You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.
Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.
If they didn't have to answer for iPad babies then unfortunately they won't have to answer for this either.
I've resolved to accepting the fact that most people are just content with any form of brain rot because the alternatives are too mentally taxing. Technology has just enabled brain rot to distill into its current form, but the demand has always been there.
Idk about you but I would not consider AI-generated memories of my grandparents even remotely close to being an authentic experience whatsoever. One of my grandparents passed before I was born, so any synthetic depictions of us are fake. That frankly sounds like a post-apocalyptic experience, if not worse than that.
The e/acc camp will tell you AGI can solve all of those, which is why AI research needs to move as fast as possible. What they don't tell you is only an aligned AGI can solve it in a way beneficial for humans.
We had a half-assed lockdown for a few months where most people just kind of stayed indoors and saw noticeable environmental improvements world-wide. An unaligned AGI can easily conclude the best way to fix these problems is to un-exist all humans.
This is the same as slacklining over a ravine with no harness. Are the views epic? Yes. Does the adrenaline rush feel good? Yes. Are the consequences irreversible if you happen to mess up? Probably yes. The last point is why there's so much more doomerism compared to OpenAI's previous products. We don't have that harness and we don't know if we'll ever have it.
AI and AGI are practically two different concepts that most of the industry and the mainstream media are doing a poor job making the distinguishment between them.
Also, 100 slightly wonky houses will sell like hot cakes if each one costs less than 1/100th of a not-slightly-wonky house. People will buy 100 of them instead of 1 and just live in a different one every day/hour so they always notice the novel parts instead of the wonky parts. We've had mass manufacturing for centuries and they always prevail when the trade-offs are acceptable.
Yours is an optimistic take and frankly I do agree with most of it: there isn't an upper bound to economic opportunities as long as everyone gets to use the tools, since the cost/risk to produce something new will significantly decrease, this will boost the diversity of creative industries from which countless gems will be made. However the problem is what if everyone loses their current opportunities before these techs become widely available? How to handle the transition period? A monopoly/oligopoly is not going to care about helping the average person in accomplishing that transition, because it won't make their next quarterly earnings report look pretty.
Let's agree to disagree here because we are clearly not talking about the same things at all. I suggest reading up on what Chinese mega apps look like and Musk's personal comments that referred to WeChat. Adding longform video is exactly part of a conventional mega-app and it is absolutely not revolutionary whatsoever.
Has he ever stated anywhere that his long term vision is a "general computing platform"? Because mega-apps are not that. There has been zero building happening or even hinted at towards his everything app vision while he is wrecking everything at Twitter.
1. The "everything app" being talked about is essentially a Chinese tech giant mega-app, which are absolutely not general purpose computing platforms which are not "apps" themselves.
2. Agreed but this has nothing to do with Twitter or mega-apps whatsoever.
3. Transitioning to cloud service is not what Twitter needs to do right now even under the mega-app vision. And attempting so under their current situation is a sure fire way to actually go bankrupt.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely do not have "everything" apps. Google Maps is the closest to a mega-app and it's still highly focused on things that are location-based.
These companies also don't favour their own services over others on their cloud platforms. That's why regulators aren't coming after them. Twitter is not a cloud service provider and it's not hard to see why the argument you presented does not hold up.
It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it.
Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
His high level vision was to create "X the everything app" in the style of mega-apps offered by Chinese tech giants. Not only does this vision require clearing massive regulatory hurdles, secure immense amount of capital funding, and acquire/build a highly diversified portofolio of companies covering multiple unrelated consumer sectors, there's probably nobody willing or capable to take that job.
The thing is this didn't have to be his bomb to hold in the first place. He made what appeared to be an impulsive decision to offer an overpriced acquisition deal and waived due diligence leading him trapped in a position he couldn't back out of without consequences.
IC fabrication and packaged component assembly are very different things. China doesn't have anything near this level of sophistication, at least not without any outside help.
Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.