Posts Tagged ‘Marc Andreessen’
“Our poetry is courage, audacity and revolt”*…
One of your correspondent’s daily delights is Rusty Foster‘s Today in Tabs, a newsletter that informs and provokes as it, inevitably, amuses. Take for example this excerpt from Monday’s installment, subtitled “Today in Fascism”…
“Could the end of the AI hype cycle be in sight?” asked TechBrew’s Patrick Kulp and precisely on time today here’s a doorstop of LinkedIn-brained crypto-(but-not-too-crypto)-fascism from Egg Andreessen titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” It’s very long, and you should absolutely not read it, but it’s useful for finally making explicit the fascist philosophy that people like Brad Johnson have long argued is growing steadily less implicit in Silicon Valley’s techno-triumphalism.
“Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die,” writes Egg, and Rose Eveleth was already like 🤔:
But before going fully mask-off, Andreessen has some crazy things to say about AI.
There are scores of common causes of death that can be fixed with AI, from car crashes to pandemics to wartime friendly fire.
But AI can surely help us kill the right people in war much more efficiently, yes? Still, he needs to make a pseudo-moral case to keep pumping cash into the AI bubble, so we get this:
We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.
Got that, Untermenschen? Regulation == murder. [Followed by the photo at the top]
But let’s get to the good stuff, in the section titled “Becoming Technological Supermen” (I swear I’m not making this up).
We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.
We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.
To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
The first two paragraphs here are just bonkers. He’s horny for trains? I guess he saw North By Northwest at an impressionable age. But that last paragraph contains the only quote in the whole piece that isn’t attributed to a specific source, and it turns out it’s not really a paraphrase, it’s a direct quote from Filippo Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto” with “technology” substituted for the original’s “poetry.” I wonder if Marinetti wrote any other famous manifestos?
In case we somehow still don’t get it, Andreessen specifies that “The Enemy” is “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable…” and then drops an extended Nietzsche excerpt. You know who else hated the ivory tower and loved Nietzsche?…
“Industrial Society and Its Future (Are Gonna Be Great!),” from @rusty.todayintabs.com. Do yourself the favor of subscribing to Today in Tabs— it’s marvelous.
* Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesti Futuristi
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As we reprioritize prudence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that Richard F. Outcault‘s comic strip Hogan’s Alley— featuring “the Yellow Kid” (Mickey Dugan)– debuted in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal as a regular feature. While “the Yellow Kid” had appeared irregularly before, it was the first full-color comic to be printed regularly (many historians suggest), and one of the earliest in the history of the comic; Outcault’s use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper comic strips and comic books. Outcault’s work aimed at humor and social commentary; but (perhaps ironically) the concept of “yellow journalism” referred to stories which were sensationalized for the sake of selling papers (as in the publications of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, an earlier home to sporadic appearances of the Yellow Kid) and was so named after the “Yellow Kid” cartoons.
“Not with a bang, but a whimper”*…
What actually happens to workers when a company deploys automation? The common assumption seems to be that the employee simply disappears wholesale, replaced one-for-one with an AI interface or an array of mechanized arms.
Yet given the extensive punditeering, handwringing, and stump-speeching around the “robots are coming for our jobs” phenomenon—which I will never miss an opportunity to point out is falsely represented—research into what happens to the individual worker remains relatively thin. Studies have attempted to monitor the impact of automation on wages on aggregate or to correlate employment to levels of robotization.
But few in-depth investigations have been made into what happens to each worker after their companies roll out automation initiatives. Earlier this year, though, a paper authored by economists James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, and Wiljan Van den Berge set out to do exactly that…
What emerges is a portrait of workplace automation that is ominous in a less dramatic manner than we’re typically made to understand. For one thing, there is no ‘robot apocalypse’, even after a major corporate automation event. Unlike mass layoffs, automation does not appear to immediately and directly send workers packing en masse.
Instead, automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies—whether they’re fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit—and causes a long-term loss of wages for the employee.
The report finds that “firm-level automation increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of 11 percent of one year’s earnings.” That’s a pretty significant loss.
Worse still, the study found that even in the Netherlands, which has a comparatively generous social safety net to, say, the United States, workers were only able to offset a fraction of those losses with benefits provided by the state. Older workers, meanwhile, were more likely to retire early—deprived of years of income they may have been counting on.
Interestingly, the effects of automation were felt similarly through all manner of company—small, large, industrial, services-oriented, and so on. The study covered all non-finance sector firms, and found that worker separation and income loss were “quite pervasive across worker types, firm sizes and sectors.”
Automation, in other words, forces a more pervasive, slower-acting and much less visible phenomenon than the robots-are-eating-our-jobs talk is preparing us for…
The result, Bessen says, is an added strain on the social safety net that it is currently woefully unprepared to handle. As more and more firms join the automation goldrush—a 2018 McKinsey survey of 1,300 companies worldwide found that three-quarters of them had either begun to automate business processes or planned to do so next year—the number of workers forced out of firms seems likely to tick up, or at least hold steady. What is unlikely to happen, per this research, is an automation-driven mass exodus of jobs.
This is a double-edged sword: While it’s obviously good that thousands of workers are unlikely to be fired in one fell swoop when a process is automated at a corporation, it also means the pain of automation is distributed in smaller, more personalized doses, and thus less likely to prompt any sort of urgent public response. If an entire Amazon warehouse were suddenly automated, it might spur policymakers to try to address the issue; if automation has been slowly hurting us for years, it’s harder to rally support for stemming the pain…
Brian Merchant on the ironic challenge of addressing the slow-motion, trickle-down social, economic, and cultural threats of automation– that they will accrue gradually, like erosion, not catastrophically… making it harder to generate a sense of urgency around creating a response: “There’s an Automation Crisis Underway Right Now, It’s Just Mostly Invisible.”
* T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
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As we think systemically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that Ken McCarthy, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Graham held the first conference to focus on the commercial potential of the World Wide Web.
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