
The tech industry’s God complex is getting out of control - radmuzom
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/13/the_tech_industrys_god_complex_is_getting_out_of_control/
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Zigurd
If you think of the dangers and flaws in technology today as a big bug list
full of critical showstopper issues, this article is a bug report that not
very clearly describes issues that have repeatedly been closed as "not a bug"
or "will not fix."

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eli_gottlieb
The article splits into two streams on the "God Complex" subject and fails to
address them _separately_ , which would be the proper treatment.

There's the god complex of thinking that your latest social-mobile-local
disrupt-a-service-industry start-up is world-changingly important and entitles
you to be a douchebag to everyone else around you. Yeah, that's just hubris; I
say "just" hubris because if you go around thinking like that, the business
cycle can and will punish you for your overly inflated view of yourself. It is
a temporary inconvenience but an eventually self-correcting problem. The rest
of us just have to keep our money in index funds long enough to remain solvent
until the markets stop being irrational.

(Mind, so far the markets have actually behaved _rationally_ , as
technological innovation is cheaper when capital is cheaper, and when there's
no place _else_ for capital to go for high returns, it floods into low-impact
consumer technology for socially suboptimal but economically rational reasons.
Anyway!)

And then there's the god complex in which _we are actually playing God_. You
know: genetic engineering, pervasive surveillance, greenhouse-gas emissions,
automation destroying jobs, anything and everything to which the adjective
"transhuman" can be attached, all that stuff. In an economically "ironic" way,
most of these require both massively more capital investment to work than VCs
are prepared to part with at once, but all stand to have utterly massive
historical impacts. Also, these are _real technologies_ , not consumerist
gimmicks: the markets will _not_ automatically punish us for spreading Roundup
Ready genes across a continent's worth of crops or building a human-unfriendly
artificial general intelligence. We will _merely_ suffer the natural
consequences of our own actions.

So in the first category, we in the tech industry are hubristic and
irresponsible if we believe ourselves godlike, while in the _second_ category
we are hubristic and irresponsible if we believe ourselves _mere mortals_. We
ought to remember that Oppenheimer, too, was a _mere mortal_.

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invalidOrTaken
I disagree strongly with this article. Yes, sure, there are probably some in
our culture that think they can do no wrong. But life has a way of disabusing
us of these illusions.

But this article isn't attempting to change their minds. Rather, it's
attempting to instill paranoia into the minds of _non_ -technical readers.

So, I mean, good luck with that. Maybe he'll succeed (probably not, it's one
article). But I have a hard time taking this extended sidelong remark
seriously.

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xiaoma
Marc Andreessen pioneered the web browser and contributed greatly to the very
platform we're using to have this discussion. After that, he became half of
the pre-eminent VC firm that funded so many later developments in web tech.
That's why I assign weight to his opinions and tweet sets.

Why should I assign weight to the opinions of the author of this rambling
piece?

> _" Marc Andreesen tweets that tech superpowers “upgrade us as creators,
> builders, inventors, designers, artists: _producers _.” And it is certainly
> true that the smartphone — infinitely more accessible and far cheaper than
> the personal computers of yesterday — democratizes access to the information
> age. But what he fails to mention is that, when everyone has superpowers,
> that’s the same as nobody having superpowers, and the same social inequities
> that give some people advantages over others will reassert themselves. The
> advantages of class, wealth and location don’t vanish. "_

This is a huge logical jump. Everyone having superpowers is _not_ the same as
nobody having them. Yes there are some positional goods but there are also
many, many others that aren't. Consider the _typical_ person's existence now
compared to 50 years ago when most the world lived in poverty. Or compare it
to 4000 years ago when lives were shorter, more violent and offered fewer
options. Simply put the difference between everyone or no one having
superpowers is the difference between a life of abundance and one of scarcity.

