aerodeck

What makes you say that China's closed/censored society is directly at odds with Google's products?

You'd probably do a cheaper and better job just spending 15 minutes browsing youtube, then calling your buddy in Macedonia.

Watching that was worse than August Underground's Mordum.

I'm surprised no-one in this entire thread has even mentioned the possibility that autism, OCD, ADHD, etc. might be, in part, caused by such streams of nonsense.

Human sociality needs to be boostrapped. Kids watching this all-day-every-day are /definitely/ gonna grow up funny. Why do you think daycare costs more than a mortage?

The article mixes its message a bit between automation/disruption/capital. One couldn't really say that Uber is in the business of automation. The capital/labor distinction is more productive, but since it is derived from marxism no one actually uses it.

I'm starting to get the impression that this genre of "technology gone bad" article is starting to be a safe surrogate for talking about class. The muddling of terms is actually a feature: one can avoid the dirty reality of class by framing it as an inherent feature of technological progress, which, of course, is a good in-and-of-itself (unless you're a dirty commie).

I think the same is true of immigration: low class people blame their poor condition on immigrants, rather than their class standing.

One extra consideration here is that as power centralizes, the costs of individual mistakes increases.

You can put all your energy into paddling a canoe, but if it's still tied to the dock you're going nowhere.

> working more hours gives you more experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns

This is what is called the ideology of no ideology.

A small cadre of elite economists that convened as the Mont Pelerin Society (led by Hayek) called themselves neoliberals for a bit but stopped using the term.

So you believe that there is such thing as a news report without commentary?

Perhaps doing something to control an overheated housing market would help more than tearing up new land 100 miles away from cities whose prosperity derives from the 'network effects' of geographical proximity.

> not intentional > cost effective

optimizing for cost is an intention.

ordering someone around != meaningful interaction.

If humans are just inefficient then we should just get rid of all of them no? Or perhaps just keep the smart, efficient ones with good credit scores.

> lens of blind progression

The problem is that there is no such thing as 'blind progression'. It will always be defined by someone or something, boxing all future progress into that person's biases. This is the same well-intentioned by inherently flawed utopian thinking as everyone else.

I would totally sign my life away to an AI as long as no one was telling me that it was a sign of 'progress'. At the very least, no one should be profiting from it

Anti-humanism is a very interesting strain of thought these days. Homo-Deus by Harari is my favorite example.

The problem, of course, is that if we got where we are now by being humans, then how do we know we're far enough along to 'quit' being humans without going backwards? How do you know that 'giving up' isn't the same sort of intellectual trick that that Nazis played on themselves? How do you give up without giving up?

I think this is more or less correct, but I think the more important take-away from the article is how this kind of thinking ends up getting wrapped up in NRx and inevitably, the alt-right. Viewed from 1,000 ft, it is very easy to coldly construe our weird political landscape as a fulfillment of this hyper-rationalist dream: the irrationalities of the poor and uneducated are something to be corraled by the cold and calculating. It's the sort of thinking popular with plutocrats, since it rationalizes their actions.

Accelerationism is interesting to me insofar as it is transparent about the fact that technology is an a-human (not in-human) force. Blind faith in the liberational potential of technology does nothing to actually fulfill this potential, but instead just furthers it's a-human qualities. The reference to the California ideology is apt.

It's very easy to live an long, comfortable and unhappy life.

> entertaining to watch

that's the kind attitude that got us to where we are now.

I see a couple of interviews here:

http://hayek.ufm.edu/index.php/Main_Page

Do you have a suggestion of which one is good to start? I really want to dive deep into this guy.

Also, to be fair, theory travels. A lot of time it's more interesting to see how a concept is misused than applied correctly.

EDIT:

lol. it seems that yea, he thinks price-signals are the only thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV7-2Aua4_4&feature=youtu.be...

Funny to see this on HN. I am currently reading a book that details the recent history of economic theory and how it has been in bed with neoliberalism. It has much to say about Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, a think-tank that he founded to develop his ideas.

What surprises me about Hayek was that he had a radical conception of decentralization, managing to talk about human society as though on-par with an ant-colony. IMO, this sort of anti-humanism is a necessary ingredient for overcoming anthropocentrism in our current thinking and pivoting towards ecological thinking, rather than purely rational thinking.

However, I think Hayek makes some tremendous mistakes in his thinking. Firstly, by reducing the Collective Brain to merely the market/price-discovery, he ignores the possibility that price-controls and/or social-demonization could themselves be components of that brain (perhaps fulfilling the function of an OS's kernel). Hayek talks much about there being no one person who can understand everything, but fails to critique himself. Secondly, he fails to see how the setup of a market has an influence on the kind of information that gets processed. In order for some thing to be exchanged on the market, it needs to be commodified in some way. This transformation of /thing/ into /commodity/ is where the social slight-of-hand happens, necessarily discounting some aspect of it's worth. An example is having two identical mugs, but one of those mugs being /mine/ and therefore special to me. That specialness doesn't exist if the mugs are a commodity, and perhaps that specialness fulfills an informational/computational function. In the end, the price is a result of a collective brain, but the market itself is a human construct. Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit and 4Chan all structure their 'markets' differently, with incredibly different results.

Hayek had some good ideas, but he was too much of an apologist for the existing economic order for those ideas to really be useful. As technologists resurrect his ideas to apologize for the existing technological order, the same will likely be the case.