Honestly, I felt this post just shows how delusional the people are who made out with billions during the tech boom of the past 25 years.
I was a huge techno-optimist in the late 90s and early 00s. If anything, my opinion has totally switched over the past 10-15 years as I increasingly see technology ripping societies apart, and benefits only accruing to those at the very top. So excuse me if I gag a bit from a post from newly minted billionaires saying how those crowing about the downsides of tech are just a bunch of Debbie Downers.
Tristan Harris, who was featured a lot in The Social Dilemma documentary, was on Bill Maher recently, and I totally agreed with this point he made: we have to forget all the optimistic stories we tell ourselves about tech, and instead just look at the incentives. With social media, we told ourselves all these stories about how it would bring us closer together and keep us better in touch with friends. But the financial incentives that exist for social media companies is solely based on stealing more and more of your attention: what keeps you scrolling to the next block. And it turns out nothing grabs attention like outrage. Tristan's point was that with newer tech like AI, we're likely to repeat the same mistakes if we just tell ourselves the same stories about all the good that can come from AI and ignore the incentives of those top companies speeding ahead as fast as they can. And if you look at those incentives, I don't think it bodes well for the rest of the 99.9% who won't control major AI systems.
Right — the technology we need is not the technology that is incentivized and produced by the market. Indeed, the market is tending to block the development we need.
I was a huge techno-optimist in the late 90s and early 00s. If anything, my opinion has totally switched over the past 10-15 years as I increasingly see technology ripping societies apart, and benefits only accruing to those at the very top. So excuse me if I gag a bit from a post from newly minted billionaires saying how those crowing about the downsides of tech are just a bunch of Debbie Downers.
Tristan Harris, who was featured a lot in The Social Dilemma documentary, was on Bill Maher recently, and I totally agreed with this point he made: we have to forget all the optimistic stories we tell ourselves about tech, and instead just look at the incentives. With social media, we told ourselves all these stories about how it would bring us closer together and keep us better in touch with friends. But the financial incentives that exist for social media companies is solely based on stealing more and more of your attention: what keeps you scrolling to the next block. And it turns out nothing grabs attention like outrage. Tristan's point was that with newer tech like AI, we're likely to repeat the same mistakes if we just tell ourselves the same stories about all the good that can come from AI and ignore the incentives of those top companies speeding ahead as fast as they can. And if you look at those incentives, I don't think it bodes well for the rest of the 99.9% who won't control major AI systems.