I recall about ten years ago there was a poster here who warned about tech authoritarianism, got banned for it, and had his career destroyed for the service.
At first, “scary numbers” seems ridiculous. Then you realize we live in a world where otherwise meaningless numbers (also known as “money”) are, because of their emotional effects on others, scaling up to the whole society, legitimately fear-inducing.
Right. The fundamental difference is that LLMs are a technical achievement that almost no one expected to come this fast. Neural networks were long considered a dead approach—not anymore. In 2015, most of us thought we’d be where we are today in NLP circa 2040.
The business fad will no doubt end in a fiery crash as people discover the hard way the limitations of LLMs, but the underlying achievement is still real. This is more like 2001. Lots of dot-coms died either because they were silly or tragically ahead of their time, but the Internet never went away. (Unfortunately, it does seem to be evolving into a worse version of itself due to platform decay, but that’s another topic entirely.)
The good news is that these costs are still in exponential decline and will be for at least a few years. The early iterations are costly, but later versions will be cheap.
The bad news is that because we live under Hobbesian capitalism, (a) the high-value target is human labor (i.e., the ruling class is deciding the middle one is an undesirable expense and a competitive threat) rather than ecological harm, and (b) we will probably see Jevons Paradox arms races that almost no one wants as warmongers and billionaires one-up each other.
The technology itself, nevertheless, could very much be a force for good.
It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself. A company is no less and no more than a pile of someone else’s money that will do literally anything, including destroy your life, to become a bigger pile.
You should do a good job for individuals who will repay you later on. Companies themselves these days can sod off—they stand for nothing.
Usually when you’re in a shitty situation, all the people who know who you are are also in bad situations and probably can’t hire or protect you. That’s how business works—things go bad at the same time. All correlations go to one in a crash.
Two things can be true. Most people don’t climb the corporate ladder because there are a limited number of spots, that’s true, and it is also true for most people that the reason they won’t make it is that they’re not good enough at emotional labor.
The capitalists have found a way to make 51+% of the justifiably furious people vote for further dismantling of the institutions that work (as well as anti-DEI witch hunts and other nonsense) and, therefore, more abandon and decay.
This is a fancy word for “being human in a hostile and duplicitous world.”
There is a real cognitive cost to knowing everything is invalid but being disallowed to say it is this because then one is contributing to “a morale problem.” The weight of all the emotional labor is why most people can’t climb the corporate ladder, as the intellectual demands of office work are basically zero. Normally it is only autistic people who struggle with this cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, but since 2020 it has been basically everyone. The fact that our world is run by terrible people who will probably not go away until removed violently is one of those things no one can talk about, but everyone knows.
The problem is that only 0.01% of the people who need to be held accountable are. The number isn’t zero, clearly, but how many of the people who caused the 2008 disaster ended up in prison? My point exactly.
I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad. Clearly he’s a scumbag who deserves prison time, but people worse than him are free.
It doesn’t shield small business owners in practice, though. Bank loans tend to require personal liability, and there are ways to pierce the corporate veil when the company is provably one person. So individuals get only a small amount of protection in practice. Even if you fail in good faith, there’s a good chance that your life and reputation are ruined.
On the other hand, large companies are basically private armies in which the presumably passive shareholders are so distant from the actions taken on their benefit that people almost never go to jail unless they are deliberately thrown to the wolves by shareholders or superiors.
This. The entire point of corporations is to shield individuals from penalties, but they don’t work. Business failure in good faith, where the shielding makes sense, is not really protected because bank loans require personal liability and because it’s impossible these days to recover from a damaged reputation unless you come from a family rich enough to hire its own PR firm. On the other hand, when it comes to letting rich people get away with absolutely unambiguous criminality, corporations work very well.
They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.
* discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.*
It’s not the research or teaching that drive people out of academia. It’s the endless and humiliating scrambling for money. Everyone who’s not a psychopath hates that part of the job, and the people who are any good at it have options outside of academia.
This is an excellent post and I agree. That said, we should vilify people who get rich (small or large scale) in reprehensible ways, e.g. class traitors and people who enforce the system. But the distinction between people who simply succeed in a corrupt world (because life is random) and those who are rewarded for making it worse is important and underacknowledged.
The issue is game-theoretic. There’s value in having money, absolutely, but most people end up having to chase it and never get any. If one person chases money, emancipation results for him. If everyone chases money, as most of us are forced to do, we end up miserable, and nobody wins except the people we should be removing from power as fast as possible.
Money clearly matters a lot, though. Why? Because we live in an objectively evil society—an oligarchy that has no language but money.