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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
As someone in that age range I feel complete contempt for the Luigi worshippers and anti-AI/data center people and can’t relate to their worldview at all. The friends I have in this camp are exactly the people I would expect, namely those who have a dogshit understanding of, well, everything, and have lived pretty coddled lives. I want this trend to stop immediately (I work not in Silicon Valley but at a company that is deeply important to the AI boom) but have no faith that it will. If the violence against AI companies proceeds up the supply chain in a sort of real life Butlerian Jihad I’ll probably be killed sometime in late 2027.
I have close to 0 sympathy for the world view driving this stuff. I myself suffer from at least a few of the grievances that people commonly ascribe to my generation (owning a house seemingly further out of reach every year, politically homeless, dealing with Boomerism in every facet of adult life), yet I don’t see how desiring to kill CEOs and protest data centers and burn down warehouses would solve any of it. It makes sense only if you have a completely cartoonish perspective on life informed entirely by fiction. It’s the mindset of a toddler throwing a tantrum. In fact, I think such things exacerbate almost all of the problems underlying the aforementioned grievances. I think due to fertility collapse the developed world essentially needs transformative AI to remain the developed world. It is the least bad solution by far. That people don’t understand this and actually believe the opposite enrages me. Young so-called progressives are now actually the most conservative (in the sense of opposing Progress) force in society. It’s environmentalists against nuclear all over again.
I don't hate him for tankie/anticapitalist reasons: I hate him for spiking the cost of memory and SSDs, and his market manipulation tactics would earn him a Bitcoin Assassin™ if we lived in Shadowrun.
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We have an elite completely devoid of virtue and with an inverted sense of noblesse oblige. Why should people feel any loyalty to an elite which is completely contemptible in their behaviour? The current billionaire class manage to make the corrupt people of Versailles seem virtuous.
The current elite needs to either shape up or get replaced.
And how do you propose, exactly, to replace them, should they not "shape up"?
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There should be no noblesse oblige without the patents of nobility.
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TAPS SIGN EAGERLY
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What exactly would the noblesse oblige be that the elite could exhibit that would satisfy the the hoi polloi? Massive public works projects? Donating ever increasing shares of their wealth to broken nonprofits that do nothing of value? Art museums? Wives who volunteer in soup kitchens?
In Chicago, Al Capone was popular among the working class because he ran soup kitchens.
An assurance that you won't starve to death in a ditch seems like a pretty good baseline.
The top 1% of income earned pay 40% of income tax which goes to fund Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and EBT. I doubt that Al Capone spent as much of his income on soup kitchens as top 1% income earners spend on those things. Yet this is not enough.
High income != high wealth. High income people are for the most part the upper middle class. They are the loyal retainers of the true ownership class. The truely rich don’t pay much in taxes.
It's intuitively bizarre to say that people who out-earn 99% of people are part of the middle class. Data bears out our intuitions - half of the top 1% of wealth holders are in the top 1% by income, with the rest of the top 1% of income earners being made of the next 9% of wealth holders. You're welcome to define the top 10% of the country as the "upper middle class" but this is pretty nonsensical.
Maybe “upper middle class” isn’t the right term for them, especially at the higher end, but the fact remains that anyone whose wealth is primarily drawn from their own labor is just not in the same category as people who derive their wealth from owning. There are a few exceptions like CEOs who manage established companies rather than founding, but for the most part the people paying the very high income taxes are not the super wealthy. When the super wealthy do pay high income taxes, it’s generally pretty trivial compared with the main bulk of their wealth. If you don’t want to call top earners who can save low double digit millions “upper middle class,” that’s fine, but it is import to distinguish them from billionaires and centimillionares.
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One difference is that the government intermediates the creation of value and the distribution of value. Humans evolved for personalist politics; tracking where the revenues come from that the government redistributes is beyond the majority of people. Instead, if something the government is doing helps you out, it's because of the Big Man (be it Obama or Trump), not the material organization of the economy.
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Is the fix, then, to replace government spending $100k/year per person on homeless services with soup kitchens personally funded by AI oligarchs serving slop costing $100/year, with a big statue of Altman up front?
There is no one in San Francisco starving to death for lack of resources.
Honestly, maybe?
When Capone was running his soup kitchens, publicly funded relief systems didn't really exist like they did today. He took the floor from "nothing" to "something".
It seems like we need more stops on the way down between "gainfully employed" and "underpass resident". Bringing back SROs, for example, might help. On the government side, we could consider reinstating the civilian conservation corps.
Amazon already has, for most intents and purposes, a guaranteed job paying meager but livable wages for anyone willing to work. They get zero gratitude for this.
I can't imagine why.
As someone who's seen what goes on in shipping/mailing, that's not a job you want to get stuck with.
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A week ago OpenAI published an AI industrial policy document that lists many ideas for how to distribute wealth. Some things it includes are: creation of a public wealth fund that gives all citizens stake in AI-driven growth, increasing the capital-gains and corporate tax rates, and expanding workers benefits as an “efficiency dividend” (including suggestion of a 32 hour work week). They did not have to do this and yet they did. I don’t think actually following through on such an assurance is something any lone company could do, so their duty is to lobby the government to take such action. This is them doing that.
I think I have a fiduciary duty to my investors to recommend the State buys their bags, actually.
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To my knowledge Sam Altman does not possess any of the characteristics you’ve listed here. He consistently states he wants the benefit of the technology his company is developing to be widely distributed and documents of his internal communications with Elon and his co-founders (from their ongoing trial) show that this a sincere concern of his.
No one is asking for loyalty to the elite, I’m asking for “loyalty” (if you want to call it that) to the basic expectation of liberal democracy that you don’t just try to kill people because you disagree with them.
But Altman lies constantly about everything. He started off saying he was running a non-profit, then weaselled out of it. Ilya hates him and accused him of lying. Dario hates him and accused him of lying. Helen Toner accused Altman of failing to inform the board about the ChatGPT launch and hiding his financial interest in the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Even in that very trial it brings out their plans to basically run off with Elon's money and make a for profit.
He might just be saying that because it sounds a lot better than 'this is my path to universal domination, you dumb, dumb fucks'. Deceptive people shouldn't be trusted.
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Dogshit or not, how would you describe their model for all of this?
Billionaires and corporations bad, wealth inequality bad, all my problems are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.
Edit: I’ll add that this all seems to me to be downstream of a belief in labor theory of value and a lack of understanding of what markets do and why they might be good. Same people who thought that pandemic-era inflation was actually just Greedflation. You can only come to believe such a thing if you have no understanding of supply and demand and the price mechanism, and what the government clamping down on these would actually cause.
Billionaires and corporations
badare corrupting the free market through anticompetitive behavior and by bribing politicians and judges, allowing them to overprice their products and services and underprice labor. Wealth inequalitybadinevitable, but can be moderated by effective policy,all my problemsmy poor salary and high costs of housing, food, and healthcare are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.There's a more realistic steelman for you.
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If your model of what drives the outgroup is this simple and pejorative, you should be at least a little suspicious of it. Can you try to steelman the pro-Luigi case?
Sure.
The very wealthiest people (some very small fraction of the top 1%) are now richer as a percentage of total wealth than they’ve ever been. They could not spend their wealth over the course of their lives, and they are all well past the point where an additional million or even billion makes a meaningful impact on their quality of life. At the same time, many Americans who arguably work just as hard as these people in terms of effort and working hours struggle to get needs like healthcare and shelter met.
The government’s job is to support the health and wellbeing of its people, but to make matters worse, the government is unable or unwilling to help regular working-class people. This is because this segment of wealthy people are able to buy political influence that cashes out either in government services being worse or nonexistent (because the wealthy buy themselves tax cuts), or in corporations (owned and operated by the wealthy) achieving regulatory capture, meaning laws are written to favor allowing corporations to make more money at the expense of customer experience.
Combine this with the emerging trend of companies actually abandoning lower-cost offerings targeting the poor and working class in favor of doubling down on high-cost offerings targeting the wealthy, and you start to see a society that treats anyone but the most wealthy as essentially discardable slaves that might actually be worth more turned into biodiesel. Even worse, these AI freaks are talking about completely replacing labor with capital, eliminating the need of the ruling class to at least act like they care about the working class.
The solution then appears to be to tax the wealthy more, and eliminate their ability to buy influence in politics. Taxing them would have almost no discernible impact on their lives but would have a very positive impact on the lives of normal people. But, the wealthy are now so thoroughly entrenched that there seems to be no way for the voices of millions of working-class people to effect change via normal, respectable, political advocacy. You can protest all you want, but tomorrow a billionaire will write a check to [insert politician] and that’ll be it. And so, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.
Edit: I’ve amended “top 1%” to be more narrow as what I said isn’t actually even true of the 1%.
The threshold for the top 1% by net worth in the US is about $13.7 million. Easily spendable, and an additional million (and certainly billion) makes a difference.
The labor theory of value is just wrong.
I’m not sure if you missed the comment I was replying to but this is meant to be a steelman of a perspective I’m arguing against. These are not my views and I disagree with most of them.
OK, but if you're going to do a steelman, it's best not to include things that are false (like the top 1% being so rich that an additional million or billion wouldn't make a difference)
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Whatever steelman someone creates for an irrational position to seem more rational is going to be considerably less related to what people actually believe.
It can still be a useful exercise, but one must approach it with the awareness that the steelman is wholly unrelated to whatever drives the fangirls.
But does this matter? I think you will struggle to find any widely supported position where the majority of believers can articulate an intelligent justification. You can argue about whether it is an effective strategy to attack the "head-empty believers" directly (by way of shame or ridicule or whatever you think works), but even if it is, performing that attack here will not reach them and only shit up this discussion space.
Also, it stands to reason that those who do hold the position for more intelligent reasons hold an outsize influence on it; even the ones who just think on the level of "fat moneybag CEO bad" are vaguely reassured by some belief that some smart and high-status people can articulate a more robust line of reasoning for why it is so. Far more interesting and fruitful, then, to engage with that line.
Depends on why you're doing it. If you're trying to come up with a reason an intelligent, rational individual will believe X, steelmanning can be useful. If you're trying to understand why the youths or the elderly or PMC liberals with In This House signs post like they believe X, steelmanning is useless.
I do not think that stands to reason at all. Popularity and influence do not strike me as particularly well correlated to intelligent reasoning.
Robin Diangelo, Tema Okun, Ibram Kendi are quite stupid people that held, for several years, an incredibly amount of influence, perhaps precisely because their reasoning is incredibly simple. Nor do I think this trend is limited to progressive racism.
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