesto and his experience principally centers, I don't think we've realistically been closer to too much regulation than we have to too little, and complaining that too much regulation is our current problem... is not reflective of the state of the insustry to anyone who isn't absolutely against even minimal regulation.
I don't think this is true. I don't agree with the author that all of those things listed are bad, but some of them are imo just completely dysfunctional ideas leading to worse outcomes for...
complaining that too much regulation is our current problem... is not reflective of the state of the insustry to anyone who isn't absolutely against even minimal regulation.
I don't think this is true. I don't agree with the author that all of those things listed are bad, but some of them are imo just completely dysfunctional ideas leading to worse outcomes for everyone (de-growth) and many things done in the name of "sustainability", even if the idea itself makes sense, are exactly the thing that hurts western competitiveness, makes poor people poorer and has little value on the environment. This is how I interpret the manifesto - I don't think their idea is "fuck the environment and ethics" but "the outcomes of trying to regulating tech usually lead to even worse outcomes than not regulating it".
For example, the issue with regulating car emissions is that developing a high quality motor that lasts takes a really long time. Unfortunately EU is either unable to fully comprehend this and its effects, or simply wasn't able to plan ahead enough to give the manufacturers a clear and realistic long-term plan that doesn't change every two years. This has multiple negative effects. One is that motors in todays cars break sooner and are more expensive to maintain. Another is that to offset added costs of car components and development, car manufacturers make more big cars like compact SUVs, because they're more expensive overall, so it's easier to dilute the added costs, and carbon credits do not help this. It applies to EVs as well, though for a different reason - the huge cost of a battery is more easily offset in a car that's big and expensive.
Apart from the fact that buying new cars more frequently is not great for the environment on its own, a middle class western european can easily handle this, but it disproportionately affects poor people who live outside of cities. And unfortunately there are many places and jobs where it's almost impossible to live semi-normally without a car. I am one of those people, I own an ultra cheap small car from 2008 that uses a motor developed afaik in the late 80s, it easily passes emission tests, is very cheap to maintain (simple, reliable, cheap parts) and will likely last another decade if I want it to. No new car like that with this potential and cost exists on our market anymore.
edit: One of my biases on this is that I know multiple people who have worked in fields related to a mix of geography and economics for 30+ years, most often regional development and supporting innovation and small businesses, and at least two of them served as consultants essentially doing reviews of proposed laws (for the state, not for individual political parties or lobbyists). And their views on regulation based on their decades of professionally watching the process and sometimes participating in their creation, is basically what I describe above, despite the fact that they're not libertarians in their political opinions in general or by who they vote for.
I do not think this is a sensible reading of the actual text of the manifesto, but even if it were, I don't think it's an accurate reflection of the current state of tech regulation -- certainly...
I don't think their idea is "fuck the environment and ethics" but "the outcomes of trying to regulating tech usually lead to even worse outcomes than not regulating it".
I do not think this is a sensible reading of the actual text of the manifesto, but even if it were, I don't think it's an accurate reflection of the current state of tech regulation -- certainly not within my field, AI, in which there is virtually no regulation in effect and the big players don't even try to follow potentially applicable law. Tech companies have been incredibly under-regulated for a while now, operating under a "move fast and break things" mentality that has indeed resulted in some progress but has absolutely also resulted in important things being broken by people and companies who just don't care about the consequences. Look at the history (and honestly also the present behavior) of one big player, say Facebook, and it seems absurd to write a manifesto decrying over-regulation in this space.
As for the specific policies you describe, I don't think they make a good argument for wholesale deregulation but rather arguments that the specific regulations in those spaces were poorly targeted or implemented. Arguing against wholesale deregulation of tech doesn't mean I'm automatically lauding every single existing regulation as being effective.
See, I cannot decide whether this is a bad thing or not. Because from what I've seen in public debate, what seems to be happening is that lawmakers have zero idea about how AI works or how to...
certainly not within my field, AI, in which there is virtually no regulation in effect
See, I cannot decide whether this is a bad thing or not. Because from what I've seen in public debate, what seems to be happening is that lawmakers have zero idea about how AI works or how to effectively regulate it without causing bad side effects, including gutting the industry and letting China gradually outcompete us because of their absence/disregard of regulations. Lobbyists pushing for regulation don't seem to be much better and their motives often are not safety but lobbying for copyright holders.
I think that regulation is inevitable at some point, but I also think it's very plausible that at this point simply observing instead of regulating straight away might be the more sane option.
All in all, I'm also not pushing for deregulation of everything, what I'm arguing is that the author's view is more sane than you make it look based on how rarely I see actually good and efficient regulation without a lot of bad side effects.
I agree. But I live in a post-communist country in the EU, where what happens more often is that big corporations outcompete small companies because they have more financial reserves to keep up...
I agree. But I live in a post-communist country in the EU, where what happens more often is that big corporations outcompete small companies because they have more financial reserves to keep up with nonsensical but expensive regulation.
A similar argument is made in the automobile industry. People think of automobiles as an “old” technology but regulations for safety, air emissions, etc, are tough and continuously increasing...
A similar argument is made in the automobile industry. People think of automobiles as an “old” technology but regulations for safety, air emissions, etc, are tough and continuously increasing making it hard for newcomers to enter. (E.g. one of the most prolific, if not popular, airliners is based on a 1967 design and it competes with a 1982 design…. You just couldn’t sell a 1992 car design.)
Chinese cars, in particular, have been kept out of western markets because they struggled to make compliant ICE engines. In the EV age it is a lot easier for them to get in. (The really great, if happily jingoistic, movie Wolf Warrior 2 has a scene where the hero rolls a Chinese car and emerges unhurt because of the modern seatbelt…. You’d better believe they are proud of advances in this area.)
At least in the case of Noah Smith, he fits pretty squarely in the mold of a social Democrat. Public investment spurs innovation, markets efficiently allocate capital, the government taxes and...
At least in the case of Noah Smith, he fits pretty squarely in the mold of a social Democrat. Public investment spurs innovation, markets efficiently allocate capital, the government taxes and redistributes wealth to the masses. It's not unreasonable to dream of improving our living standards through technological progress and democratic guidance.
At root, most technologies produce undesirable entropic byproducts.
This feels like a statement rooted in a stereotypical idea of industrial factories spewing pollution. What's the downside to mRNA vaccines, sodium ion batteries, or solar panels being cheaper than coal? There are some absolutely incredible carbon capture technologies being worked on right now which could shift the entire climate change narrative! I think many techno optimists are more benevolent than you give them credit for.
You might want to spend a while looking at the supply chain inputs to each of the miraculous products you've mentioned. As a "for instance", a typical chemical reagent used in mRNA synthesis,...
You might want to spend a while looking at the supply chain inputs to each of the miraculous products you've mentioned. As a "for instance", a typical chemical reagent used in mRNA synthesis, N-methylimidazole, is the product of several synthesis steps each of which has ~60 - 80% efficiency, and some nasty waste byproducts.
Solar panel manufacturing uses very unpleasant raw materials, often obtained through environmentally destructive processes. Panels comprise difficult to recycle mixed waste at the end of the typical 20 - 25 year functional life.
I say this not to denigrate the game-changing quality of the technologies you've mentioned. But the hype surrounding each one elides a tremendous amount of complexity. We do a disservice to everyone, scientists, technologists, and society as a whole, when we handwave away the costs and focus only on the benefits. [It doesn't help that much of the manufacturing burden has shifted to developing nations or deprived communities, and the negative externalities aren't in plain sight to the commenters here.]
Paying attention to reality right out of the gate helps avoid the violent pendulum cycles of technophilia/technophobia that are so distracting and destabilizing at the political level.
Part of genuine techno-optimism is the willingness to say, "we're capable of dealing with all the consequences, good and bad, and making informed, rational choices about improvements that take into account everyone's well-being."
This is exactly right. Every technology does not have some civilization shaking negative tradeoff, most are in the realm of pure public good. I feel like ultimately the technology part of the...
This is exactly right. Every technology does not have some civilization shaking negative tradeoff, most are in the realm of pure public good.
I feel like ultimately the technology part of the discussion is irrelevant to what most people are actually talking about. The question is ultimately do you believe society is in general pretty good or mostly bad. That core belief then propagates to how you imagine improved technology will be used.
In my mind improved technology makes society choosing to be better for everyone a far easier job. When there’s more than enough to go around we don’t have to play zero sum games where someone has to lose in order for you to win. But improved technology only makes that possible, not inevitable.
Here's my simple counterpoint to techno-optimism: That vertical wall of technological advancement? Almost all fossil fuels. One way or another, eventually we need to stop relying on burning...
Here's my simple counterpoint to techno-optimism:
That vertical wall of technological advancement? Almost all fossil fuels. One way or another, eventually we need to stop relying on burning concentrated dinosaur carcass.
And when that happens? Progress will slow. Not even accounting for low-hanging fruit being picked (like say efficiency improvements), but just because generating the needed energy is harder. And our efficiency gains rarely translate to lower usage in the long term.
LED TVs are more efficient than CRT TVs. And maybe if we kept LED TVs capped at the size of CRTs we would have seen progress. A 32 in CRT TV took about 130W...and that was on the large end in their heyday. Circa 2009 <30% of TVs were larger than 40 inches. Nowadays 90% of them are larger. A 40 in LED TV uses about 100W, and a 50 in one easily uses 150W.
Not a whole lot of overall improvement to the power profile in 30 years. But hey they're bigger and lighter now so who cares right?
Yes, but that is also much harder to deploy on a mass scale. The resources are harder to find, and require more complexity to keep growing. I didn't touch on this directly, but I also don't think...
Exemplary
Yes, but that is also much harder to deploy on a mass scale. The resources are harder to find, and require more complexity to keep growing.
I didn't touch on this directly, but I also don't think human capacity for intelligence is unlimited. We're riding the back of fossil fuels and presuming we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. Not to say nuclear power can't fill that void, but it's much harder to keep going.
We see even today that losing what we have created is trivially easy, and much knowledge is being lost to the sands of time despite it being easier than ever to preserve it.
The exponential rise of mental health problems are a tell that this current path of techno-industrial progress is not sustainable. Many of us already depend on taking pills to keep ourselves stable enough to not kill ourselves.
It takes time to learn things. Our techniques of teaching might get better, but unless we're gonna start requiring doctorates for everything going forward, we're eventually going to hit walls. I suppose we could start dosing the water with Adderal if technogical progress starts stagnating.
And the perpetual added stress of needing to learn evermore isn't going to ease those stress problems.
I think the future of innovation will be with 'less is more'. Rediscovering how to do things as simply as possible to reduce mental load.
I don't think this means that our techno-industrial progress as a whole is not sustainable. It could easily just mean that we're doing some things wrong, but not that the right way to do them is...
The exponential rise of mental health problems are a tell that this current path of techno-industrial progress is not sustainable. Many of us already depend on taking pills to keep ourselves stable enough to not kill ourselves.
I don't think this means that our techno-industrial progress as a whole is not sustainable. It could easily just mean that we're doing some things wrong, but not that the right way to do them is necessarily slowing down. I think that this is quite likely at least to some degree because we have not yet been able to fully adjust to a few technologies like social media, but at the same time we don't really need to adjust to many other new technologies like mRNA vaccines or electric cars that rather significantly change our lives.
I also have an issue with your judgment of mental health. It is again obvious that some technologies like social media specifically have an effect and it seems that the effect is negative on average, and we will likely need to change how we deal with the average parson having to do much more knowledge work than ever before. But the way you describe it seems like many people in society are on the verge of suicide, which would surely increase the suicide rates, but numbers do not seem to support it. Suicide rates are going up in the US, but in many other developed countries in Europe they're stagnant on an acceptable level or going down.
I think that specifically having to do so many more decisions in your life than 50 years ago and specifically social media are definitely having an effect on mental health. But it doesn't seem nearly as bad as you describe and I think that at this moment it's quite difficult to say what part of statistics showing growing rates of mental health problems are that and what part is simply more success in diagnosing them. Both seem to be obviously happening.
It takes time to learn things. Our teqniques of teaching might get better, but unless we're gonna start requiring doctorates for everything going forward, we're eventually going to hit walls.
I'm quite sure that AI is going to help a lot with this. Even ChatGPT, which in the grand scheme of things is a super early application: it's being slammed for not being an infallible answering machine, but it works really well as a knowledge processor, it's pretty reliable when making summaries of articles or explaining them. And it's likely to get better in the future. I agree that there seems to be an obvious limit to how much we can individually learn and understand, but I don't believe we're quite there yet.
I don't really see your point about why fossil fuels are a "vertical wall". Renewable sources are already cheaper to build in many places. In general, I don't see why more usage is bad. The reason...
I don't really see your point about why fossil fuels are a "vertical wall". Renewable sources are already cheaper to build in many places. In general, I don't see why more usage is bad. The reason usage increases is because we want it, because we enjoy better things. Also, I'm not sure your stats are correct. The 65 inch LG C3 uses ~100W, and others of the same size use closer to 50W. Sure, you can find big TVs which use lots of power, but you can't ignore the fact that overall, they still become more efficient over time even while getting bigger and more feature-full (or "smart"). Don't you find it impressive that TV's are ~4x bigger by area but still use ~half the power?
The point about fossil fuels is that we didn't get magically smarter during this period of progress. Our ingenuity was fueled by cheap, available power. It might continue, it might not...but human...
The point about fossil fuels is that we didn't get magically smarter during this period of progress. Our ingenuity was fueled by cheap, available power. It might continue, it might not...but human intelligence and ingenuity has not dramatically shifted in thousands of years.
Power Consumption (Max) 239 W
I know OLEDs have improvement, but ultimately if the content is brighter its still gonna consume a lot of power. Even 100W is still more than a typical TV of 30 years ago. A typical TV was only 22 inches, and typically only consumed 50W.
Sure it's impressive we can do so much more in the same power budget. But what does this functionally actually offer me? I can watch some garbage for 20 hours a week with some extra pixels now. A bit of extra eyecandy that I won't remember 6 months from now. Oh and stuff costs a lot more to produce because the high fidelity makes it easier to spot flaws.
It doesn't matter if we have 4x larger screens if we're consuming the same power we did back then. Energy consumption needs to level off eventually or we'll cook ourselves.
I don't understand why we need to marry a positive or negative to technology. It's not inherently good or evil. Google itself once was founded by starry-eyed optimists. They used to have the...
I don't understand why we need to marry a positive or negative to technology. It's not inherently good or evil. Google itself once was founded by starry-eyed optimists. They used to have the motto, "Don't be evil". Time and corporate interest have twisted it into powerful and ominous corporation.
It's the innovators that create a technology who are usually the optimists. If it can be used for money or war, the optimism will fade with it's use as it becomes a tool for the controlling or suppressing the masses. My cynicism isn't rooted in my view of technology or capitalism, it's a component of human nature. As corporations grow and technology adds more layers between people we objectify each other more and feel more comfortable with callous behavior. This is true for your average keyboard warrior as much as your CTO making decisions that will affect a global tech product.
The intention is sometimes totally removed from the end product, especially in tech.
Of course technology is neutral in and of itself. It's mostly just highly refined rocks. It's merely the end result, and there's a reason "the ends justify the means" is a dangerous mindset....
Of course technology is neutral in and of itself. It's mostly just highly refined rocks.
It's merely the end result, and there's a reason "the ends justify the means" is a dangerous mindset.
Technology that relies on suffering (to keep costs down!) is immoral, because the process of its creation is.
It seems to me that the debate about whether should be generally optimistic or generally pessimistic about the future, in general is way too abstract to be usefully debated. This is not really...
It seems to me that the debate about whether should be generally optimistic or generally pessimistic about the future, in general is way too abstract to be usefully debated.
This is not really about technology or the future, it’s about psychology, whether to be an optimist or a pessimist. People may have optimistic or pessimistic outlooks on life, but it’s not something you reason yourself into, and we don’t need to build consensus on whether everyone should be optimistic or pessimistic, in general.
Pessimistic thinking can be useful for things like disaster planning. A pessimistic vibe about everything that might happen doesn’t do anything useful.
Similarly, having some optimism is useful for trying things that might work, rather than giving up before you begin. An optimistic vibe can go badly when it means not thinking about or suppressing discussion about possible problems.
This suggests we need both optimists and pessimists, and we will make better decisions if we listen to both with curiosity, looking for what we can take away from the discussion that’s useful.
It's difficult to be very invested in discourse that's dominated by tech capitalists opining on things they are well insulated from. It's the plebs who suffer the ravages of their exploits....
It's difficult to be very invested in discourse that's dominated by tech capitalists opining on things they are well insulated from. It's the plebs who suffer the ravages of their exploits.
They're too busy patting each other on the back. They're stubbornly stuck on the mindset that they alone are divine ordained ministers of technology. Their word is gospel of the church of math and science. Non-believers are heathen who dare question math?!? It's not surprising he ended the article pressing you to have faith.
A depressingly large number of people seem to see technology and society as fundamentally in competition.
...
This worldview sees technologists as fundamentally a type of pirate, sailing the high seas in search of plunder while the navy of social responsibility chases them around.
This is your worldview of what you think is the worldview of others. This is the fundamental flaw of so called tech optimists. They assume everyone else are opposed to technology. Few are. Predicating your dialog with such silly notions is an insult to everyone else. But of course IT nerds have traditionally carried themselves with holier than thou attitude.
Just as the manifesto disingenuously equated Luddites to being opposed to technology. They were not. They were a labor movement.
These so called tech optimists want to talk to their straw man who hates technology then I will take no part in being their scarecrow. Everything they derive from their flawed premises is pompous self congratulatory rhetoric. Where every step is met with their utopian technology trump card. They speak of benefits for humanity at some time in the future. Accuse you of being technophobe. That is not discussions. It is a sermon.
I liked the piece. I share some of the authors skepticism of the sort of arcadian type philosophies like degrowth and cottage core and stuff like that. I agree with the idea that technology opens...
I liked the piece. I share some of the authors skepticism of the sort of arcadian type philosophies like degrowth and cottage core and stuff like that. I agree with the idea that technology opens up more possibilities for what people can do, and I think that on an individual level that is a benefit for people in a way that's separate from the larger impact it has on society. I feel that stagnationist political philosophies take that stance from a consideration of society scale impacts and see the potential negative impacts of technology as inextricably leading to a negative impact at an individual level, which I don't think I fully agree with.
I dislike engaging with this as it gives merit to the idea that it can be productively discussed in such frameworks. As others have mentioned, tech is what it is. Not good or bad. Further, looking...
I dislike engaging with this as it gives merit to the idea that it can be productively discussed in such frameworks.
As others have mentioned, tech is what it is. Not good or bad. Further, looking historically, we are in a major technical anomaly thanks to the industrial revolution and following energy/computation boom. There's 0 guarantee that will continue, and it very well could plateau, even without considering the climate and energy issues we're beginning to bump into.
With that in mind, I feel like there's certainly a "cult of tech" that has always been around. ANYTHING techy is good, and it will always solve the issue. This often over-complicates or ignores easier solutions (like, i dunno, hyperloop instead of trains), and people are suddenly willing to ignore safety and regulations (like basically all self driving car technology in use).
On the other hand, you've got doomsayers who are certain that our "eh tech will solve it" mindset is leading us to doom. And while sure, that is 100% a factor, there are serious technologies making progress. I'd say material sciences and energy research are still huge factors. While not nearly as simple/affordable as people think, solar panels ARE generations better than they were in the 90s, and for more paradigm shifting stuff, something like fusion might finally look like it's ACTUALLY 60 years out rather than "probably another 20 this time".
And i'm not even going to go into the good and bad on the medical side of things.
Trying to wrap up all the nuance and complexity of "tech" in some sort of philosophy is, to me, akin to arguing the merits of astrology. It's just so obviously wrong, and a pointless discussion to even have.
This skims right past one of the most morally difficult pieces of Techno-Optimism as a philosophy. It presumes that "greatest good for the greatest number" is unquestionably desirable, without weighing who gets harmed, how much consent they can give, and what basic human (or species, or ecosystem, or planetary) rights must not be abrogated.
It doesn't matter if most people have greater optionality and more choices, when some people (or species, or systems) are irreparably deprived of choices, injured or killed. Marc Andreeson made it very clear in his Manifesto that he cares nothing for those who oppose the choices he has the ability to make - they're all "enemies". Noah Smith is a little more flexible on this point - the nebulous, faceless "Society" will decide how options are allocated and what controls are applied, leaving aside any contemplation of how power biases social decision-making or what fundamental entitlements should be.
At root, most technologies produce undesirable entropic byproducts. The fruits of the technium are unevenly distributed. Who bears the burden of dealing with the waste, and who benefits, are social choices. And throughout history, we've always seen some group of people arrogate the best choices to themselves, and distribute as little as possible for purposes of maintaining stability, while designating some choiceless outgroup to bear as much of the burden as possible. Even the most overtly "equitable" societies of the modern era chose to punish immigrants, guest workers, the aged/disabled, other countries to which they can export their dirty, hard labor and wastes.
I am a techno-optimist, in the sense of believing that we can always discover and engineer ways to do better than we are now. [I'm still holding out for sustainable, equitable, fully automated luxury communism.] But until we have serious discussions of "better for whom, and does everyone get a choice?", I'm tired of seeing this optimism hijacked for a truly abhorrent political agenda.
What frustrates me is that I keep seeing comments here on Tildes that are like "of course we should be optimistic about technology, it can do so much stuff for us!" without remotely engaging with the main point at issue here. These so-called "techno-optimists" here are explicitly pushing for less regulation and ethics/risk assessment. Andreeson explicitly says this in his manifesto.
It's not "people who optimistic about technology vs people who are pessimistic about technology", it's rather "ancaps who think the tech industry should be totally unfettered from regulation by anything but the free market vs anyone who thinks we should assess risks and consider ethics in our development and deployment of technology."
That's one interpretation, but another view is that many Western countries have tied themselves down with inefficient regulations that are actively preventing progress. A common example is housing regulations that make it impossible to build the housing that people need.
In the US, one of the most prominent leftists in government called for reassessing sunscreen regulations because the US doesn't have any good UVA blocking sunscreens! The EU and most of Asia have looser regulations that encourage companies to produce better sunscreens. Efficient regulations benefit everyone; there's a happy middle ground here.
I think there is indeed a happy middle ground, but I don't think for most of the tech insustry we're closer to too much regulation than we are to too little.
And I daresay I'd rather have too much regulation than not enough.
No regulation is how you get buildings that are collapse and fire hazards. Rat feces in your food. Industrial waste in your drinking water. Global survielance networks in your bedroom.
Bad and excessive regulation can result in these things as well. What's the Marxist refrain? Private property is a legal fiction? Is that not regulation? We waste time and work against our own goals when we speak in such black and white terms.
But if we forbid rat feces in food, what happens to the poor people who can only afford to eat rat feces, huh? You've prevented some future scientist from inventing a cure for rat feces-induced illness. It's over-regulation like this that prevents capitalism from reaching its full potential.
Did you get that from the manifesto or from somewhere else? Because personally I did not get it in the manifesto. I see it as warning against overregulation, because even if current reality is not ideal, regulation over certain amount tends to make things worse in general.
I'm theoretically a fan of regulation (I live in the EU and agree with most of its existing regulation, though I'm strongly against some of it), but in reality my experience has been that anything that involves human behavior is so complex that the side effects of any even miniscule regulation are impossible to predict, some are always negative, and attempts at solving the problems generally involve more regulation with more negative side effects. Also often times the people responsible for writing and analysing laws simply do not care enough or are too ideologically motivated to care.
The downside of overregulated markets is usually that your economy stops being competitive in the global market and citizen's lives get worse as a result. A lot of regulation also disproportionately affects poor people, currently we can see that with ecological regulations for example.
This does not mean that anarcho-capitalism or even some milder form of libertarianism is the answer, but in my experience the best outcomes in reality are achieved when people think about what is the smallest amount of regulation that is truly necessary, and implement that. The manifesto seems relatively in tune with that.
The section titled "The Enemy" includes this paragraph:
Now I understand that it's possible for too much or poorly targeted regulation to impede progress. I'm a trans person in the EU, so there are certainly things I can name off the top of my head that are over-regulated. But within the tech industry, around which Andreeson's manifesto and his experience principally centers, I don't think we've realistically been closer to too much regulation than we have to too little, and complaining that too much regulation is our current problem... is not reflective of the state of the insustry to anyone who isn't absolutely against even minimal regulation.
I don't think this is true. I don't agree with the author that all of those things listed are bad, but some of them are imo just completely dysfunctional ideas leading to worse outcomes for everyone (de-growth) and many things done in the name of "sustainability", even if the idea itself makes sense, are exactly the thing that hurts western competitiveness, makes poor people poorer and has little value on the environment. This is how I interpret the manifesto - I don't think their idea is "fuck the environment and ethics" but "the outcomes of trying to regulating tech usually lead to even worse outcomes than not regulating it".
For example, the issue with regulating car emissions is that developing a high quality motor that lasts takes a really long time. Unfortunately EU is either unable to fully comprehend this and its effects, or simply wasn't able to plan ahead enough to give the manufacturers a clear and realistic long-term plan that doesn't change every two years. This has multiple negative effects. One is that motors in todays cars break sooner and are more expensive to maintain. Another is that to offset added costs of car components and development, car manufacturers make more big cars like compact SUVs, because they're more expensive overall, so it's easier to dilute the added costs, and carbon credits do not help this. It applies to EVs as well, though for a different reason - the huge cost of a battery is more easily offset in a car that's big and expensive.
Apart from the fact that buying new cars more frequently is not great for the environment on its own, a middle class western european can easily handle this, but it disproportionately affects poor people who live outside of cities. And unfortunately there are many places and jobs where it's almost impossible to live semi-normally without a car. I am one of those people, I own an ultra cheap small car from 2008 that uses a motor developed afaik in the late 80s, it easily passes emission tests, is very cheap to maintain (simple, reliable, cheap parts) and will likely last another decade if I want it to. No new car like that with this potential and cost exists on our market anymore.
edit: One of my biases on this is that I know multiple people who have worked in fields related to a mix of geography and economics for 30+ years, most often regional development and supporting innovation and small businesses, and at least two of them served as consultants essentially doing reviews of proposed laws (for the state, not for individual political parties or lobbyists). And their views on regulation based on their decades of professionally watching the process and sometimes participating in their creation, is basically what I describe above, despite the fact that they're not libertarians in their political opinions in general or by who they vote for.
I do not think this is a sensible reading of the actual text of the manifesto, but even if it were, I don't think it's an accurate reflection of the current state of tech regulation -- certainly not within my field, AI, in which there is virtually no regulation in effect and the big players don't even try to follow potentially applicable law. Tech companies have been incredibly under-regulated for a while now, operating under a "move fast and break things" mentality that has indeed resulted in some progress but has absolutely also resulted in important things being broken by people and companies who just don't care about the consequences. Look at the history (and honestly also the present behavior) of one big player, say Facebook, and it seems absurd to write a manifesto decrying over-regulation in this space.
As for the specific policies you describe, I don't think they make a good argument for wholesale deregulation but rather arguments that the specific regulations in those spaces were poorly targeted or implemented. Arguing against wholesale deregulation of tech doesn't mean I'm automatically lauding every single existing regulation as being effective.
See, I cannot decide whether this is a bad thing or not. Because from what I've seen in public debate, what seems to be happening is that lawmakers have zero idea about how AI works or how to effectively regulate it without causing bad side effects, including gutting the industry and letting China gradually outcompete us because of their absence/disregard of regulations. Lobbyists pushing for regulation don't seem to be much better and their motives often are not safety but lobbying for copyright holders.
I think that regulation is inevitable at some point, but I also think it's very plausible that at this point simply observing instead of regulating straight away might be the more sane option.
All in all, I'm also not pushing for deregulation of everything, what I'm arguing is that the author's view is more sane than you make it look based on how rarely I see actually good and efficient regulation without a lot of bad side effects.
I think we simply must agree to disagree both on the author's view and on the general tenor of regulation in the tech industry at this point.
Coming from reddit, not being called a dogwhistling cryptofascist or being blocked is a step up, no problem with disagreeing .)).
A downside of under regulation is that your economy stops being competitive at all as mergers take competition off the market.
I agree. But I live in a post-communist country in the EU, where what happens more often is that big corporations outcompete small companies because they have more financial reserves to keep up with nonsensical but expensive regulation.
A similar argument is made in the automobile industry. People think of automobiles as an “old” technology but regulations for safety, air emissions, etc, are tough and continuously increasing making it hard for newcomers to enter. (E.g. one of the most prolific, if not popular, airliners is based on a 1967 design and it competes with a 1982 design…. You just couldn’t sell a 1992 car design.)
Chinese cars, in particular, have been kept out of western markets because they struggled to make compliant ICE engines. In the EV age it is a lot easier for them to get in. (The really great, if happily jingoistic, movie Wolf Warrior 2 has a scene where the hero rolls a Chinese car and emerges unhurt because of the modern seatbelt…. You’d better believe they are proud of advances in this area.)
At least in the case of Noah Smith, he fits pretty squarely in the mold of a social Democrat. Public investment spurs innovation, markets efficiently allocate capital, the government taxes and redistributes wealth to the masses. It's not unreasonable to dream of improving our living standards through technological progress and democratic guidance.
This feels like a statement rooted in a stereotypical idea of industrial factories spewing pollution. What's the downside to mRNA vaccines, sodium ion batteries, or solar panels being cheaper than coal? There are some absolutely incredible carbon capture technologies being worked on right now which could shift the entire climate change narrative! I think many techno optimists are more benevolent than you give them credit for.
You might want to spend a while looking at the supply chain inputs to each of the miraculous products you've mentioned. As a "for instance", a typical chemical reagent used in mRNA synthesis, N-methylimidazole, is the product of several synthesis steps each of which has ~60 - 80% efficiency, and some nasty waste byproducts.
Solar panel manufacturing uses very unpleasant raw materials, often obtained through environmentally destructive processes. Panels comprise difficult to recycle mixed waste at the end of the typical 20 - 25 year functional life.
I say this not to denigrate the game-changing quality of the technologies you've mentioned. But the hype surrounding each one elides a tremendous amount of complexity. We do a disservice to everyone, scientists, technologists, and society as a whole, when we handwave away the costs and focus only on the benefits. [It doesn't help that much of the manufacturing burden has shifted to developing nations or deprived communities, and the negative externalities aren't in plain sight to the commenters here.]
Paying attention to reality right out of the gate helps avoid the violent pendulum cycles of technophilia/technophobia that are so distracting and destabilizing at the political level.
Part of genuine techno-optimism is the willingness to say, "we're capable of dealing with all the consequences, good and bad, and making informed, rational choices about improvements that take into account everyone's well-being."
This is exactly right. Every technology does not have some civilization shaking negative tradeoff, most are in the realm of pure public good.
I feel like ultimately the technology part of the discussion is irrelevant to what most people are actually talking about. The question is ultimately do you believe society is in general pretty good or mostly bad. That core belief then propagates to how you imagine improved technology will be used.
In my mind improved technology makes society choosing to be better for everyone a far easier job. When there’s more than enough to go around we don’t have to play zero sum games where someone has to lose in order for you to win. But improved technology only makes that possible, not inevitable.
Here's my simple counterpoint to techno-optimism:
That vertical wall of technological advancement? Almost all fossil fuels. One way or another, eventually we need to stop relying on burning concentrated dinosaur carcass.
And when that happens? Progress will slow. Not even accounting for low-hanging fruit being picked (like say efficiency improvements), but just because generating the needed energy is harder. And our efficiency gains rarely translate to lower usage in the long term.
LED TVs are more efficient than CRT TVs. And maybe if we kept LED TVs capped at the size of CRTs we would have seen progress. A 32 in CRT TV took about 130W...and that was on the large end in their heyday. Circa 2009 <30% of TVs were larger than 40 inches. Nowadays 90% of them are larger. A 40 in LED TV uses about 100W, and a 50 in one easily uses 150W.
Not a whole lot of overall improvement to the power profile in 30 years. But hey they're bigger and lighter now so who cares right?
I'd say nuclear power is the next step in technological advancement after fossil fuels, and it leads to more efficiency and less pollution
Yes, but that is also much harder to deploy on a mass scale. The resources are harder to find, and require more complexity to keep growing.
I didn't touch on this directly, but I also don't think human capacity for intelligence is unlimited. We're riding the back of fossil fuels and presuming we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. Not to say nuclear power can't fill that void, but it's much harder to keep going.
We see even today that losing what we have created is trivially easy, and much knowledge is being lost to the sands of time despite it being easier than ever to preserve it.
The exponential rise of mental health problems are a tell that this current path of techno-industrial progress is not sustainable. Many of us already depend on taking pills to keep ourselves stable enough to not kill ourselves.
It takes time to learn things. Our techniques of teaching might get better, but unless we're gonna start requiring doctorates for everything going forward, we're eventually going to hit walls. I suppose we could start dosing the water with Adderal if technogical progress starts stagnating.
And the perpetual added stress of needing to learn evermore isn't going to ease those stress problems.
I think the future of innovation will be with 'less is more'. Rediscovering how to do things as simply as possible to reduce mental load.
I don't think this means that our techno-industrial progress as a whole is not sustainable. It could easily just mean that we're doing some things wrong, but not that the right way to do them is necessarily slowing down. I think that this is quite likely at least to some degree because we have not yet been able to fully adjust to a few technologies like social media, but at the same time we don't really need to adjust to many other new technologies like mRNA vaccines or electric cars that rather significantly change our lives.
I also have an issue with your judgment of mental health. It is again obvious that some technologies like social media specifically have an effect and it seems that the effect is negative on average, and we will likely need to change how we deal with the average parson having to do much more knowledge work than ever before. But the way you describe it seems like many people in society are on the verge of suicide, which would surely increase the suicide rates, but numbers do not seem to support it. Suicide rates are going up in the US, but in many other developed countries in Europe they're stagnant on an acceptable level or going down.
I think that specifically having to do so many more decisions in your life than 50 years ago and specifically social media are definitely having an effect on mental health. But it doesn't seem nearly as bad as you describe and I think that at this moment it's quite difficult to say what part of statistics showing growing rates of mental health problems are that and what part is simply more success in diagnosing them. Both seem to be obviously happening.
I'm quite sure that AI is going to help a lot with this. Even ChatGPT, which in the grand scheme of things is a super early application: it's being slammed for not being an infallible answering machine, but it works really well as a knowledge processor, it's pretty reliable when making summaries of articles or explaining them. And it's likely to get better in the future. I agree that there seems to be an obvious limit to how much we can individually learn and understand, but I don't believe we're quite there yet.
I don't really see your point about why fossil fuels are a "vertical wall". Renewable sources are already cheaper to build in many places. In general, I don't see why more usage is bad. The reason usage increases is because we want it, because we enjoy better things. Also, I'm not sure your stats are correct. The 65 inch LG C3 uses ~100W, and others of the same size use closer to 50W. Sure, you can find big TVs which use lots of power, but you can't ignore the fact that overall, they still become more efficient over time even while getting bigger and more feature-full (or "smart"). Don't you find it impressive that TV's are ~4x bigger by area but still use ~half the power?
The point about fossil fuels is that we didn't get magically smarter during this period of progress. Our ingenuity was fueled by cheap, available power. It might continue, it might not...but human intelligence and ingenuity has not dramatically shifted in thousands of years.
I know OLEDs have improvement, but ultimately if the content is brighter its still gonna consume a lot of power. Even 100W is still more than a typical TV of 30 years ago. A typical TV was only 22 inches, and typically only consumed 50W.
Sure it's impressive we can do so much more in the same power budget. But what does this functionally actually offer me? I can watch some garbage for 20 hours a week with some extra pixels now. A bit of extra eyecandy that I won't remember 6 months from now. Oh and stuff costs a lot more to produce because the high fidelity makes it easier to spot flaws.
It doesn't matter if we have 4x larger screens if we're consuming the same power we did back then. Energy consumption needs to level off eventually or we'll cook ourselves.
I don't understand why we need to marry a positive or negative to technology. It's not inherently good or evil. Google itself once was founded by starry-eyed optimists. They used to have the motto, "Don't be evil". Time and corporate interest have twisted it into powerful and ominous corporation.
It's the innovators that create a technology who are usually the optimists. If it can be used for money or war, the optimism will fade with it's use as it becomes a tool for the controlling or suppressing the masses. My cynicism isn't rooted in my view of technology or capitalism, it's a component of human nature. As corporations grow and technology adds more layers between people we objectify each other more and feel more comfortable with callous behavior. This is true for your average keyboard warrior as much as your CTO making decisions that will affect a global tech product.
The intention is sometimes totally removed from the end product, especially in tech.
Of course technology is neutral in and of itself. It's mostly just highly refined rocks.
It's merely the end result, and there's a reason "the ends justify the means" is a dangerous mindset.
Technology that relies on suffering (to keep costs down!) is immoral, because the process of its creation is.
It seems to me that the debate about whether should be generally optimistic or generally pessimistic about the future, in general is way too abstract to be usefully debated.
This is not really about technology or the future, it’s about psychology, whether to be an optimist or a pessimist. People may have optimistic or pessimistic outlooks on life, but it’s not something you reason yourself into, and we don’t need to build consensus on whether everyone should be optimistic or pessimistic, in general.
Pessimistic thinking can be useful for things like disaster planning. A pessimistic vibe about everything that might happen doesn’t do anything useful.
Similarly, having some optimism is useful for trying things that might work, rather than giving up before you begin. An optimistic vibe can go badly when it means not thinking about or suppressing discussion about possible problems.
This suggests we need both optimists and pessimists, and we will make better decisions if we listen to both with curiosity, looking for what we can take away from the discussion that’s useful.
It's difficult to be very invested in discourse that's dominated by tech capitalists opining on things they are well insulated from. It's the plebs who suffer the ravages of their exploits.
They're too busy patting each other on the back. They're stubbornly stuck on the mindset that they alone are divine ordained ministers of technology. Their word is gospel of the church of math and science. Non-believers are heathen who dare question math?!? It's not surprising he ended the article pressing you to have faith.
This is your worldview of what you think is the worldview of others. This is the fundamental flaw of so called tech optimists. They assume everyone else are opposed to technology. Few are. Predicating your dialog with such silly notions is an insult to everyone else. But of course IT nerds have traditionally carried themselves with holier than thou attitude.
Just as the manifesto disingenuously equated Luddites to being opposed to technology. They were not. They were a labor movement.
These so called tech optimists want to talk to their straw man who hates technology then I will take no part in being their scarecrow. Everything they derive from their flawed premises is pompous self congratulatory rhetoric. Where every step is met with their utopian technology trump card. They speak of benefits for humanity at some time in the future. Accuse you of being technophobe. That is not discussions. It is a sermon.
I liked the piece. I share some of the authors skepticism of the sort of arcadian type philosophies like degrowth and cottage core and stuff like that. I agree with the idea that technology opens up more possibilities for what people can do, and I think that on an individual level that is a benefit for people in a way that's separate from the larger impact it has on society. I feel that stagnationist political philosophies take that stance from a consideration of society scale impacts and see the potential negative impacts of technology as inextricably leading to a negative impact at an individual level, which I don't think I fully agree with.
I dislike engaging with this as it gives merit to the idea that it can be productively discussed in such frameworks.
As others have mentioned, tech is what it is. Not good or bad. Further, looking historically, we are in a major technical anomaly thanks to the industrial revolution and following energy/computation boom. There's 0 guarantee that will continue, and it very well could plateau, even without considering the climate and energy issues we're beginning to bump into.
With that in mind, I feel like there's certainly a "cult of tech" that has always been around. ANYTHING techy is good, and it will always solve the issue. This often over-complicates or ignores easier solutions (like, i dunno, hyperloop instead of trains), and people are suddenly willing to ignore safety and regulations (like basically all self driving car technology in use).
On the other hand, you've got doomsayers who are certain that our "eh tech will solve it" mindset is leading us to doom. And while sure, that is 100% a factor, there are serious technologies making progress. I'd say material sciences and energy research are still huge factors. While not nearly as simple/affordable as people think, solar panels ARE generations better than they were in the 90s, and for more paradigm shifting stuff, something like fusion might finally look like it's ACTUALLY 60 years out rather than "probably another 20 this time".
And i'm not even going to go into the good and bad on the medical side of things.
Trying to wrap up all the nuance and complexity of "tech" in some sort of philosophy is, to me, akin to arguing the merits of astrology. It's just so obviously wrong, and a pointless discussion to even have.