Sam Altman Does Not Care About You ⇥ disconnect.blog
[…] If he [Sam Altman] was serious about wanting to extend people’s lifespans by 10 years, he wouldn’t be looking at sci-fi fantasies, but at the policies that can deliver those benefits and how to get the US political system to move them forward.
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Silicon Valley claims we can solve these serious social problems through technological innovation. On its face, that might seem to make sense. We can see many examples through history where the rollout of new technologies has improved our quality of life and increased our lifespans. But when tech billionaires use that term, they actually means letting VC-funded tech companies deploy whatever they want on an unsuspecting public with little regulation and no threat of accountability when things go wrong.
One weird thing that happens to me more than it should is that I reserve a bunch of books at the library, each of which has a long queue of other borrowers in front of it, and I assume these books will slowly trickle down to me — but, what actually happens is that all of them become available at the same time. Then I feel compelled to churn through them as quickly as I can so I am able to return them in a timely manner. Anyway, I chased Kyle Chayka’s “Filterworld” with Evgeny Morozov’s “To Save Everything, Click Here”, and I found it particularly thoughtful. I sometimes disagreed with Morozov’s conclusions, but his interrogation of the Silicon Valley ethos is necessary and considered.
The kinds of ideas Marx is writing about here are what Morozov would call “technological solutionism”. These are the procedural changes and supposedly revolutionary products and services intended to produce a desired social outcome when, instead, there are proven effective public policies which ought to be preferred. There might be a role for new technologies, of course, but “biohacking” is not going to be as effective as, say, universal healthcare for extending the lifespan of most people.