I agree with you. Maybe AI can generate designs that look moderately good and aesthetically pleasing for UIs that solve known problems in a prototypical way.[0] That is useful, especially for simple utilities, internal tools, or hobby projects. However, I have yet to see AI solve new design problems, improve on old problems, and create a unique design style that defines a brand and separates it from competition.
I agree with your premise that the unethical behavior in the markets is structural. I also commend your work on this book. The creation of the LTSE is also a huge and laudable accomplishment. Kudos!
However, I have to express some skepticism that through regulations and reforms, we can reverse the entire incentive structure for public investment to be aligned with stewardship rather than extraction. How do you plan to defy the "financial gravity" between you and this dream?
Finally, I think that Claude Code has misinterpreted your request to summarize your interviews and events. Instead, it created a marketing and promotional website with not a summary to be found!
Ah! Your point about Claude Code is very funny. At a minimum, you can find links to many of the interviews I've done. If it comes across as too promotional, you can always use the "official" website incorruptible.co which is more staid.
Your skepticism is well earned, and all I can really say is that I hope you'll read the book and judge for yourself. I tried really hard to lay out the evidence for two things that are necessary to address this skepticism:
1. We have to see that these structures are changeable. The economy that our grandparents inhabited is almost unrecognizably different than the one we inhabit today. So too, we can imagine that the economy that our grandchildren will work in may be unrecognizably different to us. Why does that necessarily have to be in a negative direction? What was once changed by human hands can be changed again.
2. I know this is hard to believe, but there's actually a lot of evidence that mission-driven, purpose-driven, trustworthy organizations outperform their conventional counterparts. The fact that this is so gives us a lot of tools we can use to drive the change we want to see.
On top of all that, we are living through a massive generational shift. The new generations have lived their whole lives under this maligned structure, and they are sick and tired of it. If you think they are going to sit quietly by and allow those structures to persist, I think that is very unlikely. Which means we're going to have change one way or the other; the only question is how violent and difficult is that revolution going to be? We'd be much better served to change proactively because we know what the right thing is.
Thanks for being a good sport about my joke! And also thanks for answering a gazillion questions here on HN with care, patience, and curiosity.
I have to say, to your first point, that exploitation (of humans, labor, resources, consumers, etc.) has always been the primary driver of accumulating large wealth under capitalism. Sure, "innovation" sometimes has a role in softening the blow, but let's be real.
That was true in our grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time. While their economies looked very different, the same structural incentives were in place and certainly did not curb unethical behavior one bit.
It has taken a long time for the piper to come for his full payment, but we can all see now that the world is burning, poisoned, and suffering as a result. We can no longer eat freshwater fish due to the massive amounts of PFAS in our lakes and rivers. The billionaires are trying to pretend they can escape the disaster by building their bunkers on remote islands or trying to colonize Mars.
I want to have some optimism in the newer generations to create positive change here, but I can't help but look at what happened to the idealism of the 1960s. The counter culture was right about the societal benefits of renewable energy, organic food, vegetarian diets, ecology, egalitarianism, civil rights, and more. But somewhere around Reagan many in that generation sold out and those great ideas were simply appropriated and fed back into the profit-machine that rewards exploitation. Today we have "certified organic" labels on food products, but that term has been watered down to almost nothing by the marketing departments, politicians, and lobbyists.
Anyhow, I obviously need to keep my pessimism at bay. LOL You have convinced me to give it a read!
>"I have to say, to your first point, that exploitation (of humans, labor, resources, consumers, etc.) has always been the primary driver of accumulating large wealth under capitalism"
Under all forms of human civilization, since the beginning of agriculture allowed one person to accumulate more cattle than another. Capitalism is actually a great equalizing force from that yoke - it allowed for the first time to get out of it through ingenuity and hard work. The rule for practically all of existence before that was "you do what the biggest baddest guy around tells you to do or you die", and your entire life and your children and their children's will be the exact same, with no hope of betterment whatsoever. It's what led to the rise of slave morality religions like Buddhism and the Abrahamics; if you have no chance at happiness in this life, best to believe there's something better after, and that those responsible for your suffering will be punished.
Meh, lazy thinking on religion and oversimplification of history. Yet, there's absolutely an argument to be made that capitalism has provided wider mobility than the Chinese bureaucratic system, the medieval church or merchant states provided before. But mobility is measurably worse in the US now than mid-century and we can and must do better.
It took most Black folks 400 years to mobilize upwards from slavery under capitalism in America. And many of the civil rights that were hard won in the mid-century have been eroded practically overnight. Racism has always been a cornerstone of capitalism, and still is, condoning exploitation of people by casting them as less than human. Upward mobility is measurably harder if you're brown. I agree, we must do better.
Two-party politics promotes gridlock. Multi-party systems, as long as they don't have veto players, don't have as much stagnation and do a better job of citizen representation.
Do they? 79% of Australians and 73% of Germans have an unfavorable view of Israel, in Germany's case 49% of all being "very" unfavorable [0]. Don't see much representation of that in their politics. Both very much multi-party systems. Australia's system in particular has aspects that are often held up as one of the best in the world. Even on important other topics, it doesn't seem to reflect things much.
Another example, if you survey basically any multi-party European state such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and so on purely on economic policies, you'll overwhelmingly find people supporting much more progressive taxation and in general more socialist economic policies. I'm talking large majorities. Including nationalization of many institutions and so on. Yet their governments have done the direct opposite for decades. Not very representative.
The better representation you're talking about is very surface level, for everything that matters the outcome is that favored by big capital.
I fear you might be mostly right about global political outcomes favored by big capital. However, both example countries you cited have much stronger social safety nets than the United States. The research shows there is a spectrum, but that multi-party systems generally do create greater citizen representation.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin page published an article that uses data to come to this conclusion about the public's influence on American policy:
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Iskander De Bruycker and Marcel Hanegraaff authored a recent study, focusing on the EU, in which they "demonstrate that interest groups with more economic resources are generally more influential, but only if their policy positions are congruent with a public majority." Sorry this one is paywalled. Such is the state of academic publishing. :(
The flaw, which Meta said it had fixed, allowed anyone to take over Instagram accounts using a bug in the company’s new artificial intelligence software.
To your example, the engineers were well aware of the dangers of using hydrogen and they sought to mitigate the risk through design. In fact, the Hindenburg was struck by lightning on multiple occasions during its career with no ill-effects, even when the lightning burned holes in the cover of the airship. Simple bad weather was much more of a threat than hydrogen. The US Navy had four Zeppelin-type airships, all helium, three of which were destroyed in stormy weather. Vehicles and airplanes today are full of flammable fuel. Many have exploded throughout the course of history. I wouldn't say that gasoline in vehicles is a problem if engineers and management can mitigate the risks, which is what they did with regard to the Hindenberg.
Another example is the Challenger explosion. NASA managers disregarded engineers' warnings about the dangers of launching in low temperatures and did not report these technical concerns to their superiors.
I am not defending AI here by placing the blame on management. I'm defending the engineers. Good managers listen to their devs when they report risks. It's as simple as that.
I meant both. AI did it's job, albeit with some faults, as one would suspect and need to review. The devs did their job in discovering and reporting the holes in the code. Management did not do its job if the problem code was allowed to be shipped.
"Reasons given include pressure to deploy quickly, vulnerabilities being too difficult to fix, and reliance on other controls to pick up the pieces."
Are they not warning their bosses? I find this reasoning hard to believe. If management doesn't care, the problem has little to do with AI. A more reasonable explanation is that they hate that they are forced to use AI and they ship Swiss cheese as and act of sabotage, apathy, or to prove AI's incompetence at taking over their job.
AI isn't the source of the problem (as you point out, bad management is a preexisting problem), but it exacerbates it significantly. I think it's still worthwhile to call out a new factor that's making an existing problem much worse.
I think that's my issue with the headline. Placing the incompetence of bosses on devs deflects the blame.
But if we are talking about blame, we can't rule out the sabotage element. I'm a developer and luckily I have not been forced to use AI. But in my nearly 30-year career, I have never seen such resentment towards the forced use of a technology.
I got downvoted for mentioning PFAS, but I think that is a huge part of it. There are so many kids with cancer or debilitating ulcerative colitis in my town, including my teenager. My neighborhood has a slurry of PFAS and GenX chemicals in the well water that we just discovered a couple of years ago. My neighbor's PFOS reading was 144 ppt!!! The high school had a mix of forever chemicals too, over 50 ppt for PFNA.
This warning on freshwater fish is perhaps the saddest thing I have read in an endless stream of stories on the profit-driven destruction of our environment:
Ya I forgot to mention that the reason I chose microplastics and PFAS is that those are relatively new compared to when Gen X was growing up in the 70s and 80s. We had BPAs and leaded gasoline etc, but those effects were well-understood and we finally transitioned off of them.
Also I learned recently that 10% ethanol has the same antiknock effect of tetraethyllead (TEL), but they suppressed it because the fossil fuel industry didn't want biofuels to eat into their profit margins. Better to shower the world with lead and reduce IQ levels, evidently.
It's not so much a question of whether AI is strong or not. It's a question of whether the tradeoffs (theft of intellectual property, coal burning, lack of transparency, stealing water, rising energy prices, global surveillance, etc.) are worth the outcomes. It's not even a serious question.
If AI was truly strong, we would be seeing signs in the job market. And we would certainly be seeing a lot more subscriptions and demand for these services. For most people, AI does not improve their lives. For a lot of them, especially younger people, it makes their lives much harder and sadder.
> If AI was truly strong, we would be seeing signs in the job market.
Recalling past business cycles, the job market can look "strong" with low unemployment, even while a lot of creative destruction is going on. Look at the 2004-2009 cycle, where the economy looked strong until some time in 2008 even though a lot of money was being wasted on bad projects.
It's only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming without trunks. So unemployment doesn't typically rise until the recession part of the cycle.
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