ok2938

I am no one. I have greatest respect for all Turing award winners.

But one thing I am wary is that LeCun - while special and excellent - is just as many others, working at a place where "AI" is already used to "engage people up" - it is just the nature of the business if you are in the engagement business. And your "AI" will gladly help you in all kind of subtle ways. What is also nice is that it's uncharted territory now, so you can freely roam - and engage the heck out of your audience.

And LeCun is just - as a "neutral" scientist - just doing his part.

Why can't he not work at FB? Money? Data?

I see capitalism as a good system in the sense that it does not require any belief in anything - that's certainly a plus.

What is bad is that I capital can just work and earn money, those not lucky need to be creative and actually use and sell their abilities.

Also bad: while there is competition, there is just a huge amount of excess and waste work because everybody is determined to out-compete the others.

In the end, a capitalist company aims for perpetual growth and monopoly, because that's where you can set your price and maximize your profit.

Yes, that's fine - I'm doing that.

My goal is simple: try not to make things worse.

Let me ask you, why aren't more workers "happy capitalists" and praise this way of living? Why aren't the warehouse workers more happy? Or the people soon displaced by computers and algorithms? Why aren't they look forward to a life of less chore and more free time?

Why do so many people protest against climate change? Why is it ok for corporations to externalize costs? Why is all the considered good?

I'm all for competition and fierce fights, but let just not forget that we live in a "society" and not in a box, everyone for themselves.

Yes, true - many societies are using this configuration for hundreds of years.

My issue is not based on morality, but on the fact that we as humans are capable of reflecting on our existence. And that each of our lives is determined by a large amount of luck.

I could be born smart, ill, rich, poor and so on. Does some accidental property give me more rights and opportunities than others? My western net worth would allow me to retire right now in many parts of the world - but did I earn this privilege? Of course not, it was pure accident.

My issue is that people take a huge amount of lucky accidents as a justification of all kinds of power grabs and entitlements. And capitalism just has the potential to magnify this effect - e.g. by letting the "smart" and "lucky" control the "less smart" and "less lucky" and call it all "natural" and without alternative.

My problem is, I'm kind of anti-capitalist, to make it short. Labor and capital and not just production factors, but they constitute a power relationship (and often a quite asymmetric one).

I cannot bring myself to "invest" in something or believe that "my money works for me" - that's delusional. Money does not "work".

People get all upset about the stance, but all I am saying is that everyone wants to profit off someone else' work and I do not think that's the best way forward. Especially not in an era, where labor overall will decrease in value (we will continue to automate more and more) - which just means poverty for anyone w/o capital (it's that simple).

Edit: Also, I'm not speaking as a "loser" of this system - but on track to the first million - it's just that I can imagine another world and so many people take the "capitalist framework" as a given - which it just not is. There are ways to think about society in a more nuanced way, without losing all the competitive niceties of capitalism.

We ended up here, because a) the promise of easy to use structured data - that is inherent in data processing systems - has not been fulfilled: you have to scrape HTML to reconstruct some relational table, and b) information, despite being almost free to transmit in large amounts today, is treated as if it were a physical good, and each copy costs money. There is just lots of money in there, because our economic system looks more backwards than forwards.

I smiled when I heard a hedge fund was using a "data engineering" solution that many today would consider outdated - I guess I'd invest with them.

I do not envy you.

I stopped buying from Amazon a couple of years ago - not that I was a frequent shopper before that. I feel it is the same capitalistic dilemma all over again: exploit technology and as opposed to make technology a force for liberation use it as a weapon against labor and call it innovation.

We are in the beginning of our probably very long dystopia, where only the rich will be able to live a life off total surveillance and the rest will be sucked out of all remaining living traces for survival.

The only rule I live by is that I do not try to exert power over anyone that I would not wanted to be subjected to myself. Period.

Germany has free schools, universities, low cost good child care, a relatively good health infrastructure, and more. Some regions do not even need debt any more to finance all this. The high taxes do not just evaporate, but sure could be used more efficiently.

If I'd have the choice between US and Germany, I'd probably prefer the old Europe model.

Source of happiness: Being able to just say no to any job since I could live quite well without one until 2040.

Surprised that vim clocks in at only 6%.

One thing to keep in mind: With every request-response cycle for the probably upcoming paid service, you are feeding constant data points to a commercial entity. Basically your typing habit, the project development over time, the bugs, the fixes, all will be recorded.

Think about it, one well paid profession in the grips of capital siphoning off valuable, highly intellectual work (by using "open source" already), repackaging it and the selling it back to the people it aims to replace.

Imagine a million lawyers' days being recorded in 60s intervals - including what they type, the files they have opened, etc. - how long would it take to encode the average lawyer into a hdf5 file? How many lawyers would be fine with that kind of assistance?

If that's not ingenious, then I do not know what is.

Call to action: Programmer, wake up.

Edit: Just to address some typical rebuttals - I'm all for progress and cool toys, but I'm all against monopolies and mega-corps that control and monitor every aspect of your life.