Technology

The following doesn’t apply to everybody in technology, but it applies to enough of them: At some point STEM education was the only thing the Olds cared about because of something something Asia, and now we have a couple of generations that are highly educated on paper and comically unaware of the complexity of the world outside of WordPress plugins.

I was going to say it's not just technology executives. I'm glad the author addressed this too. It's the whole industry.

People do this to ourselves too. How often do people see a tech nerd and think they're some sort of all knowing demigod.

"You're a tech guy. Here fix my thing."

"Tell me about such and such complex topic complete outside of your niche professional expertise but you're of the All Knowing so opine me your All Knowing wisdom."

Everybody just fucking stop already.

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Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got somethin' to say

But nothin' comes out when they move their lips, just a bunch of gibberish

This is so on point and perfect. Like, 'shamelessly abuse my mod privledges and pin if I was a mod' perfect.

"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing [technology executives]. You need to think of [them] the way you think of a lawn mower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about [technology executives]."

-- Brian Cantrill (Originally about Larry Ellison specifically)

The issue I feel, is we live in a society that equates money with importance. This guy over here made lots of money so he must be smart right? No, no it doesn't.

The headline should be Stop Talking to Technology Executives, Tax Them.

Here's a similar post by Ed Zitron (Titled: Make Fun of Them). He gives a few examples of complete nonsensical stuff that some big Tech CEOs have said, and goes on to argue that more people, especially those who cover tech in media for a living, need to be far more critical of tech CEOs and not just basically go "oh wow thats so cool" to everything they say.

It’s not even an unwillingness to admit ignorance: it’s the lack of awareness that there’s already a conversation.

This is the take-home point. They aren't unaware there's already a conversation. Their hubris compels them to believe they can answer these questions better than whatever the liberal establishment has come up with.

These people suffer from a severe lack of imagination. Raised to pursue success along a solitary economic metric, they ignore all arts and sciences extraneous to that pursuit. They treat the world outside their interests like a children’s game they’re not really into. Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own.

That's the startling thing about these tech guys: they are utterly oblivious to life outside of their extremely narrow little domain, and they occupy that domain largely because they never had the imagination or curiosity to look past it. The Silicon Valley milieu they grew up in told them that success consisted in this one thing, and they just swallowed the story and dedicated their lives to it without ever pausing to question, investigate or think for themselves. They buy into ideologies without ever exploring alternatives. They condemn the humanities with no understanding of them, and no interest in learning. They constantly attempt to solve philosophical, existential or cultural problems with technology, because they don't even notice that they're not engineering problems. These are dull people, the sort who'd stockpile art as an investment and status symbol without ever looking at it for more than a few seconds. They're rich financially but in other ways everyone can see how impoverished they are except them.

The gibberish from Altman is clearly done in bad faith.

When defining AGI in negotiations with Microsoft, there was no faux-philosophy or other types of word salad. They defined anything that gave them $100B per annum in revenue as AGI, philosophy and technology be damned.

Unfortunately, you can't just politely ignore people with an eleven-to-thirteen-digit line of credit. That much of a hand in the consumption habits of the richest country on earth commands attention whether you like what they're saying or not.

The real question is whether you're going to be a WaPo-style hack stenographer who shows up at these events and whispers "These people are fairy wizards who can do real God-magic and transform the universe into a Science Fantasy wonderland!" Or you come at it from the Ed Zitron / Molly White / Riley Quinn / Any Sane Person at the Financial Times perspective, tearing into the actual balance sheets and analyzing the runways of these bloated economy leeches, and guestimating what future impact their continued operation will have on the rest of the domestic and global economies.

Tech Execs have to be taken seriously but not literally. When Zuck says he wants a trillion dollar spending line on datacenters to supercharge humanity, you have to read that with the same gravitas as a weather forecaster predicting a Cat-5 hurricane making landfall.

In the past the people who knew about tech were promoting new things and the people who didn’t were skeptical.

With AI the people with less technical knowledge are gung ho and the ones who understand are skeptical.

That was an awesome piece. We need more people willing to speak out about all the obvious bullshit like this, but more importantly we need this kind of critical thinking to reach the people who are uncritically driving the continued use of these crappy-ass tools that are burning the planet. I’m thinking about CEOs (who will only do anything if it helps their bottom line), but also about your boomer co-workers who think ChatGPT is the fucking messiah and remind you about it every chance they get.

This was a delightful read, especially since I agree with the premise fully. Those people need to shut the fuck up.