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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?
I'm a little older than your cutoff, but I remember trying to get a first job was absolutely brutal for almost everyone.
Now AI adds a little bit to that uncertainty. I like Noah Smith's take. The younger generation already gets a fairly raw deal with a terrible system to look for jobs, most of their tax money funneled to pensioners, a dating market equilibrium that's never been worse, ridiculous housing prices thanks to NIMBYs (another defacto tax going to the elderly), and now there's the looming threat of AI.
I personally think AI will just be a mostly normal technology like the internet, but that uncertainty doesn't help.
My view on the matter has slowly become that increasing longevity is the actual root cause of most modern malaise, among the youth and all other groups. I think the biggest inflation-chock the economy has ever known was when we started to regularly live until we were 85 or 90 rather than 65 or 70. We've added more years, but the value of our collective years has depreciated – it's hard to get a house or an apartment, it's hard to get a job, it's hard to do fuckin' anything because doing anything requires time and yet the value of the time has only shrunk. Everyone knows they have a lot of years now so everything keeps getting pushed back, everything costs more time because we keep living longer and longer and longer and thereby we fool ourselves into thinking we have more life to live since we have more time to spend.
And yet life to live is the thing we don't have, because youth and fertility and energy and capacity for enjoyment and beauty, and everything that actually makes more time worth having is fleeting and adding more time whittles it away like water erodes the cliffside. I once had a friend tell me to discount beauty when looking for a girlfriend, because all beauty eventually fades. But everything fades, everything is transient and everything is slipping away like Kansas' famous dust in the wind. A Buddhist would call this attachment to wordly things folly and point out that it inflicts दुःखम्, duhkham, and indeed, if impermanence is a valid counterargument then all is disproven. But assuming it is not, it's clear that more years doesn't neccessarily mean more living. Yet we keep throwing good years after bad ones, day after day.
One day soon, sooner than we would all like, the extension of our lifespans, coupled with the women's liberation movement having liberated women from all previously taken-for-granted aspects of womanhood, could very well mean that large parts of the world might well be populated primarily by people who cannot perform any meaningful labour and who are thus reliant on other people working for them to continue living. But as the great Kipling wrote:
Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?
I still think we can sort the problem out, but I don't think the main problem for today's youth is AI.
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