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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?
It's interesting to me that, as far as I can tell, right now is when OpenAI is the least impressive relative to competitors ever since they kicked off the modern LLM chatbot era with GPT 3.5 almost half a decade ago, and that's when the most violence against its CEO is happening. Even if, somehow, like a video game boss, his murder caused the complete liquidation of OpenAI and disbursement of the proceeds to his murderer, it's doubtful it would put a meaningful dent in the consequences of LLMs in employment and other societal things.
Last week, there was also someone who filmed himself setting fire to a Kimberly Clark warehouse, having been disgruntled over his low pay. He reportedly explicitly compared himself to Luigi Mangione, and I've noticed at least some significant amount of support for him, by the same sorts of people who also lionized Mangione and support the attempts on Altman's life. I don't know where things are going, but I'm pretty sure that more escalation of this type of behavior will lead to nowhere good, triply so for the least well-off parts of society, and I just hope this is a blip instead of a sign of things to come. I'm not sure what else there is to do to stop it other than ramping up law enforcement and making sure that those convicted of such actions get the harshest punishment possible without martyring them. Which doesn't seem like it'd be enough, though.
I just happened to scroll imgur over the weekend (no account, incognito window), and one in every five posts was a picture of a flaming warehouse and variants on the quote "All you had to do was pay us enough to live." It is likely that activists and foreign social media manipulators are trying to meme it into a movement for low-class vigilante sabotage. It is also likely that among imgur users (who lean young and left) this is actually a message that lands well, and is probably providing inspiration for other young would-be vigilantes.
On the other hand, with the motivation of the culprit explicitly captured on video, the theory of social media toxoplasma predicts that it will garner fewer headlines in the mainstream media than the UHC CEO shooting, where a lot of the story was people being able to speculate and argue over the killer's motivation for a few weeks. On the gripping hand, there is probably a larger population of would-be saboteurs and arsonists than would-be murderers: Leftist activists in general are not familiar enough with guns, and the personal taking of a life is not a line most would cross.
I will admit a degree of sympathy. Having dealt with a family member on UHC, they are absolutely using questionable strategies to cut off care early, and having a friend who recently bought a modest home, banks in that city are now telling potential borrowers that they require a salary of about twice the city's median income before they will authorize a loan for a "starter home" price. (And given that the bank has title on the property as collateral on the loan and requires borrowers to pay for insurance against default if they have insufficient downpayment, that must leave borrowers with a very high risk of default.)
Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders. Enforcing the anti-monopoly laws already on the books as written would probably be enough to improve many sectors of the economy, especially those where local monopolies are pushing up prices, like homebuilding and dental care. Removing principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare (the employer wants to pay for the cheapest plan) would be another good reform. But neither of these will happen. If there has been a single guiding principle since Clinton, it would be that the ruling party will do what is good for shareholders, and enforcing anti-monopoly law would help small businesses at the expense of shareholders. In its stead, I would predict that there will be more security expenditures for high-profile CEOs, at least until the predictive panopticon is complete.
So ... which is it? Populist demands are easily converted (by both sides of the aisle!) into protectionist policies that set up parts of the economy for rent extraction. "You can only build more housing here if it's economically 'inclusionary' enough" gets predictably turned by reality into "you can't build more housing here" and drives up the price of the grandfathered (often literally!) housing stock. People want to "drive housing prices up for people who own their homes" while also making housing prices affordable for people who don't, but that just doesn't compute.
are another example. The ACA caps insurance company profit as a percent of premiums, a policy at least populist enough for Obama to brag about it ... and a policy that inadvertently sets up a huge conflict of interest when insurers are trying to figure out what they should pay out.
Ironically, this sort of "cost-plus contract" malincentive was also fixed in part by Obama, in the context of NASA procurement, when he supported and extended the Commercial Resupply Services contracts and then went beyond them with the Commercial Crew program, in both cases paying for purchases where the seller actually could make more profit by producing results more cheaply. For now we still have to burn $4B a pop for SLS when we want to send humans outside Low Earth Orbit, but we can replace it with a $180M Falcon Heavy launch for things like Europa Clipper.
Meaningful reforms are the more important part of that sentence. If reforms are rejected until you get to the point of populist demands, those will likely be hijacked by special interests, as you note in the case of housing.
The princial-agent conflict I was thinking about was "my insurance is paid for by my employer, who has no incentive to limit total costs to me or to provide good coverage," but adding market consolidation adds additional problems: health insurance companies withholding payment from independent doctors to give the providers incentive to
sell outjoin their affiliated provider network. Ditto health insurance companies owning healthcare providers, PBMs, and pharmacies. It gets even more pernicious. In the case of my family, UHC was hiring staff out of clinics as consultants, who then acted as medical professionals to assert that continuing care wasn't necessary. There were at least two backchannels between these consultants and people working as care providers in the clinic, and there was some exaggeration of the recovery going on in the official medical charts, which the consultants then used to argue against further care. What's a little favoratism between friends?I agree that contract reform is nice, but it is only putting a band-aid over the fact that we went from a vibrant market with ~200 major defense contractors to five. As we see in space, merely doubling the number of options the buyer has can vastly change the incentives driving market participants.
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