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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?
A top marginal tax rate of 101% and for rich dudes to shut the fuck up and go back to the business mines, instead of pretending they are gods gift to this earth.
"I stole or copied an idea from someone who had less seed capital and lied to partners and investors and broke various laws until I hit escape velocity and everyone decided we can't punish this guy just for doing all that shit, he's a rich founder promethean demigod now!" Shut the fuck up and put the tech stock in the bag.
Who am I talking about? There's just so many fucking options, so many titans of industry who's main job is to do rails of coke, fuck adolescents on little saint james, and perform slightly to vastly worse than a replacement level MBA after hitting the big time.
But they've done so much for the world! They're so fucking important we could never replace them with a random number generator, the deserve to control the production of a significant amount of the worlds total work and labor. Imagine if Von Neumann and Bohr did the smart thing and developed and ap that spies on you in exchange for making you depressed instead of revolutionizing their fields, changing the world for all time. They could have gotten rich, the fucking retards.
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