Warm, but nuanced

December 1, 2023 3:42 PM

Imagine a future that doesn't have to resort to the sledgehammer of social compulsion - no mandates and worse, and no risk of poorly designed and implemented mandates that arguably make things worse - because the infrastructure of public health is woven into the fabric of civilization. These worlds are possible, and a medium amount of funding into bio-defense could make it happen. The work would happen even more smoothly if developments are open source, free to users and protected as public goods. from My techno-optimism by Vitalik Buterin
posted by chavenet (32 comments total)

Imagine thinking Technology will free you from the structure of Capitalism.
posted by symbioid at 3:44 PM on December 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

My point isn't that he's not trying to do the right thing, but doing all this (good luck getting that to happen) - still is reified within the superstructure that is Capitalism. Without an alternative philosophy beyond some abstract "commons" with no real economic foundation to base it on, you'll just be co-opted. I just find it hard to listen to someone who thinks crypto and blockchain (even less environmentally destructive ones like Eth2.0 or whatever) are revolutionary world changing things, and not just that they think it but literally built it. Digital Contracts? All this is even more enslavement, like libertarians pretending "freedom" while still enmeshed. Here we have a liberal version - but still enmeshed.
posted by symbioid at 3:49 PM on December 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Join us on December 22nd at 5PM PST (01:00 UTC, 09:00 SG/HK) as the CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, Founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, and Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, Haseeb Qureshi will be getting together before the holidays to share their views on giving in crypto, Effective Altruism, and their work in the space.

lol bye
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:50 PM on December 1, 2023 [22 favorites]

Sorry i took too quick a dump on this, will try to read more, still not sold, from the beginning and a bit down, but have to dig more to really understand it.
posted by symbioid at 3:53 PM on December 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

If this guy hadn’t invented mint flavour technomoney we wouldn’t have to pay attention to his junior-level writings about “the future”.
posted by The River Ivel at 3:55 PM on December 1, 2023 [9 favorites]

I should trust the wisdom and optimism of the person posting this, but man, the Ethereum dude…
posted by Going To Maine at 5:03 PM on December 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Warm, but nuanced

Describes my insults to a T
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:12 PM on December 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

He makes an opening claim that the benefits of technology vastly outweigh the costs, and as examples to support this he says:

Thanks to online maps, we no longer have to worry about getting lost in the city, and if you need to get back home quickly, we now have far easier ways to call a car to do so.

Uh... What the fuck. I can't think of any city this applies to. Who was getting lost in cities before we had Uber, beyond Kevin McAllister?

I'll read more deeply into this later but for now I need to go take advantage of the transformative effects of technology to hear a guy play guitar, which, to hear Vitalik tell it, would have been not only impossible but unimaginable 40 years ago.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 6:20 PM on December 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

A lot of software people don’t understand how much work infrastructure is.
posted by mhoye at 6:29 PM on December 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

Does… does he not know of the existence of that older technology: maps? Or how some cities have - gasp - public transportation?
posted by eviemath at 6:48 PM on December 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

(get back home quickly

Ok, to be fair, the “quickly” part is not currently a feature of the public transportation options in most North American cities, like it is some other places.)
posted by eviemath at 6:51 PM on December 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Depends on how you define "quickly".
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:36 PM on December 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

From the article:

Existential risk is a big deal

One way in which AI gone wrong could make the world worse is (almost) the worst possible way: it could literally cause human extinction. This is an extreme claim: as much harm as the worst-case scenario of climate change, or an artificial pandemic or a nuclear war, might cause, there are many islands of civilization that would remain intact to pick up the pieces. But a superintelligent AI, if it decides to turn against us, may well leave no survivors, and end humanity for good. Even Mars may not be safe.

I am constantly fascinated by these sorts of folks and their dual certainty that: a) human civilization would, of course, definitely survive any kind of war, pandemic or climate change (and thus we shouldn't spend our time dealing with that), and b) super AI is definitely coming and if we're not careful, will destroy all humans (and thus we should be spending all our time dealing with that).
posted by mhum at 7:51 PM on December 1, 2023 [12 favorites]

You can’t solve social problems with technology. Thinking that you can is the fallacy at the heart of Utopianism.
posted by oddman at 8:11 PM on December 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I reject the mentality that the best we should try to do is to keep the world roughly the same as today but with less greed and more public healthcare

Who is advocating for this outcome?

This makes me mad and I’m only a few paragraphs in. Who thanks reviewers at the beginning? Share your ideas and thank referees at the end: if what you are meaning to express is actual gratitude or proof of your engagement with critical thinkers whose feedback strengthened your arguments and helped you prune out dreck, what possible reason could you have for namedropping before you even say what you came to say?

Are we supposed to take seriously twitter-style polls that only 10 to 90 of a major tech mogul’s thousands of global connections were willing to answer? A link to a 3-paragraph Statista blurb about the number of broadband connections per hundred people in various countries as proof that “thanks to the internet, most people around the world have access to information at their fingertips that would have been unobtainable twenty years ago”?

Our property becoming digitized, and our physical goods becoming cheap, means that we have much less to fear from physical theft. ???

Online shopping has reduced the disparity in access to goods betweeen the global megacities and the rest of the world. ?!?!?

This is fucking embarrassing. How can anyone engage with techno-optimism and its ilk if adherents can’t even think at the level of a B- freshman review paper? What is the matter with our world that people with such stunted critical and intellectual capacity are seen as geniuses, consulted on policy, discussed in the media?
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:11 PM on December 1, 2023 [14 favorites]

You can’t solve social problems with technology. Thinking that you can is the fallacy at the heart of Utopianism.

Not to derail too much, but most utopian communities/attempts throughout history (both secular and religious, though religious experiments in Utopianism rather outweigh secular ones) have been more agrarian. Especially in recent centuries, after the development of capitalism, where they tend to overlap with Romanticism and/or developing religious ideas around Eden as a primitive garden as the state of perfection or purity to which those with utopian leanings desired to return; or in the case of some variants of utopian socialism emerging from the working class, refer to pre-Enclosure and pre-capitalist/factory-based communal economic relations that involved artisanal craft/technological production but were also more agrarian in nature. Fully automated luxury gay space communism (tm) or other versions from classic science fiction that rely on technological solutions — and, specifically, automated or mass production technologies instead of small scale artisanal technologies — to material problems are pretty recent entrants in the lists of utopian visions.
posted by eviemath at 9:44 PM on December 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

humans surpassing monkeys, multicellular life surpassing unicellular life, the origin of life itself, and perhaps the Industrial Revolution, in which machine edged out man in physical strength.

?!?!?!??????????

WHAT

Humans surpassing monkeys?!? What does that even MEAN, especially when followed immediately by a dick-measuring “strength” contest between man and machine?

Multicellular life surpassing unicellular life? I mean, are we talking about biomass here, or perhaps resilience to environmental shock? Species duration? Or is this just the most pitifully obvious “I like being human and wouldn’t want to be a blue-green alga and so the fact that they’ve been in constant existence for the past 3.5 billion years and literally created the oxygen atmosphere that has afforded the proliferation of most multicellular life forms human beings are aware of“ ignorance? Does human surpass multi-drug-resistant TB?

FDA critiques?! Switzerland is often considered to be the closest thing the real world has to a classical-liberal governance utopia.…the other major part is very defense-favoring geography in the form of its mountainous terrain. ?!?!? A completely unexplained infographic from “Oxford researchers” with icons of locks and bombs, viruses and syringes, wind farms vs. coal fired power plants??? Praise for Dogecoin-funded grants that don’t seem to have actually produced anything of value, certainly not better tests, homebrew vaccines, tricorders, etc.?!?! Praise for Twitter’s “Community Notes”?!?!?

The default path forward suggested by many of those who worry about AI essentially leads to a minimal AI world government. … “polytheistic AI” ?!?!?!

This is unhinged. It is religious. What of value is to be had from this?
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:46 PM on December 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

I’m sorry to be so intense, chavenet - you post thought-provoking links, and I appreciate you - but I can’t see any connection between the pull paragraph you posted and literally anything else in what’s written here, just wild and incoherent gesturing about a thousand other topics, finally coming to rest with an invitation to various groups to accept an AI pantheon as their lord and savior.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:53 PM on December 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Tying my previous comment back in, I note that “technology” is historically/traditionally a much, much broader term than Silicon Valley tech bros refer to or envision when they use the word. That is, “tech” is but a small subset of human technologies, which can include both machines and processes. Eg. factory farming systems and small scale permaculture farming systems are both technologies - competing ones, in fact. (That some technologies may preclude others is another detail that tends not to occur to the authors of these sorts of manifestos, it seems. They tend to have a rather inaccurate linear/totally-ordered-set mental model of what is instead a highly complex and branching set of interrelationships.)
posted by eviemath at 9:59 PM on December 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also, these guys are more than wealthy enough to hire editors for their techno-opti/pessi-mism manifestos. Given how high the claimed stakes are, the failure to do so indicates a level of hubris that doesn’t recommend the intellectual product presented.
posted by eviemath at 10:09 PM on December 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

He's not Marc Andreesen (previously) who put out a tech-manifesto in recent times.

I didn't read either. I sympathise that they've been conned by the system, while making other people rich they do not have the agency and impact they wish to have. We all get lied to and give it time in service of amplifying capital. I accept my life has limited agency and impact, something of a daily effort when Buterin and Andreesen make it appear like my mundane life could hit the same tech-grift jackpots they did.

(Meta: chavenet, I would have included the Andreesen prev for context.)
posted by k3ninho at 1:25 AM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

He's not Marc Andreesen (previously) who put out a tech-manifesto in recent times.

I know. He specifically positions himself in opposition to Andreesen’s techno-pessimist manifesto in the intro, in fact. I’m saying the two are not as far apart as he might like to think: like the Catholic/Protestant schism, where both still remain Christians.
posted by eviemath at 7:17 AM on December 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: Sorry i took too quick a dump on this, will try to read.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:57 AM on December 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think it's pretty uncontroversial that technology - from the industrial revolution, green revolution, public sanitation and vaccinations, etc - has made life much more pleasant than before their introduction. The dismissive kneejerk that technology won't change anything is shortsighted and speaks to a great level of privilege. It's a bit rich for a bunch of first worlders to pooh-pooh the idea that it hasn't made life better for many people - just for example, in the last decade mobile phones and photovoltaics alone have enabled people in developing countries in remote communities live a better life. A lot of the things people want, like public healthcare, a robust social safety net, are only possible when built on top of the material abundance produced by technology.

Silicon Valley likes to think of themselves as builders - and given that much of US industry has moved away and infrastructure projects are perennially late and overbudget, it's not as if anybody else is around to contest the title. For better or worse, American software companies have somehow branded themselves as synonymous with "tech" in popular imagination. This is one level of the "techno-optimism" movement. And you know what? We should be building more things! But we need to be circumspect about what is being built and what the impact will be. Buterin's thinking appears to be along these lines. The real question is what kind of technology are we building? I'm fond of Jacques Ellul's observation that as we develop technique (be they technology or processes), they tend to build upon and/or extend what is already present. And since machines - be they mechanical or organizational - are inflexible, what ends up happening is that humans end up having to adapt to them, instead of the other way around. This is how instead of 19th century visions of machines liberating humans from work, in the 21st century have humans working to keep pace with machines.

I'd be remiss if I didn't note a disappointing number of "tech companies" appear to not actually produce anything or even be more efficient - Uber, for example, is basically just taxis on a phone. Or WeWork and Peloton, who have nothing to do with technology except in their branding. Their market cap reflects their potential to extract wealth, not create it - these are innovations in business models, not technology. These are speculative investments premised on the possibility of monopolizing the market, which was possible in a low interest rate environment. Now that money is no longer free, companies have to actually show they are profitable instead of potentially paying off in the far distant future. This is the real reason behind Andreessen (who is a venture capitalist and "techno-optimist") writing a manifesto - he needs the gravy train to keep flowing.
posted by ndr at 12:05 PM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I want to go through the piece again— I thought it had some interesting points, but there's just way too much WTF. Buterin seems to use the syllogism

1. Technology is usually a great thing.
2. I am doing technology.
3. Therefore I am doing a great thing.

which is a fallacy. The weird thing is that he almost seems to get it— he starts out by talking about times when new technology needs fixing, and admits (in boldface!) that "this does not happen automatically, and requires intentional human effort". But when he gets to his favorite techs, AI and crypto, he forgets the lesson entirely. The very idea of a ten-year freeze on AI research sends shivers down his spine, even if he also blandly reports that AI might have an "over 25%" chance of killing us all. Isn't that, like, way too high a chance? Russian roulette has better odds.

But then he spends the rest of the article trying to solve science fiction problems. And I get it that those are more fun to think about, but it's sad that the techbros are too preoccupied with sf problems to even see the actual, practical problems ChatGPT is causing right now.
posted by zompist at 2:03 PM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

What is the matter with our world that people with such stunted critical and intellectual capacity are seen as geniuses

He's an acceptable ethnicity, he's the correct gender, he made some wealthy people wealthier, and in so doing he built a really great infrastructure for further scamming.

...that's pretty much it. Like Elon, minus the foaming racism.
posted by aramaic at 4:22 PM on December 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think it's pretty uncontroversial that technology - from the industrial revolution, green revolution, public sanitation and vaccinations, etc - has made life much more pleasant than before their introduction.

You… you think the Industrial Revolution was uncontroversial? That’s a bit a-historical. Anyway, “technology” is myriad. Some of it has made life more pleasant. Some of it hasn’t. See, for example, the Kissinger obit thread or the Israel-Gaza war threads for some examples where certain technologies have made millions of people’s lives much worse, in many cases by ending them in a scary, painful, and untimely manner. Guns and other war technologies have never been uncontroversial. Heck, even the green revolution has never been uncontroversial, as you can also read about in a recent thread here on Metafilter. And while it pains me that such is the case, sadly vaccines are also far from uncontroversial. (At least I haven’t heard much against public sanitation. Fingers crossed that this doesn’t somehow jinx it.)
posted by eviemath at 7:07 PM on December 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think it's uncontroversial that our current standard of living, much of it the product of the industrial revolution, is much higher than it would be without technology. Even if many people at the time strongly resisted (with good reason), in hindsight, few would want to undo it entirely. And it is myriad - I'm talking about the technological complex taken as a whole (and I suspect Buterin is too). If there was a magic button to revert back 1000 years, how many people would hit it?
posted by ndr at 11:51 AM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

That “our” in “our current standard of living” is doing some work.
posted by eviemath at 2:18 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

The "our" applies to just about everybody other than the North Sentinelese who are effectively cocooned off. Even if you're a farmer in a developing country, you can now get antibiotics that treat what would be incurable maladies in the past, more accessible transportation, cheaper material goods enabled by mass production that save daily drudgery, etc.
posted by ndr at 5:58 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

“The religion of techno-optimism,” Paris Marx, Disconnect, 11 December 2023

Tech billionaires are using faith to solidify their power

posted by ob1quixote at 9:39 AM on December 12, 2023

There are quite a large number of people other than North Sentinelese currently living in war zones, suffering genocide, starvation, or whose historic ways of living have been completely disrupted by climate change, some of whose ancestors at varying point had better lives than their current experience.

On a much smaller scale, just in terms of material comfort, my grandparents’ standard of living as adults in the second half of the 1900s was better than my material standard of living has ever been, and I know quite a few people in the US and Canada my age or younger for whom that is also the case.

Medical knowledge and technology is often pointed to as something that has been improving monotonically, and for those with access to health care that is certainly the case. However, even in the US, there are populations whose health-related standard of living has been in decline due to greater inequality resulting from the political and economic technology of current governments and economic systems (note that this is an instance of a non-material technology).

Material components of standard of living are definitely not everything, and an increased ability to live out of the closet is an important quality of life factor for many folks I know in North America - but some past times and places have definitely been more welcoming for that than many parts of North America currently are (especially for my queer friends of North American Indigenous descent). Technology is not

History is not a monotonic story of human progress. Specifically, the history of human technological development is neither monotonic nor anywhere near uniformly distributed. And that’s not even getting into the issue that “technology” is far too broad a category to attempt to make any such pronouncements about.


And because you seem to still be unclear on this point: technology is not just the machines of an assembly line, it is also the managerial structure that says “let’s have workers do a single task repetitively all day, every day”; it’s not just the cameras and computer programs to track Amazon warehouse workers’ every motion, it’s also the organizational framework or structure that seeks to do so in the first place, and any organized, intentional and codified or structured or theorized in a management or business school somewhere system of punishments and incentives (mostly punishments) that managers use to push workers to or beyond their bodily limits. Our systems of governments are an example of human technology, not just the specific voting machines or office computers and software that help people do the work of those systems of government. Tax codes, and the way that tax forms are designed and laid out, are technologies, not just the mail collection bin or internet that we use to submit our taxes or the pen that we might fill out a paper tax form with, or the machines that print the paper tax forms or the algorithms that ensure the security of our electronically submitted tax information. And so on. Technology encompasses human systems, not just mechanical or electrical or human-mediated biological systems.
posted by eviemath at 1:24 PM on December 12, 2023