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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?
The anti-billionare crowd would rather have an opaque network of institutional investors appoint a ceo puppet than have a founder keep his company. What what they would prefer even more of course is a government committee.
I'd actually like worker co-ops, myself.
They work well in certain sizes, around the small to mid range of things. I’m very skeptical of ideas of “workers self-management” and the like that the anarchists and syndicalists of old loved to extol. I sometimes wonder if those people have ever actually had a job and dealt with the ensuing frustration of those who simply ‘don’t work’. If we lived out said ideals on a global scale we wouldn’t have a workers paradise.
I mean shit, when I was in high school and the teachers put us all into random groups and we couldn’t select our friends, I was always the guy doing all the work while the other kids sat around doing jack shit. That’s fine with me. But if I’m doing 90% of the work, all of you guys are getting F’s due to your lack of contribution. You’d better be shining my shoes and serving me lunch everyday and hope I put your name on the project. If we had this program on a national level, you’d have half the planet die of starvation and unable to wipe their own ass.
Actually the largest workers' self-management experiment was conducted in the form of Yugoslavia, where it was enshrined in the constitution or whatever and was the main ideological pillar of the state. The system changed quite radically over the course of the state's existence, so how it was set up in the 50s and 60s during times of economic boom probably didn't have much to do with how it looked in the 80s.
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You could imagine a world where working people are allowed to make agreements with each other to collaborate in their work. Then, if someone stops fulfilling their end, the other person is allowed to stop working with them and find a replacement. The co-ops could then develop specialized roles for handling these agreements, allowing workers in the co-op to focus on the tasks they are best at.
You'd build on top of that: some co-ops would work better than others. So, then, by the same principle the co-ops can choose which co-ops they want to do business with, to provide an incentive for co-ops to work efficiently on socially valuable goods and services.
You could even have some kind of meta co-op, which exchanges frozen labor value to nascent co-ops that want to try something new and risky, in exchange for some of the value to compensate them for the risk and reward them for the labor involved in picking out the most promising co-ops.
This is somewhat by the by, but I’m curious to know how you’d interpret the failure of the kibbutzim.
On a local level we already have what you’re suggesting in the sense that there’s nothing that prevents a small band of individuals from organizing along a cooperative pathway (obviously, since that’s what we’re talking about). The problem I see is one with scale and how it generalizes to a larger population. Local production and distribution doesn’t produce an economic surplus that the broader mass of humanity outside the cooperative can benefit from on any large scale. Now technically that’s an imperfect example because some cooperatives do produce a profit but that in turn gets distributed among the workers, there is no capitalist or investor that reaps up the overall net profit to the exclusion of the workers.
I get what it is you’re hypothesizing but it just strikes me as a way for extremely dysfunctional labor to get by without keeping up their end of the work. It doesn’t seem to me to provide a solution that ‘fixes’ the problem.
Fundamentally the only way this would ever be determined is just to get the system enacted and try it out. I could be wrong, so could do. I just have a very hard time seeing it working given my empirical views about human nature.
The kibbutzim are/were more than just a worker-owned business; they were also income-sharing communities. You can have the business end of it without the communal living part. Mondragon corporation is often pointed-to as the prime example of a large corporation running as a worker co-op.
Yeah, I’m aware of Mondragon (1, 2). Even Mondragon admits however that once a labor collective gets to a certain size they get spun off from the rest of the cooperative because it becomes unmanageable. There’s a reason vertically arranged hierarchies, whether its labor or sociopolitical are easier to manage when they become more complex than horizontal systems.
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"Only once in history did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it." - Joshua Muravchik, "The Mystery of the Kibbutz", as quoted in this fascinating GrokInFullness blog post
It feels like "failure" is too strong a word to use for that, though. Even if it didn't work well enough economically, it was at least a counterexample to the old "you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out" joke.
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