The last few posts from Sam Altman have been deeply troubling and make me worried for the future of YC. He presents leftist ideas as fact without evidence of serious critical thought or even basic economic education.
"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."
This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a weaver or a smith. You have dedicated your life to mastering the craft and slowly produce products by hand. Now a textile factory or a foundry opens up. You will suddenly find it impossible to make your products profitably. Not only will you be out of work, but so will all of your colleagues in the rest of the country.
Or imagine you are a farmer, and then the green revolution happens. In 1870, 80% of the US population was in agriculture. Today, its under 2%.
In both of these cases, it will seem like the end of the world to the displaced workers. But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.
We've gotten to the point that even admitting the existence of possible negative consequences of current economic trends is "leftist."
It's so very ironically Soviet. Collectivized farming is boosting crop yields! What? There are people starving? How would that be possible, because collectivized farming is boosting crop yields!
What is factually wrong about that statement? He doesn't say the new technology requires huge numbers of weavers and farmers.
There's nothing about being freed for "new purposes" that means those new purposes have economic value or will necessarily uplift your standard of living. In the developing world, they are undergoing the industrial revolution now so they are going through the same process of replacing farm jobs with factory jobs. But in the developed world, unemployment and inequality are rising.
>But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.
That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.
We should think about how to make technological progress work for us in a positive way instead of blundering forward on the assumption that it will automatically turn out that way. That's what I read this essay as advocating. I don't see that as particularly far "left" or "right," just... well... thinking.
What's funny is that modern so-called "neoliberals" seem to have adopted the Marxist idea of automatic progress. We are headed "forward" to the automatically-better future.
I think that's bollocks. We get the future we choose and work to achieve.
Rather than drawing such a broad conclusion (a troubled future for YC), it could be that's he's just trying to emulate the very informative and enjoyable essays of PG, and still trying to find his footing as a writer. I think that's a simpler more likely explanation.
"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."
This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a weaver or a smith. You have dedicated your life to mastering the craft and slowly produce products by hand. Now a textile factory or a foundry opens up. You will suddenly find it impossible to make your products profitably. Not only will you be out of work, but so will all of your colleagues in the rest of the country.
Or imagine you are a farmer, and then the green revolution happens. In 1870, 80% of the US population was in agriculture. Today, its under 2%.
In both of these cases, it will seem like the end of the world to the displaced workers. But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.