lwo32k

This same story played out exactly a hundred years. Out of the turmoil we got the Progressive Era - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

As Nietzsche would say embrace the chaos, learn to love it, comfort and safety is for farm animals.

The Vatican has survived all that including the fall of countless nations and empires. Guess how they did it?

What do you think "rogue devs" are going to do once they stumble up on something their 3 inch chimp brain can't handle? They will call Large corp or Govt.

The "best" programmer you work with can be fired on any day of the week if corporate wonderland doesn't hit its quarterly numbers. They know this and the ones who survive get quite good at getting others fired, especially people better than them.

I stopped caring too much about who the best in the room was after 7-8 rounds of this. As Nietszche would say these are not Ubermensches but the last men in a nihilistic swamp. Creatures who have attacked and destroyed older moral frameworks without replacing them with anything new. For their own comfort and survival.

The kind of people who pretend they have mastered complexity, but in reality its just survival theater and political/power games. Ubermensches haven't emerged yet.

United States of Podcasters

"Talent" in a tech firm is overrated, because what tech firms do is over rated.

This is what Max Weber calls Moral Detachment. These people are not in direct contact with people who suffer. And so their intentions will always be mistrusted. Costs of which will mount with time and manifest in all kinds of shocks and surprises.

Worth looking at why the Church (which has survived much longer than govts, businesses, science/tech orgs) emphasizes direct contact with suffering, through things like Pastoral Care. This is not an accident. They have learnt that lesson the hard way again and again through out history.

Thiel has to be read as a counter to Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum etc.

Neither side has perfect solutions about how society should handle complexity, chaos and unpredictability.

So its always going to be an oscillations between the two camps.

Hopefully more and more people realizes it doesn't have to be an antagonistic back and forth. Requires constant daily reminders of humility and recognition we chimps are chimps not gods.

This has something to do with Irish whiskey.

The US ad industry already makes about 1000 bucks a year from one person's attention (70 bucks of which goes to Meta every quarter). People have been arguing its very hard to extract anything more because hours spent viewing content is already peaking. There is more content being produced than there is people*free time. This is quite inefficient.

And that's what Zuck has been basically telling Wall Street, that the ad industry/attention economy is still too inefficient - ai will change this, and they can milk much more attention/intention without getting people to spend all day scrolling/consuming content.

And he is right. Which is why they are raking in cash and the META stock is skyrocketing.

Cardinals elect the Pope. That's a democratic mechanism in one of the longest lasting institutions ever created by the chimp troupe.

They are AI

In the Attention Economy, the biggest Attentions whores win.

Is someone telling the ants how to "live life optimally"?

Did they all get wiped out after more "intelligent" species showed up?

The chimp troupe is really full of itself when it comes to thinking about "intelligence".

There are more microbes on earth than there are stars in the observable universe. If you don't know this, don't even worry yourself, thinking about anything else.

Intelligence is a side show. It's not the main show and never has been.

C-suite is under mass assault from sales armies of ever increasing firms claiming all kinds of things. Its a War for their limited Attention. Claims will get more and more ridiculous.

Don't worry. Just monitor the rate at which data breaches are happening.

Too add more perspective

They generate cash at a ridiculously insane rate (literally few bucks off everyone connected to the internet growing by 10-15 cents every quarter).

What happens when you can produce cash faster than you can cultivate capacities to use it, and Wall St is constantly pushing you do something with it?

The kids are not even trying to do either. They are already gravitating towards multidisciplinary teams, cause unlike past generations they are dealing with a rate of change at a totally different level. In such an environment, people get to see their own limitations much faster no matter the quality of their training and they end up having to rely on others.

The big challenge is getting very different people with ever growing different skillsets and interests to coordinate, stay in sync and row in one direction.

Well "we dont get into the weeds" with microbes. And they gave us CRISPR, Penicillin, Photosynthesis etc. Sentience is not required.

Wait till the bills arrive.

There was Mario, Micheal Jackson, Randy Savage and Baywatch. I mean that was all my kid brain needed to feel all was right with the universe.

There is more Content than Eyeballs or Time to consume it all.

Look at HN - is everyone reading every link posted? So how much waste does such a system produce? The system doesn't not signal it. Nor does it signal if waste is increasing.

Cause if they did people would have a very different definition of Value.

Even without AI the Content/Attention Economy is a mirage.

When Supply greatly overshoots Demand you have to ask why is it happening? And how long can it sustain itself?

AI is just a side show. Cause Economies aren't detached from Demand.

Normalcy bias implies Mom can do something about ALL threats one drops in her lap. Sooner or later one realizes Mom can't, and its not related to how loudly one cries or screams about the problem or how quickly Mom runs into the room.

People are acting as if awareness and consciousness is some magic to solving complexity and unpredictability.

Nature has already shown us how to compartmentalize info flows so that we don't get overloaded. For example you are not conscious about what every organ in your body is doing at all time. You are not aware about how many cells are glitching or failing. You are not aware about whats happening at the molecular or atomic level. This is not an accident cause the system doesn't have capacities to do anything about it even if it was magically aware about every problem.

Today our info architecture of society is that pathetically designed, that it is doing nothing useful other than overloading everyone.

People have survived all kinds of chaos throughout history. Just look at the life stories of ordinary people who survived the World Wars or Russian or French revolutions. Guess what helped them from having their brains totally fried by the chaos? Ignorance did. Don't pay attention to things way above your pay grade or career trajectory. Nothing good will happen in the current info landscape.

Well these are nonlinear emergence engines. No two will come up with same solution the more ambiguous, dynamic or complex problems get.

Just because your AI gives you a solution, doesn't mean my AI will provide the same. Now scale that fact up to different teams and different firms. How are things going to work? Why will it reduce the number of people? Just like Jurassic Park(or working on Linux), once strange unpredictable things start happening, you need more and more people running around to clean things up. They don't know what the fuck they are doing, or how to do it well, cause thats the nature of complex problems. So things spiral.

Most people are just defaulting to - oh AI will have one answer to everything. And we will all agree to that solution. This will never happen and therefore the predictions will all break.