clipsy
7 months ago
This could've been moderately interesting if he'd bothered to elucidate exactly how the Democratic party has moved away from him, because as far as I can tell their policy platforms have not changed dramatically except on some social issues. The only thing I can come up with as speculation is that he's greatly overestimating the popularity of "The Squad" and a handful of other progressives based on social media presence rather than actually examining what the party has tried to accomplish in recent years.
(Ok, a more cynical speculation is that he's the one who has changed due to his enormous wealth, and he no longer actually aligns with the Democratic party of 20 years ago; but he'd never consider, let alone admit, such a thing.)
baobun
7 months ago
I think it's just setup and prepositioning for the GPT-for-president arc.
smt88
7 months ago
> exactly how the Democratic party has moved away from him
For a Very Online person like Altman (or me, for that matter), it's easy to assume everyone knows.
He's referring to the (very modest) Democratic turn against Silicon Valley. It started with the demonization of Meta and Twitter during Covid, and it's what caused Zuckerberg, A16z, and a lot of other newly-right tech people to become Republicans too.
For the record, I think Altman is deeply out of touch with normal people and it's always frustrating to hear billionaires cry about being bullied, but he does have a point that Democrats are no longer tech optimists in general.
salawat
7 months ago
No one should be a tech optimist. Tech can't guarantee good outcomes. It's equally applicable to good and evil ends. The ones who blindly go forward disregarding the potential bloodbath down the road from their creation deserve to have ice water thrown on them by the adults in the room.
Fade_Dance
7 months ago
One doesn't necessarily need to be blind to be an optimist. Optimist != zealot. And it's quite arguable that benefits of technological development outweigh the drawbacks in general.
Anecdotally, I've found recently it's more often than not the doomers who need the ice water thrown on them. That's usually where I'm hearing the incoherent zealot ranting style takes, and even in relatively "normal" circles like the art world there are many that basically want to shut the entire project down and are blind to the benefits.
salawat
7 months ago
When the benefits accumulate to less than 1%, while the costs are borne by everyone else, who are simultaneously frozen out of benefitting through over-weaponization of high level network effect through acts of political and industrial collusion, then you'll have to excuse me if I give the doomers looking at their future a bit more credence than your starry eyed optimist. Especially when every "but no one would ever do that/that won't happen" that my more optimistic self believed in over the last half of the average human lifespan has inevitably turned out to have whipped around and slapped me in the face.
I'm a systems thinker, and a system is perfectly tuned to get the outcomes it does. If you want the outcome changed, you have to change the system. There's too much rent seeking, and too much power centered around woefully too few fools to keep one another from dicking around too extravagantly with it.
clipsy
7 months ago
I can't agree that holding tech companies to reasonable account is the same thing as abandoning tech optimism, especially given (eg) Biden's push to try to build fabs in the US, but I can certainly see how the fairly minor slight would send an out-of-touch billionaire into a conniption fit.
aaron695
7 months ago
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