That's my problem with a lot of the literature on building successful businesses. They all seem to be offering a white glove path and don't talk about all the tactics ranging from shady to downright illegal that helped many of the biggest companies today to be where they are now.
When I was a kid, I read about Jack Welch and thought he was great. Later I learned of all the shenanigans he pulled, not just unethical, but illegal stuff. And the way he trampled people. Bill Gates is a respected philanthropist today, he too did all kinds of shady, ruthless stuff to get to the top. Everywhere I look, same story - Amazon, Facebook, Google... The only big company I think is okay is Costco - either they really are good or I haven't yet about their practices.
There is this podcast called Behind the bastards - in one way, it is eye opening. But it is also depressing, it does a pretty good job of shattering all our beliefs and respect for the rich and the successful.
Is it even possible today to become super successful without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff? Everything from garden variety wage theft all the way upto buying politicians and corporate espionage?
USA culture has this idolatry for the Rich that looks like what the aristocracy always did: my "beloved" king, the kind princess...
Like the philanthropy of the robber barons that made them respectable, but when they are still alive.
I prefer the French approach to take care of aristocrats.
> America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
> Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
In 388 BC, Aristophanes tackled the question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Society has evolved since then, but not drastically. I find his perspective "compelling" :-)
The French Revolution led to quite poor results for those fortunate enough to survive it. You might prefer the approach, but I doubt you’d enjoy the aftermath.
I am not being sarcastic. The revolution and subsequent wars caused extremely high casualty rates among French men, while the country isolated itself from international trade, and suffered negative economic consequences.
Have you held the nations that stayed aristocratic and the havoc they caused next to france? Getting rid of parasitic waterhead bodies of government is always a pro birthong pains included.
PS : Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy of f europe jumped the reforming nation.
Can’t replay the counter factual, but for those that lived it, there were regrets… and most reasoned there was a better way about the changing of power.
Also, it’s not like it was all happy republicanism after the terror, there was a new elite replacing the old (Napoleons) and he was a petty noble anyway, plenty of the aristocracy stuck around, and said emperor did his best to marry into Europe’s aristocracy. Seems a bit like musical chairs, don’t you think? Plenty of France was still royalist too anyway after it all. I don’t think the narrative is so clear, except everyone realized you can’t beat down your peasants too hard.
Even Peter the Great, traveling through France in the 1700s, wondered how long the wealth disparity could last, having seen Versailles and the peasants from the road.
The problem with the French revolution was that the radicals moved too far, too fast, in the social reform. Their economics werent the issue, it was the total disregard for any religious or traditional culture and the factionalism that doomed the revolutionaries.
peter the great gave a shit about the peasants , like all Russian zhars, russians had cholera as main source of death till the communists did take over. thats drink from the place you shit in savagery ,those aristocrats did less then nothing and deserved to be purged for dysfunctionality alone . You can not romanticize backwardness just because the front fell of the anti democratic progressive priest caste in the west. Those guys didn't built a thing either besides a caste system .
Big part the French Revolution is not by chance called “la Terreur”.
You can acknowledge that the values the revolution promoted are good, aristocratic rule needed reform, while still being clear that revolutions are not a peaceful thing, especially not for poor or marginalised groups.
50.000 people executed is quite some birthing pains…
I think he means to say that had the other European nations not declared war on France with all the grand coalitions, the casualty rate wouldn’t be what it was.
Even without that, the execution rate in the Reign of Terror was appalling and I doubt it's something the initial commenter would want to live through. Revolutions only sound good idealistically but are very difficult to pull off, most even fail.
It led to dictatorship and itself was a super bloody dictatorships. The regime it replaced was failing, corrupt etc. But the revolution was not "make us free and happy" kind of event. It was "and now we are going to go through really really bad times" kind of event.
Strange response, heard of the Reign of Terror? This helped Napoleon rise to power and after he was overthrown, they simply went back to kings. It didn't really solve anything.
America's attitude towards the rich is heavily qualified gratitude. Rich people tend to create lots of wealth. It's hard to argue Microsoft hasn't made America better. Same with Google, FB, etc.
But the rich are most likely to support effective political solutions (and be politely ignored).
Rich people have, in general, made America a better country, and there's a certain deference because of that.
But this isn't blind stupidity. The Sackler family is as unloved as the Manson family. But even folks who built their wealth in questionable ways (the Kennedys) tend to make America a better place.
I saw a video on Youtube where an American asked a Belgian where the "new money" families lived. The Belgian said "what are you talking about, there is no new money." Most Americans react in horror to that idea.
> But even folks who built their wealth in questionable ways (the Kennedys) tend to make America a better place.
I dispute that strongly. How has the Walton family made America a better place? I'd say they've made it a much worse place. Similarly, Zuck hasn't "made America a better place". I'm not sure you can argue that Gates and Microsoft have.
This sounds like the same trickle down economics BS that we've been fed for decades now.
The only real benefit is to the owners of Walmart though. Their food is not healthier, and their business impact is not better for local economies than what came before.
You can't have food that is at the same time cheap, healthy and at your doorstep. You can have two of them. Walmart gets you cheap and nearby. If you want healthy and nearby, go to Whole Foods and be prepared to stretch your wallet. Not everyone can afford it though.
I don't think the stores that used to exist had the same or superior choice of goods and the same prices as Walmart did. I mean there might be some that did, but they persist even in the presence of Walmart - I have several Walmarts within 15 min drive of me, and still know a bunch of local grocery stores and specialized shops that still do fine. But I am not sure why "local store" is inherently superior to Walmart unless it does something better, or how it will be able to deliver on the all three.
Their food is absolutely cheaper for the same health value as comparable grocery stores. Walmart was amazing for low income families in small cities and rural areas.
> In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.
> They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.
All that research indicates is that Walmart isn’t a good place to work. It doesn’t say anything about how much is saves you by shopping there.
I saw this first hand when Walmart showed up in my small city in the 90s. Everyone saved enormous amounts of money, complained about shopping there, and avoided working there because the pay was shit.
If you were low income and had a job outside of Walmart retail competition space, Walmart was a godsend. Think teachers, construction workers, etc.
so what? it came at the expense of thousands of small businesses, destroyed hundreds of towns, and is one of the largest transfers of wealth in US history
Some interesting books in this category:
* Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software
* Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs biography. Einstein’s 4 papers are one of the most unexpected, ground breaking discoveries in history
* Houdini!!! Tells the story of the escape artist and magician, and exposer of psychics.
* The Double Helix
* Stress Test. By Tim Geithner who pulled the world out of the financial crisis
* Man’s Search for Meaning. Surviving and finding meaning in a concentration camp
This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected them).
I'm fairly convinced most successful "social" sites have bodies buried somewhere. The problem of launching a two-sided market is tough.
It was against my ethics but we sent a round of unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been a really good list (and a different time and place) because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have '@' signs in them!)
There's that famous story of how reddit was initially populated with fake users too.
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I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning ,since I read an essay that pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people like to fantasize that everyday life is like a concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy undermines Frankl's own thesis
I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget. We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but it happens over and over again routinely
and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can take your own experiences of your group being persecuted and apply that to justice universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave their lives together with African-American James Chaney in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and displace civilians) against other people. It's your choice.
I read the Einstein biography. Highly recommended. But to the parents point, I came way think Einstein was a huge asshole, especially given his pop culture representation as a kindly old grandfather type.
Probably every human being looks like a huge asshole if you put their entire life under a microscope. Even Mother Teresa did some giant asshole things if I remember. You're just not aware what a huge asshole you are because someone hasn't written a very good biography of your life from a perspective different from yours (or you havent lived long enough)
For any successful company, you can probably find ex-employees who think that some "fat trimming" was excessive and unnecessarily cruel or that they pushed some line or another in excessive ways.
The Jack Welch case (and I'd add Mark Hurd at HP) was an example of financial engineering looking great for a time--until it wasn't.
ghaff. you said the first part well well. Welch "looked great" its the second part "until it wasn't." that stands out to me...because his approach, to kill the goose to get the golden eggs, so to speak, was doomed from the beginning. Its just hard to tell early on if you don't know what to look for. People in his orgs knew what was happening, but hard to go against the "hero".
I don't know a solution to these kinds of scenarios except for having a more wise and educated populace. Perhaps trusting the people at the bottom. Big issues. Hard to solve. And in today's world, harder than ever.
Perhaps not, but I think you can be "very successful" while remaining ethical.
Most people want to be successful because success brings happiness. But there is a level of success at which happiness starts to plateau and yields diminishing returns of happiness.
Thank you for saying that. I get low-level irritated at the constant background murmur that success means that you had to screw someone over at some point.
If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.
Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.
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[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair
This is a classic midwit criticism of capitalism that assumes zero sum.
You can sell services and goods that boost productivity and the alternative is just the status quo that produces waste. Someone that creates a successful business doing something productive is not inherently evil because of capitalism.
Can you run a 1M, 10M dollar business ethically without screwing over anyone - employees, customers, suppliers, environment etc? Sure. What about 100M, 1B, 10B, 100B businesses?
How many Billion dollar businesses can we name that are run ethically? Not that many, correct me if I am wrong. I suppose at some level, profit and monopoly becomes the one and only motivation. Plus if you didn’t do shady stuff, your competitors surely would, putting you at a disadvantage.
Why else would Google drop “don’t do evil” from their principles?
Theres a ton of ethical wealthy people, you just have no clue who they are because they are playing a different game and don't want the spotlight.
Whats the shady ruthless stuff from Google? They've obviously started running their business differently after the easy growth went away, but I've never heard anyone be like: they made me pee in a bottle because going to the bathroom was too much time off the line.
I think a problem is that we have to look at shady, ruthless, unethical and illegal actions as different categories, but to many people they are all the same.
Of course, you don't want to leave a trail of bodies in your wake but Life's not a bowl of cherries and taking a Pollyanna approach to business won't get you very far.
Yes, and even just the normal business attitude of "our goal is to make a profit, not solve all the world's social problems" is viewed as "unethical" by many people (most of whom have never run a business).
It doesn't have to be the only goal, but if you're not making money you will not be able to achieve anything else. So it's the thing that enables any other goals you might have (and, I might add, it's the main thing that makes it worth the risk, vs. just putting your money in savings bonds or something).
That would exclude approximately 99% of all the businesses that have ever existed (including most of those that claim to have some other, loftier goal)
sounds cynical but I'm shifted to believing not. If you don't do it there will always be someone else who will. Not to say you should, that's a personal choice of course, but in a competitive environment there will always be someone or lots of someones who will do anything.
This is why its vital to make unethical corporate malfeasance costly. Meaningful fines and criminal convictions for individual executives responsible for law breaking, wage theft, and intentional violations of regulation, provide meaningful deterrent. In their absence tax evasion and white collar crime become normative, which changes the game for anyone working in executive level roles.
Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit on mob tactics.
The mob is basically a corporation, held together by a charismatic CEO. In its later years, violence was (I think?) less common, so politics and deal-making became the norm. However, given the subject matter, they likely wouldn't whitewash the reality of it.
I share your thoughts. Sometimes you just need to be at the right place, at the right time, solving the exact problem and this is troublesome, especially in this era when so much is already invented.
Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.
Combined with the willingness to exploit those two things to hoard as much as you can, without qualms about taking advantage of cheap goods and cheap labor even from those who work as hard as you but get less because of economic/power/freedom asymmetries, without concern for the Mathews Effect (that wealth breeds wealth, that poverty breeds poverty)...
And just following up: Even though there is a significant amount of random chance, that does not mean you are randomly sorted into success and failure.
Even if you move from 0 to success with a very-small positive bias on your random walk, even the lower-bound on most of the results will be increasing with sqrt(n).
Don't let randomness dissuade you from effort, even maximal effort, because every thing you can do it increase your "bias towards success" will have an effect over long time scales.
The way my dad explained it to me: "a heads or tail might matter, in the grand scheme of things, but at the end of the day, you gotta be there to flip the coin in the first place." Granted, he said that in regards to me being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the quote applies aptly here.
Tech has often been associated with novel success. That is success by inventing or perfecting a previously underrated, underestimated or wholly invented technology.
This isn’t the only type though.
There is success through persistence. In the long run, 95% of businesses fail. Simply running a component operation that outlasts competitors in a proven market can take you very far. It’s harder than it looks. Likewise this gets little traction on most media
Then there is success by accident. The one that gets most traction in media is businesses that have some flash in the pan unexpected success. These seem to be a traditional combination of luck and persistence. Along these same lines are businesses that come to fruition during a time in which they can succeed, like TikTok and the pandemic.
Absolutely. I've been pretty lucky in my career, especially at a couple of critical junctions. But I had also put the foundations in place to be lucky at those junctions.
Not just capitalism, luck applies to even ordinary things like getting jobs etc. This is not to say we shouldn't try or put effort into whatever we are doing, but luck does play a big part. In one place where I worked, this 18 year old kid got an internship. She wasn't terrible, but she wasn't great either. She masterfully did minimum work for maximum benefit. I learned she was the kid of a VP who worked there - I am sure there were plenty of kids who were more qualified/motivated than her, but they don't have a VP parent.
There is a reason young people today feel hard work doesn't reward as much as it used to. Everything is stacked against them - from student loans to crappy jobs. SO MUCH depends on luck
Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative (public perception) pushback, they used to write and publish under pseudonyms.
Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.
> Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though
For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything in your real life, and you haven't already published a lot of prose under your real name.
It depends how much people care even outside of state level actors, how much of a celebrity you are IRL, and how much care you've put into covering your tracks including just not telling people.
These days you can probably do some writing pattern matching if you suspect the true name of an author but you can probably stay pretty pseudonymous unless people really want to determine a true identity. I don't have a lot of doubt I could probably publish a pseudonymous blog if I took some reasonable precautions and didn't write stuff that especially provided a fingerprint pointing to my IRL identity.
An interesting question is how authors of these books look for stories to turn into book. Stories traditionally have a standard arc where the hero faces a challenge but wins in the end having learned something. I'd be curious to talk to authors about how much the desire to fit this template influences the selection of what they write about.
That's because the literature has a value in its own right. Like history, the message that is presented, is for the present. Reality/truth be damned. The present day operational advantage is all.
This is very cynical - but also freeing - when accepted. Do you think the yatch, billions, beautiful wife is worth your integrity? You decide.
It's more of a, it generally wasn't illegal at the time they did those things, and of course now they want it to be illegal. It's much like pulling the rope up behind them so nobody else can climb the same ladder they did.
There is a reason you have to have licenses to braid hair, cut nails, etc(and charge for it) in many US states for instance. It's not a simple license like a food worker has to do. It's much more involved.
I mean if someone is going to mess with my hair, do a manicure or pedicure they should know the basic hygiene things much like a food worker has to do. I'm good with that. Why do they need more than that? It's not because we as a society actually care that much about a person that can't braid hair trying to charge for it. It's because all those beauticians want to limit their competition.
One of the fun things about reading Young Stalin, which is a biography of Stalin from birth to the Russian revolution, is nobody liked him in Georgia where he grew up, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, so it was easy for the biographer to get sources to tell all the negative and horrifying details of his earlier life building and running organized crime gangs to fund the Russian revolution. Imagine the most paranoid narcissistic jerks you've ever known who also happen to be exceptionally intelligent decide to take over a country and they manage to pull it off. Fascinating stuff.
Perhaps, but it would have been of little use as a question there.
Once you acquire enough of a feeling for a foreign language that not every bit of your skill in it comes from somebody telling you that a particular thing is said in a particular way, you are doomed to live with a constant suspicion that your feeling is somehow off in a way you don’t recognize. Usually it can be suppressed and ignored, but sometimes it can’t, and occasionally it has to become a question. (I expect this is a fairly common experience.) This was one of those.
I'm not sure about your point about "leveling" vs "leveling up", because for me, "leveling" means making a surface level/flat and does not have any video game-related meaning, but the "on" is probably coming from the phrase "to read up on" something (meaning to study/read about something; there's also a slangier variation, "to bone up on" something).
Free markets don't work. Corporations absolutely will abuse their position and power to establish monopolies wherever they can, blocking any new entrants to the market. I wonder how we (europeans) would ever regret regulation to stifle monopolistic behaviours from American behemoths.
As long as you don't interpret monopoly to have to mean 100% market share, but an overwhelming portion of the market, enough to be able to disrupt it, prevent any new entrants, and abuse the leading position without the fear of repercussions, plenty.
* Google in search, video, browser, email
* Meta in social media for massive age segments (what, 30-70?; younger than that may be on Snapchat/TikTok (too))
* Amazon in online retail, and specifically in online books and e-readers
* Microsoft in desktop OS and productivity suite, especially for business
If we go into oligopolies, where there are a very small amount of market players that can still abuse their position, we can also add video and audio streaming, mobile phones and tablets, CPU and GPU manufacturers, smart watches, etc.
You really can't speak for everyone. You can maybe say this particular cohort is fine despite seeing some of this content while young, but certainly not because of it.
> I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.
They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.
> The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
I think this is just saying that social media is still part of society, and so there is nothing inherently bad in using social media, which is just an extension of our offline lives. That doesn't mean it's not harmful - if the offline life is harmful, social media can amplify it.
> The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally
The APA paper is filled with warnings specifically about adolescent social media use:
> ...potential risks are likely to be greater in early adolescence — a period of greater biological, social, and psychological transitions...
> Parental monitoring... and developmentally appropriate limit-setting... is critical, especially in early adolescence.
> Evidence suggests that exposure to maladaptive behavior may promote similar behavior among vulnerable youth, and online social reinforcement of these behaviors may be related to increased risk for serious psychological symptoms, even after controlling for offline influences.
> Research demonstrates that adolescents’ exposure to online discrimination and hate predicts increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms, even after controlling for how much adolescents are exposed to similar experiences offline.
> Data indicate that technology use particularly within one hour of bedtime, and social media use in particular, is associated with sleep disruptions. Insufficient sleep is associated with disruptions to neurological development in adolescent brains, teens’ emotional functioning, and risk for suicide.
> Research suggests that using social media for social comparisons related to physical appearance... [is] related to poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.
Perhaps that is part of the problem with these laws: we are playing a game of whack-a-mole instead of tackling the issue of mental health. While I personally avoid social media due to privacy concerns, I have encountered other adults my age who have expressed that they avoid social media for reasons related to mental health. While walking through my neighbourhood, it is clear that there are many people with mental health issues that society has all but abandoned. Then there are the people who have issues that they do not talk about and cannot be seen.
Perhaps it is because I put a heavier emphasis on the word media, but I don't really classify HN as a social media site. It's more of a forum where people discuss submitted articles. The dynamics are entirely different.
For one thing, there is a lot less "attention seeking" behaviour. While YCombinator and associated companies use it as a promotional tool, it is muted. Some end users may use it to drive traffic to their blogs or show off their skills, but it usually comes off as humble and related to common interests (or maybe the blatant self-promoters rarely make it to the front page). Even though some of the people who frequent (or pop in) here are more recognizable, I doubt that anyone is trying to win a popularity contest.
I think stuff like that is important when considering the psychological impact of a site. For good or for ill, reality is reality. In contrast, social media sites tend to be driven by fantasy: fame and fortune for creators, endless exponential growth for investors, and all of that nonsense. That distortion of reality can be damaging for those who either seek to achieve it and for those who feel they will never measure up.
I don't find the broad stroke of "mental health" very useful in any discussions since it implies there is a baseline mentally healthy state. I think some people are able to handle social media and others aren't, and that's completely fine.
While I agree that mental health is an awfully broad stroke, I have seen few discussions that represent it as a baseline for a mentally healthy state. It is typically used when either self-harm or harm to others is involved.
The mental health issue was pre-empted by the advertisement-based business model that threw everything into an algorithmic blender to begin with, causing users to scroll more and more.
I mean that's what web crawling is, right? By extension, you just can't reach a page unless you stumble upon a link to it _somewhere_. Google gives you an option to submit a link and schedule a crawl that way, so that's another option if it's not being linked to from anywhere.
Cynical view: without new regulation in the area of AI, it will reduce the value of labor in many domains and completely eliminate the need for it in many others. Profits will go to companies like OpenAI, unemployment will rise and people will be left to fend for themselves, and it's exactly what's going to happen.
Realistic view: Unemployment is actually at an all time low despite centuries of industrialization, automation, etc.
AI technology is becoming a commodity at a rapid rate. OpenAI has some nice data moat but their tech is being copied left right and center and much of what they do has been replicated successfully by others; including some open source projects. I don't see OpenAI end up with all the profit here.
AI is a transformative technology for sure. But just like previous introductions of transformative technology it won't play out as doom predictors predict.
Most of the goods we buy and consume are actually produced in parts of the world where workers are exploited just fine without the help of AI. The dystopia already exists; just not in our little bubble. And a lot of those places have leveled up quite a bit economically in recent decades. So things aren't that bad anymore.
Our own past is actually built on the dystopia of the industrial revolution where people had no rights and worked until they dropped dead. Most of us on this forum have jobs that most of those people would not have considered real work. Hence us procrastinating on hacker news instead of doing real work.
AI will cause more of that to happen everywhere. But we'll find ways to keep ourselves busy. And more free time means that we can do things that are valuable to us. And what are economies other than just the accumulation of things we value? It used to be that we mostly valued not starving to death. Most of our economies were basically related to food production. Now food production is only a tiny part of our economies. We found more valuable things to do. Whatever AIs do or don't do, we'll find a way to find new things that are valuable to us. AIs simply expand our economy to include more such things. That's what transformative technology does. It grows our economies.
> Unemployment is actually at an all time low despite centuries of industrialization, automation, etc.
You've got an interesting point there. But I'm wondering, isn't this mostly true for places like the US? Looking at it globally, it's a bit of a mixed bag: the global unemployment now is higher than 30 years ago, for example.
And about the industrialisation bit – I mostly agree with you, but let's not forget the hard fought battles for fair work conditions. We got to where we are because people stood up for their rights, not just because machines started doing the heavy lifting. The original post seems to nudge towards more rules or better safeguards with AI, kind of like what happened with the rise of factories. Are you not in favour of that?
Small sidenote: calling your own view 'realistic' might put some people off. It sort of implies other opinions are not, you know?
> Small sidenote: calling your own view 'realistic' might put some people off. It sort of implies other opinions are not, you know?
I'm just countering the cynical view here; which at least puts me off. Anyway, there's always somebody that is going to disagree. To me the cynical view is historically always there and usually wrong.
I don't actually agree that AI is causing any perceived worker injustice. The US is a bit special because it generally seems be a bit different than the rest of the world in terms of a lack of worker protections. Like getting decent health insurance, job protections, and not being forced to work crazy hours just to get slightly over the poverty line. Whether you agree with that or not, a lot of that predates the whole "AI is bad" debate and is simply the result of decades long policy. Rolling back some of that or changing those policies is a different topic. IMHO that would be a good thing regardless of AI or any other transformative economic effects of other innovations.
And to counter that, I've mostly lived in places where things arguably are not that bad. People get decent insurance. They don't work crazy hours. And they mostly get paid fair wages for what they do. There are some exceptions to that of course. But people are doing pretty OK and I don't think that will change because of AI. I just don't see the need for a lot of pre-emptive measures here.
Globally, we have more people than ever and they are wealthier and more healthy than ever. Sure, there are some pretty grim outliers but that's mostly in places with despotic regimes and really crappy economies. That too is not caused or made much worse by AI.
The opposite of a cynical view is an optimistic one, not a realistic one. Optimism like yours has been as wrong as cynicism throughout history, and its unrealistic to believe otherwise.
I wholeheartedly agree (at least in the near future of a decade or so). IMO the only thing HN needs to worry about is that this round it could be the programmers that are one of the careers obsoleted and all the really well paid jobs will be things that require being good with your hands. So maybe people who are paid to think have jobs, but it is paid more like retail work.
Which; y'know, fair enough if that does happen. Worse problems to have. Mankind will be in a great spot. I always wanted to learn to weld.
> much of what they do has been replicated successfully by others; including some open source projects
This is true, except for GPT4 which no one has been able to even come close to in actual usage.
As long as OpenAI maintains the lead by making the very best model available via a consumer-friendly interfaces, and via API, I'd wager they remain in the lead.
That could be a temporary thing and is mostly just a side effect of them having a lot of money and infrastructure. I don't think most of the world is ready to just defer to them and give them all their data. There's a lot of incentive to come up with alternative solutions. The more OpenAI earns, the bigger the incentive to work around them.
As for the UI and UX. Chat GPT looks a bit like a rush job. Midjourney and others figured out that discourse wasn't half bad as a UI and it kind of snow balled from there. Chat GPT basically took that and did not add very much to it. It's very middle of the road as a chat UI actually. Completely unremarkable. Without knowing what they did exactly, it looks to me like someone spun up some javascript project, found some chat related libraries and components and knocked together a prototype in a few weeks. I've been there and done that actually on a project a few years ago. It's not that hard and a very sensible thing to do for them.
The value of chat gpt is of course in the quality of the conversation, not the UX. I expect a lot of innovation around this topic during this year and it might not be OpenAI that leads that. UX is so far not their core strength. I know they are hiring pretty aggressively to fix that. But it's not a given that throwing money at the problem will ensure an easy victory here. World + dog is focusing on outdoing them on this front. They'll have a lot of competition and investment.
> Realistic view: Unemployment is actually at an all time low despite centuries of industrialization, automation, etc.
A key word is "centuries" - previously this industrialisation was not such a rapid process (took centuries indeed) - people had time to reskill and new generations didn't pursue professions of their parents if those jobs got automated.
This time it's more possible that someone who is going to college this year, graduate in 5 years then maybe will work 5 years to find out their professions got completely automated 10 years from now.
That 'unemployment is at an all time low' statistic is disingenious, one needs to include the sibling statistics that 'under employment is currently at the highest it has ever been." People are working crap jobs that merely maintain, they are not in their careers of education, they are in those "bullshit jobs" that abuse them.
> Realistic view: Unemployment is actually at an all time low despite centuries of industrialization, automation, etc.
As a whole, yes... the problem is something else: quality of employment. Good paying, unionized jobs - the backbone of all Western economies in the "boom age" between WW2 and the fall of the USSR - in farming, mining, manufacturing and industry that employed lots of people in the past have either been lost to technological progress (farming) or gone off to China, India, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand - mostly because of massively lower wages, but also (especially in silicon industry) due to massively more permissive environmental protection laws.
What's left for people to make a living is mostly either low-skill and extremely low-pay stuff that reasonably can't be automated (cleaning!), a bit of medium-skill stuff like tradespeople, and high-skill intellectual jobs (STEM). Now that a lot of the high-end jobs is being threatened by AI as well, high-skilled people from there will also be pushed down, intensifying the competition for lower rungs of society even more.
And let's face it: this will be dangerous, particularly as ever more and more of the share of global wealth concentrates in the hands of very few people. Simply from a wealth relation, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are each richer than actual medieval emperors related to what the common people had. This is not sustainable, and eventually (re)distribution fights will break out.
ETA: Just came in - in the last three years, despite a global pandemic wrecking entire economies, followed by the first land-grab war by an imperialist power ever since WW2 and the resulting economic consequences, the top 5 of the uber rich actually more than doubled their wealth [1], at the expense of everyone else. Clearly, this cannot go on for much longer.
> AI will cause more of that to happen everywhere. But we'll find ways to keep ourselves busy. And more free time means that we can do things that are valuable to us.
As if. Any free time we got gets immediately usurped by the need to take up a second job just to make rent, not to mention that there hasn't been a significant reduction in hours-worked for decades (to the contrary, "expected" aka unpaid overtime has become the norm). Women didn't enter the workforce because of feminism, women entered the workforce because capitalism needed more workers to exploit - with the nasty side effect now becoming evident that young people don't become parents at all or significantly late in their careers, worsening the demographic collapse.
> Our own past is actually built on the dystopia of the industrial revolution where people had no rights and worked until they dropped dead. Most of us on this forum have jobs that most of those people would not have considered real work. Hence us procrastinating on hacker news instead of doing real work.
Part of that fight for workers' rights led directly to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels inventing Communism. My history on that topic is a little vague, so it may be mere ignorance that I have no reason to think neither foresaw Stalin.
Likewise for capitalism, given what (little) I know of Adam Smith[0], I don't think he would've foreseen the Irish potato famine.
Smith and Marx both saw the world changing, the era of feudalism passing and fading, and the need for a new system to replace it. What we have now is neither what Smith nor what Marx advocated, though bits of each are still popular.
So… what's the AI version of the February Revolution? What's the AI version of the Great Depression (as in 1929–1939, I didn't mistype "Great Recession")?
I can very easily see ways that AI can bring about surveillance to make the Stasi blush. Those amateurs were drilling holes in walls and putting bugs in watering cans, today we carry trackers and bugs in our pockets voluntarily, and even when those are restricted, laser-microphones are simple enough to be high-school student projects, and WiFi can be modified to run as wall-penetrating radar that can do pose detection with enough resolution to give pulse and breathing rates.
The Paperclip Optimiser is basically the reductio ad absurdum of capitalism's disregard for environmental impact and externalities, except that software generally has bugs and pre-LLM AI generally hasn't shown the slightest sign of what people would consider "common sense", which makes it… my Latin is almost non-existent, "reductio non absurdum"? For what AI may do.
Even between those two examples, while it's certainly possible on paper for AI to give us all lives of luxury with minimal to no work required… from the point of view of the pre-industrial age, so did machine tools, so did the transition from alchemy to chemistry (despite chemical weapons), so did electricity and the internal combustion engine (despite the integrated CO2 emissions), so did atomic theory (despite the cold war)… and despite that, we still have 40 hour weeks.
So perhaps we'll all end up like aristocrats, or perhaps rents (literal and metaphorical) will go up to take the full value of whatever UBI[1] we are given.
[0] while I doubt politicians who quote him know any better than me, this cynicism may be borne from the last decade of British Prime Ministers…
[1] IMO, UBI is the only possible way for a sustainable society where AI is at the level of the smartest human, and in practice it's necessary well before AI is that capable — if a suitably embodied AI can do every task that an IQ 85 human can do, for a TCO/time less than your local minimum living wage[2], you've already got 15% of your population in a permanent economic trap.
I also think that UBI can only avoid a hyperinflation loop when the government distributing the UBI owns the means of production, because if they don't then the people who do own the AI will be tempted to raise prices to match the supply of money.
But there's always the temptation for a government to exclude some group, for one reason or another — "Oh, not them, they're foreign. Not them, they're criminals. Not them, they're too young. Not them, they're not smart enough. Not them, they're…", and it's very hard to make those exclusion lists smaller, as those on the less-money list wield less power, and also everyone else would have to lower their expenses if they undid it and shared their wealth more equally.
That is already an issue with technological progress. Peoples protesting because machines are more efficient and removing jobs. The issue being the profit of increased tech not being shared correctly among humanity.
This issue has not been solved. I am glad there are other peoples becoming aware of it with the rise of IA.
If we have slow takeoff, AI will be like any other automation. It will increase economic productivity. Capital owners will benefit the most, but everyone else will also benefit, because it's not zero-sum. People will lose their jobs but new jobs will be created and everyone will get richer.
If we get ASI, then that's a paradigm shift and all bets are off.
then you will simply see those jobs being moved/outsourced to the third world without regulations, just like virtually all manufacturing did.
china, russia, india and a ton of other countries won't give a shit about 'global moratorium on AI research' and 'assault GPU ban'. US+EU are a fraction of the world's population.
In some industries, prices will follow wealthier people as more profit will come from gouging those on the lucky side now much larger wealth divide, and the middle class will vanish.
You saw an example of this in ecommerce during the pandemic's economic upheaval. Luxury goods recorded increased sales, as did bottom of the barrel retailers. Services and items in the comfortable middle class we all deserve suffered decreases.
I was not talking about scarcity, I was talking about the perversions of markets in an increasing wealth gap. There is no scarcity of brand name clothes for example. It's only expensive because people with excess money choose to pay for it, but it cost cents to make and there is no mismatch between supply and demand, and it is often not better than cheaper clothing.
Why would you need a monopoly? They aren't competing on price. It's an irrational market.
It depends what business you're in. If you're a company making yachts, supercars, or private jets, then owners consume much more than workers.
As wealth shifts to fewer hands, companies making mass-market goods are forced to drop prices, squeezing their margins and forcing consolidation and further automation, as the buying power of the customer base disappears. Investment capital shifts into the luxury sector where demand is growing, and prices and production quantities increase.
More and more of the economy gets dedicated to serving the needs of the wealthy (which is essentially what what it means for the rich to get richer).
The short answer is because markets are not monolithic.
You can have all kinds of price and market distortion as long as it’s a small group of people or a group of people that has a significant wealth effect over those that do not have it.
Just like you have services and products specifically for multimillionaires and billionaires, where you can get things that nobody else has, and in many cases even aware exist, you can see that happen for broader parts of society without having a deleterious effect on the overall survival of the human species.
It’s just market specialization, and we haven’t seen it with commodities yet, but we could see it with commodities in the future, and that would really change the game if commodities become available, only to those who are inside of a small pool of people that are making all the money with artificial intelligence, and the rest of us have no access to it. That is a very real possibility.
When sufficient profit motive exists to serve commodity markets for small numbers of people instead of the broad collective, a wage/price acceleration condition could be had which we haven’t seen before where more-and-more resources are locked up by a smaller and smaller but wealthier and wealthier small part of the population, essentially creating a wage / price spiral but inside of a wealth effect. Think of it is the impact of capital, and you begin to see why well concentration could lead to commodity concentration, in ways that we’ve never seen before. We have some examples that are similar to this happening right now, with the consolidation of industry, after industry by private equity, which is unprecedented.
AI has the possibility of accelerating these trends.
We have seen this happen many times, where broad and cheap food groups become speciality food groups and product categories, rise in price as they become popular with the smaller wealthier elite groups (think of ox tails, bluefin tuna, certain purebred dogs, fine wines and cheeses, etc) they become out-of-reach to the general society.
We haven’t seen this for commodities but there is little reason that it couldn’t also come into effect in broad commodity markets with automation and AI remove the need for wage classes.
Ai is the automation of intellectual work, but also the ground technology for advanced robotics and automation powered by AI. The impact will be more profound than anyone here applying 20th century economic theory and colloquialisms really understands. The potential for interruptions is profound, and AGI and it’s ongoing improvements is very likely like a new nuclear threat.
People like to apply the logic of the wave theory of Internet, mobile, radio, television, etc. you can go all the way back to the weaving machine, the printing press, and the cotton gin.
The real question is whether or not this time is different. You know everything is not different until the time that it actually is and when you start thinking about building a digital brain, you’re not just talking about creating another transformational technology revolution, you’re talking about replicating the creature that actually creates those technology waves. That’s slightly different and deserves a little more consideration many of the people talking about this AI revolution tend to give it. Instead of creating something new that changes society, we’re creating something to replace the thing that creates those technology tools and waves in the first place. Something like us.
Like all technology revolutions, the resulting profits and productivity can be used for the uplift of humanity and for social good, or it can be used for selfish motivations. And to be fair, it could be used for selfish motivations, and end up benefiting all of humanity if the system allows for those selfish motivations to benefit the larger society. But that comes down to wise governance and careful shepherding by those in power. Gene Roddenbury is prescient as always.
So, in short, you either end up with amplification, like you’re talking about, which creates a stratification between the classes of benefit from AI technology, and the classes of those who were left behind, were you see a general transformation of the overall society that brings everyone into a new era of productivity that changes everything on earth as a paradigm-style transformation. Which model applies? The question is this: is it different to build a new machine or a machine that dreams up and makes new machines?
Look up what the business model for in-app purchases is. In short, it's a few rich "whales" that sustain those economies, everyone else is just providing free labor to amuse the "whales".
optimistic (slightly distopian) view: governments will step in and build national artificial intelligence machines. OpenAI will be competing with open source LLMs. we'll all re-create society structured around a priesthood / ceremonial worship of a big ai that symbolizes how great your "tribe" is and compete with the followers of the other gods.
I agree, except for the OpenAI part. These subscriptions are currently much cheaper than labor - about 100x even for poorly paid jobs - and so there is simply not that much value to capture in terms of total size of the economy. In other words, if the employee costs $2000 and OpenAI charges $20, then $1980 are captured by the company using the tech, not OpenAI. So there would be a problem of course, but it‘s not like the value would necessarily go just to the tech industry. Instead it might go increasingly to those who own „the means of production“ to use a Marxist term for analysis purposes.
And if the prices they charge go up, it should be possible to compete with open products.
