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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?
One comment sentiment I see regarding billionaires is "there's no ethical way for anyone to acquire that much money."
This reads to me as a complaint that billionaries aren't cashing out early enough.
Say you create a rocketship of a company. You're Mark Zuckerberg, it's the mid-aughts. Various media companies are offering hundreds of millions for what you've built. We know what actually happened, Zuck didn't sell.
There's a hypothetical where Zuck cashed out and lived a quiet but ultra-rich life instead of building one of the world's most valuable companies. In that hypothetical, Zuck would be a better person according to the anti-billionaire crowd.
What of the other side of the transaction? The only entities capable of acquiring Facebook would have necessarily been even more valuable, so then you're just enriching the established billionaries instead of creating new ones.
What do they actually want?
For nobody to have anything more or better than they do. Like I've said before, it's envy — not just wanting what other people have (that's "covetousness"), but resenting them for having it. Much more toxic, because it's most easily satisfied by tearing others down.
There's a wrinkle you leave out. There is not a desire for everyone to be joined alike in tough, dignified labor to be followed by a communal dinner served out of a big iron pot. Instead, the idea is that the right kind of person, once certified (invariably including whatever their own certifications are), should have access to the highest luxuries and social status modern society has on offer, with all the drudgery to maintain that world being performed by the lessers.
It's not a revolt against the idea of hierarchy in general, but instead a rejection of the particular hierarchy we have, because it does not adequately reward them. I can sympathize a fair bit with the radical leveler point of view (logistics and feasibility aside), but there's no one even really pretending to argue for it.
Indeed, if you actually want to do this you can do it right now. There a variety of communities that work that way. They’re weird, but they exist.
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Good thing that's not what what I said. A few may still try to sell their preferred outcome as providing this, but like you point out, they barely even try that anymore.
Again, envy is about hating those who have more than you. That's perfectly compatible with having other people who have less than you. Like you say, it's not hating hierarchy, its about hating everyone above you in that hierarchy.
I'm again reminded of my dad's old employer — who passed a few weeks ago. Liked to give all the usual lefty bits about "helping the poor"… while paying employees, contractors, and so on as little as he could get away with (along with plenty of other slightly scummy business practices); and would regularly endorse "taxing the rich more"… as a millionaire whose approach to his own taxes bordered on outright evasion (near the end, he actually got dinged by the IRS for a rather substantial amount of unpaid back taxes).
Because, you see, he wasn't rich. No, he was your ordinary middle class millionaire landlord. And "the rich" who need taxed more? Anyone who had more money than him, those greedy bastards.
There's a sequence of tweets showing how Bernie Sanders's rhetoric changed... he started complaining about "millionaires and billionaries", then when he became a millionaire he dropped that part. Elizabeth Warren, too, sets her proposals above her own substantial (~10M) net worth.
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