I have always wanted to achieve this (to no avail so far). To live for something bigger. To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.
It may sound like, but is not, workaholism. Workaholism is escapism. Workaholism, like alcoholism, roots from a certain sad history one wants to avoid. This is not workaholism, but a conscious pursuit of perfection, of "Godhood", as one may say as an atheist.
Then there's also the case where following your passion is near impossible without a large organization, anything from space to medicine.
But even forgetting all that, there is no reason engineering challenges, team dynamics and sense of accomplishment at a work project can't be higher than for the personal projects you'd do by yourself. Granted, most jobs aren't like that (for myself or for most people) but some of my most challenging and exciting projects were at work.
If you're gonna spend time until you die doing tech things you might as well get paid for it. The less you need the latter the pickier you can be, with your own thing becoming /another option/ at some point.
There are a lot of people that argue that if you were to eliminate wage labor, and distribute goods as equally as possible or at least take care of basic needs for free through universal income or some other means that people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true. As your post illustrates, working and producing is just as essential of an aspect of human life as consuming is—people want to produce, they just want it to be meaningful! They want to work on stuff that aligns with their own interests and beliefs. Ironically the people that claim that this isn't the case are probably the few that actually would prefer to never work (they want to keep wage labor in place so that they can extract capital from laborers while they relax and "lead" instead of produce themselves).
Confusing especially when most people do tens of hours of work outside of paying labor already. Sometimes another 40, or more. Perhaps with UBI et c. some folks would drop to merely 50-60 total hours of work, doing wage labor for only 20-30 of it.
But we only call the other things work when a rich person's paying someone else to do it for them (grocery shopping, lawn care, home maintenance, child care to include things like night time care when they're young ["night nanny" is a thing], meal planning, cooking, shuttling people places in cars, navigating healthcare, elder care, repairing clothes, and so on) because if money's not changing hands it doesn't count, I guess.
Not because money is some sacred object, but because money changes hands when you’re doing work for others. Money is just a lubricant that allows you to contribute your work to society and society to contribute to you in a generalized way rather than a village system where everyone returns the favor in kind.
Imagine we’re in a village, I’m a farmer, youre a tailor. If you want to get fed, you have to either grow your own food or you have to trade clothes to me the farmer because I’m the only one who can trade food back. As soon as you’ve traded with the farmers and we’re all set on clothes, now how are you going to eat? The result is everyone has to be a self sufficient subsistence farmer and only a few non farmers can be supported.
Money just abstracts that labor. It keeps the score on how much you created value for others and people pay you money that they received from the value they provided others.
Work you do for money is work you did for someone else. Picking up your groceries didn’t contribute to anyone else. It’s certainly necessary, nothing morally wrong with it, but society generally should be organized to incentivize contributing to society
What's confusing to me is this notion that if we ease up a little on the stick of "your life will be ruined and you may actually die", the carrot of more money will stop working because people are just that lazy. No, they're not, they do tons of work for no pay.
One of main reasons communism always failed - it never took this basic human nature into account, rather working with some idolized Star trekkish human with strong desire to work on bettering oneself and society, incorruptible, not selfish at all and so on.
I can't see how that is at all morally superior to communism, or how it is any less of a capitulation to the worse tendencies of human nature (hoarding resources for yourself, imposing destitution upon others to get them to do what you want, believing other people are worthless and lazy and that you alone have the wherewithal to be a true hard working human and thus you deserve the extra capital you extract).
All these arguments about "human nature" are bogus. Back then we were not as technologically advanced as we are today. Today we effectively have the means to ensure the goods of society are evenly distributed as a baseline and we also have the means to effect that distribution (think that's not true? Look at amazon. It is basically a privatized version of this idea). The thing holding us back today are these straw man bs arguments that point to ghouls and ghosts like "human nature" and "lazy people" that try to argue that the degradation of society is a natural consequence of equality. No. It isn't. You are witnessing the degradation of society in some countries right now and in almost every case it is because they are grossly unequal and people hoard resources for themselves.
No, the alternative is reality: people pay each other to do things they want done and for things they want to buy from them. There's no artificial scarcity. There's a vast amount of intricate, well-priced effort to reduce or remove scarcity.
We arguably had the means even back then, but it obviously still failed and would likely fail again. Even in the west, hyper-rationalists took various forms (Keynesian economics, urban planning, etc), but it mostly ended up in failure.
The main issue is that there was and is not a static distribution or demand of goods. We can't just decide to give everybody 4 apples/week, etc. Even if we could, demands will always shift in unexpected ways. New products can shift demand in ways planners can't possibly foresee. A new apple desert could come, or people could just plain get tired of apples.
Right now the best and most successful mechanism we have is price signals. When it is said that communism failed because there were bad incentives, people assume that it was because there was no incentive to work hard. While this is somewhat true, the main issue was actually that planners and the whole communist economy could never rationalize supply and demand because they ignored price signals, meaning they often actually induced demands with artificially cheap prices, often resorting to rationing (either formal or de-facto in the forms of long lines).
Even worse, people were rewarded for hitting planning targets, even if the results (successful or not) were often not their fault. The result was people lied, making actual planning nearly impossible. A shoe factory would get bad leather, but make the shoes anyways, even though they fell apart sooner and then (outside of the plan) induced demand for new shoes. There are even stories of cab drivers lifting their cars and running it in reverse to continue working because they otherwise hit the "max" driving they were expected to do.
So "human nature" does in fact play a role, but not in the "I'm to lazy to work in communism" that most people think it is. Amazon doesn't evenly distribute anything, they have a highly sophisticated planning system that at the end of the day responds to price signals, either via bringing in more revenue or reducing costs.
Amazon is an organization/corporation that participates in a market economy (mostly - I won't get into a details rabbit hole over regulation, monopoly, etc) that ultimately responds to price signals in chase of a profit motive and cannot use violence to force people to live within it. Maybe Bezos would like to be able to, maybe he wouldn't, but he can't either way. You can only realistically (morally) compare it to other companies.
Communism (as practised on earth so far) is a centrally planned economy backed by a coercive, centralized state that has a monopoly on violence to competitors, mostly ignores price signals, and usually uses violence against those that try to leave or access alternatives. You can only realistically compare it to other economic and/or government models.
Frankly, explaining communism in your response is just rude, even disregarding how pointed it is. But maybe there is a trend in your responses seeing as how you refuse to actually compare the results of capitalism against the results of communism, as was asked in the post you responded to yet didn't answer the central question thereof, so I put it to you again. I guess you could not answer the question a third time, but I would not expect a response from me if you continue with this obtuse path.
Because you clearly don't understand communism and you need it explained to you.
If you understood communism, then you'd never ask to "compare the results of capitalism against the results of communism", because then you'd have to admit that the death toll from communism is over 100 million and the quality of life significantly lower, while for capitalism the death tool is multiple orders of magnitude lower and the quality of life higher.
So, if we allow people to choose their jobs and don't have any mechanism that weeds out people who aren't good at what they chose to do, no incentive to work jobs nobody wants to do... we'll probably starve before the we die of lack of sanitation.
Communism had this core ethical belief that everyone should contribute as according to their ability and should be served according to their needs. I'm not sure if Marx believed this to be possible in the physical universe, or was it something that we should approach as much as possible given the constraints of the physical universe. But, countries pursuing communism so far all ran into the problem with lack of motivation, corruption and the need to build a police state in an attempt to counter the two.
So... maybe basic income isn't such a bad idea in the world where ambition can be more rewarding, but I still don't know who's going to work "bad" jobs if the alternative is to live off the basic income.
Our technological capabilities vastly outpace those of even just a few decades ago. Communism did not fail because of "human nature" or some other nonsense boogeyman people want to set up as a straw man, it failed for the simpler reason that we did not have sufficient mastery of material or recourse to automations. Today, that is no longer the case and what is actually holding us back are faulty arguments based on the existence of ghosts like "invisible hands" or "universal human nature".
There was a joke that I didn't quite understand at the time:
--What are the benefits of group sex?
--You may slack off.
People who enjoyed their work usually worked outside, or even against the establishment because the system couldn't provide them with adequate reward, not even in a form of recognition.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
A wolf walking half the Europe or an Arctic fox crossing the Arctic, and you think you have the drive to push, to evolve and to throw away the old self.
A lot of the bad parts of computing originated in hollywood. They wanted certainty that you could only play "protected" music or video.
This sort of thing made it "necessary" to lock bootloaders and eventually with the iphone... The ship of theseus didn't belong to theseus anymore, it was just a license.
now lots of devices are cash registers, surveillance devices, e-meters and pop-up generators.
To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.
We need to make collected data and metadata public. If a cabal of advertisers is considered an ethical steward of the information, a public database can’t be much worse. Scare the bejeezus out of moms and pops and watch the tide shift.
Drugs ads being able to show 30s of the one positive side effect and then spend 0.5s speed talking through all the negative ones is not a fair description of the drug.
Almost every product advertising being here's a celebrity (who has no idea how the product works) using the product without any real description of what the product does. Imagine a car ad that had to show you had to pump gas!? It's like one of the most common things you do with a car.
And other product advertising being 100% vibe based. We're the company of tomorrow! The fuck does that even mean?
Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology? The problem is that current advertising only teaches you the existence of something and not what it does.
Check in with trade organizations or whatever? I mean, fundamentally, this is what a sales catalog for a retailer is. That can be, and has been, one of the functions of a store as opposed to a manufacturer selling directly.
I don't think any sane ban on advertising would prevent people from requesting information about new products (which could functionally be ads) which could well include uncompensated reviews in interest magazines or newspapers or whatever.
"This store exists (on your maps app), here are their hours and the category of thing they do, and a link to their website" and once you're on the site, they can go nuts telling you about what they offer.
There is very nearly zero value provided to society by advertising.
In my opinion, ads should be much more limited to brief, factual information to satisfy the “learn about new technology” piece.
“This message is to inform you of a new product, X, made by company Y, intended to do A and B without the side effect of C.”
How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?
Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?
All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.
Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.
- Governments and companies are in symbiosis. Companies can influence which laws are passed and how they apply to them, and governments depend on these companies both financially, and practically for their services. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where actual CEOs are now running the country.
- The general public doesn't really care about these issues. For most people their data and privacy isn't a concern, and even when it is, it's not a large enough of a concern that they would be willing to stop using these services, or use alternatives. Since advertising/propaganda works on a subconscious level, they're literally brainwashed to not see a problem at all.
So I realistically don't see a way out of this. It would require changes in deeply rooted sociopolitical systems just to get on the right path, and then years of effort to keep us there. And without unanimous public support for all of this, it will never come to pass.
As for alternative business models, that's the least of our problems. Technical solutions for this exist today, and wouldn't be difficult to expand and build upon, but the actual challenge is changing the public perception of what "free" means. The solution likely wouldn't be as profitable for companies as advertising currently is, which is why we would need regulations to force it. When weighing the success of another billion-dollar corporation against our society's mental health and stability, the choice is obvious to me.
If there's not enough consumer demand for a service, and it's not a public utility that's worth funding through taxpayer money to maintain equal access for everyone, the logical, supply-and-demand-based, hundred year-old solution is to just admit it's not a good business idea and move on.
If their leadership teams can't come up with an offering worth paying for, well, tough luck, the list of neat ideas that just didn't atract enough customers is perpetually open.
Regardless, I block all of their ads anyway.
Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't. The story that marketers tell themselves that they're simply informing the public about a product or service they might not know about is absolute BS. If it were true, large companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't need to advertise at all. The truth is that it's all about constantly molding the public perception of a company in a way that makes them associate it with a positive feeling, so that they will subconsciously choose to give them their money. These are the same tactics used in propaganda, but instead of making people part ways with their money, it makes them think or act in any way that's beneficial to a specific cause.
The language I use is not hyperbolic, analogies aside. It's the only way of describing the insanity of the world we live in, which now resembles in many ways the fictional world novel authors have been writing about for decades. If you want to engage in the discussion, you can start by refuting anything I've said.
Same with political parties that don't take corporate money (except in sane countries, where this is recognized and forcefully limited).
No they aren't.
The situation is just so absurd and extreme, yet normalized, that accurately describing it makes people sound weird. That's why Chomsky speaks in that extreme monotone, to counterbalance the very real horror and extreme nature of the things he is saying.
To take a classic example from the "sociopathic" mind of Bernays himself:
> The targeting of women in tobacco advertising led to higher rates of smoking among women. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold; in 1929 that percentage increased to 12%, in 1935 to 18.1%, peaking in 1965 at 33.3%, and remained at this level until 1977
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
And there's far, far more to it all. Sometimes you don't need people to change their behaviour, you just need them to be confused (say, about climate change, or who to vote for), and sometimes you just need media corporations to go soft on you because they like your money.
Sometimes you're advertising to kids, because childrens brains are more malleable. They form habits early.
Advertising made smoking cool; it made diamonds valuable; it greenwashed fossil fuel companies that sold our species future for short term profit. If you don't call that behaviour change, what do you call it?
It's easy to see how absurd the practice of advertising is if you think about the actual dynamic.
As human beings we all have intentionality. When we want something, we seek it. "Hey, I really need to cut the lawn, let me find a lawnmower"—I'll go out and research lawnmowers to find one that helps me accomplish my intended goal.
Advertising totally inverts this dynamic. Instead, apropos of nothing, some person I don't know and have no relationship with interrupts some other thing I am in the middle of intentionally doing to tell me all about their fancy lawnmowers. At its worst (and most effective) it short circuits my own potential formation of intentions and reshapes my intentions, manipulating me, and at its least effective it's just a completely annoying distraction from what I was originally trying to do. It's horrible and antithetical to any notion of respect and dignity you might ascribe to the limited time of other human beings.
the first real annoyances were Spam and Punch the monkey, both parts of the advertising industry.
The good old days before cookies and trackers...
Po Bronson’s “First $30 Million” is also a classic that seems to have been memory-holed.
We are in a boom and bust and boom ... the current moment rhymes with 1993 of the internet boom - lots of hype, lots of big money .. but also something new and useful is emerging.
Its happening faster this time around ... BUT I do see a capital-to-startup impedance mismatch problem - imo, we need smaller, faster, standardized early pre-seed rounds : to build the future we need angels to take 10 x 30k bets, not 2 x 150k bets.
We actually dont need to wait for AGI to achieve an incredible creation of wealth and improve our lives .. we can just _apply_ the tech that already exists in raw form today. The resulting growth will override a plateauing Moores Law, and use all those largely dormant many-cores on todays CPU/GPU/NPU hybrid chips.
Its the best of times and the worst of times - geopolitical and economic malaise coinciding with a Cambrian explosion of new technology.
I dont think most VCs have the background to recognize this new kind of startup .. but tech-founders who had an exit payout will be well placed to go fly fishing for them - Im hoping these people will step in and Angel invest, to build the future they see on the horizon.
I’d bet a lot of people do it for the status, because they want to be able to describe themselves as investors.
Whether or not that makes them chumps to people who actually do make real money as investors doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the target audience for the status message.
Less cynically, there’s also a motivation, at least amongst some, to help people building startups.
Governments giving money as science grants ?
Are you against all VC investment in startups ?
Philanthropy donations ?
or.. would millionaires be the people starting new startups and doing science research to scratch their own itch ?
I guess the history of science and tech has examples of all of the above.
I think there's a place for government to invest and incentivise startups for sure, but man do you ever need to watch it like an eagle or it will quickly devolve into malignant opportunism on the tax payers dime.
As an example, up here in Canada, we have the Scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) tax incentives program. Basically a significant business tax reduction that any company could get (including those that shouldn't), but it required a ceremony / lengthy and annoying process that was quickly outsourced for a percentage of the gains. So now we have businesses who's sole purpose is to get SR&ED for your startup.
So SR&ED is now mandatory for Canadian tech businesses since it saves you 30-50% in tax. We're talking big boys like Shopify too.
Implementation really really matters, and you need to constantly review these things for abuses or they quickly devolve into a transfer of wealth.
ahh, am trying to do that - largely self-funded RnD over 4 years -
Also trying to wake people up about the scope for ML to be applied to real engineering problems / processes ..
We hear of applied-RL/ML examples at the elite end, such as taming fusion plasma, weather prediction on a desktop, solving protein structure from DNA sequence etc..
Yet there are vast applications such as training robot hands to sort refuse for recycling, optimal heat flow in industrial processes, silicon chip layout, 2D photos to 3D models ...
My own startup domain is detecting geometry in pointclouds .. which is currently a lot of repetitive manual labor done for the construction industry.
It is frustrating talking to VCs .. because they really dont believe there is any other AI than LLMs.
My guess is the only people who will fund this kind of useful tech are post-exit technical founders.
No.
Nor am I against angel investing. Except that I (personally) would never do it.
This accurately describes being in a rising tech trend. The most common experience is knowing where things are going but failing to find a way to catch the wave.
Boy, those early seasons of "getting so close to success before all the self-sabotage happens" were kind of brutal in a way, but I still highly recommend pushing through to the later seasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150623211113/https://grantland...
Yet it was the happiest time I remember in the whole saga.