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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?
This is very sad because this was me. Eagle Scout, 1460, varsity athlete, interested in software development, graduated in the aughts.
I had the opposite problem: The future was so open wide, that I took gambles on more creative pursuits than b-lining a traditional software job, where I could have made much more money more quickly. Now in my late 30s, with a young family, I feel the combined constant breath of the treadmill trying to keep up and catch up, while simultaneously worrying about what the heck my children will do.
The best I can do, is to pretend it's not here. Living vicariously as a parent is, in many, ways sweeter than childhood itself,; you get to be a gardener as well as enjoying the fruits of their joys. My parents got to show us a wide open world, and tell us that we could be anything we wanted, be excited to see us reach further than them, on their own shoulders...
I, instead, have to build a careful facade and guard the edges. Not tell my kids that I have no idea if they'll get to be anything at all, that I have no clue what their future will look like, while panicking that it won't all fall down before I've given them a rich childhood.
I am, of course, very very lucky in that I get to still be where I am with a family and still living in the modal 'good life'. Much better being here worried about it ending, than being on the other side worried you'll never get a chance.
It really does seem like the Boomers ended up being History's main characters; the generation born at the absolute peak.
Since you have kids, those thoughts are normal and endemic to every parent. I’d be less concerned about “the future,” widely thought of. There’s no real way you can personally impact that. Think about what you and them want for “their future,” and build toward it. I have the opposite problem. I have things people want to my name, but I have no children of my own to bequeath them to. So I’ve had to become very selective when I put together my trust but if anything happens to me, at least all the most important items will already come with names attached to them, along with the reasons why.
Another thing me and a number of my cousins started doing several years ago were recording all of our conversations together. On my laptop I have a massive archive or recorded phone calls, each one, hours long, between me and various family members and friends. My father, aunts, uncles, cousins, sibling, etc. Someone will eventually have to come along and do all the hard work of categorizing everything. It’s all unstructured and follows no organization but my rule is none of it is ever to be released to our families (immediate or extended) until we’ve all passed away + 25 years. There will be questions people will definitely be wanting answers to, and they will get them in due time. Hopefully it’ll be something important for our futures.
Wow, that sounds ominous.
Though, whatever it is, don't underestimate the ability of future generations to just move on.
My knowledge of my grandfather grew from "He died when my dad was a kid" to "murdered in his bed during military service in a tumultuous far-off land" to "in an unsolved crime story full of sex and coverups and intrigue", ending up with an email conversation with a historian who "thought some things about the official reports didn't add up" ... and that was 20 years ago, with no closure, but it's pretty much water under the bridge to me and all my cousins. You'd think that, after I later inherited a priceless artifact (not super valuable, I just don't have the documentation that I think would be necessary if I ever wanted to legally resell it) that was once my grandfather's, the story should have picked up from there, but nope, no visits from master cat burglars or Russian agents or anything. I didn't even think to check it for secret compartments.
Damn, I've never actually typed that all out before. Now I kind of wish I had some recorded phone calls to listen through.
Sounds ominous but really isn’t. My family is an interesting group of people who come from very disparate backgrounds and more or less melded into a common culture, along with the culture of where I grew up. Our extended family is huge and lives all across the country; including relatives who know me but that I’ve never met who live outside the country. And we were always a fairly close knit group of people. Family isn’t important to most Americans but it’s enormously important to us. That said, my parents were two ‘completely’ different people. I used to think they had absolutely no business getting together and don’t know how they stayed married all their lives.
At some point we’re all obliged to move on. I had a serious sit down with some of my younger cousins a few years ago who I’m very close with (they’re more like younger brothers and sisters), after my sibling passed away and told them there will come a time when mom and dad pass away, I will pass away and everyone else around you will become increasingly distant and have their own lives to live. You’ll be standing in a room by yourself, or driving somewhere or doing something and you’ll say to yourself, “… Is that it? Am I supposed to move on as if nothing happened and it’s just another day?… And the answer to that is ‘yes’… Remember the good times we had and don’t forget me. The sun will still rise tomorrow whether you’re prepared for it or not, and you always have to keep moving forward. So don’t anchor your life around me. Maybe we’ll see each other in Heaven and if not it won’t matter, so take comfort in the fact that we’re all going to the same place.”
Recording was something we began a decade or so ago and when one of my cousins, some of my friends I had a 5 hour or so conversation and I’d laughed hard about something we were discussing. I probably laughed harder than I have in my entire life. My face was red. I had uncontrollable tears. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t talk or breathe. And I remember the next day wishing I could relive our discussion because of how great it was. Then I remembered GrapheneOS has a record button in the Dialer app. My VoIP numbers also can auto-record calls in Groundwire or Sipnetic. I told them in advance what I thought about doing and they agreed to it. Since then we’ve discussed everything under the sun. Family politics. Hood politics. Old memories. Trying to organize and plan things which anymore is extremely difficult for us. Religion. Current events. Movies. Everything.
Try it sometime. You may like it. But there are also serious things people have been wanting to know for a long time that my cousins and I have discussed that we think is best to settle and table it for the next generation of our families. What they do with it at that point is up to them. They’ll definitely get a kick out of many of our conversations if they listen to them. There will be plenty of laughs, raised eyebrows, close calls and holy shit moments to keep them entertained. We have thousands and thousands of hours recorded at this point.
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