This was such a thoughtful take on the conscious and unconscious mimesis we participate in by selecting these products and how it has a snowball effect on the fate of the products we choose or discard . Thanks for writing it .
You touch on this - but this tilted field shows up a ton in partnerships. I had no idea (until recently) how effective and efficient a sales channel that can be - and that it can make or break a company (especially a startup). You can get partnerships right and have a worse product, not as good inbound (or outbound) and still win. Crazy. Markets are not meritocracies.
as someone interested in both tech and politics, I found this post particularly interesting due to the intersection of both topics.
In college I was student body president, my step dad was very close to our state governor, and after college I had an interesting stint as a "Campaign Manager" for a fellow college classmate running for US Congress, and a slogan / campaign issue that always got tons of mileage was criticizing "coastal elites" as being out of touch. Worked 10 times out of 10 and only grew more and more effective the more that we used it.
Is there a "club" in Washington, that makes many of the decisions, up to and including who even appears on the ballot as president? Of course there is. Can certain people, through money and / or influence, play an outsized effect on politics, policy, etc? absolutely. And as you said in your post, this same exact infrastructure works in Silicon Valley as well. I saw the Devin launch as well, I thought it was fantastic, simply because I've seen the applicability of code co-writers (particularly GPT-4) have helped me in my own coding, and as far as Devin (from the demo) showed the next evolution in this technology, it's definitely impressive.
What's interesting, to me, about all of this technology / AI innovations, is that I am also reading Karl Marx at the same time I am experimenting with AI, Tech, python programming, Machine Learning, etc. And the best connection that I can see between the two is Marx's assertion that a value of a commodity (in this example, coding) is the cost that it takes to produce that commodity. So if it takes a coder an hour to write a particular piece of code, or 100 hours to make a website, the cost of that code is roughly 1 hour (or 100 hours) of that coder's time, so lets say, $100 an hour, either $100 or $10,000. But, if we carry this through to AI, the cost of an AI to create a piece of code (or a blog post, or a tweet), is damn near $0 (I think ChatGPT is something like $0.00001 per 100 words or something very small like that), and THAT difference (the cost of production reaching near zero) could upend things significantly. Even if Devin AI is only able to achieve, say 95% of a complete project, and then an experienced software engineer finishes the final 5%, that drastically alters the landscape of coding / tech / science / society.
This was such a thoughtful take on the conscious and unconscious mimesis we participate in by selecting these products and how it has a snowball effect on the fate of the products we choose or discard . Thanks for writing it .
You touch on this - but this tilted field shows up a ton in partnerships. I had no idea (until recently) how effective and efficient a sales channel that can be - and that it can make or break a company (especially a startup). You can get partnerships right and have a worse product, not as good inbound (or outbound) and still win. Crazy. Markets are not meritocracies.
Hi Benn,
as someone interested in both tech and politics, I found this post particularly interesting due to the intersection of both topics.
In college I was student body president, my step dad was very close to our state governor, and after college I had an interesting stint as a "Campaign Manager" for a fellow college classmate running for US Congress, and a slogan / campaign issue that always got tons of mileage was criticizing "coastal elites" as being out of touch. Worked 10 times out of 10 and only grew more and more effective the more that we used it.
Is there a "club" in Washington, that makes many of the decisions, up to and including who even appears on the ballot as president? Of course there is. Can certain people, through money and / or influence, play an outsized effect on politics, policy, etc? absolutely. And as you said in your post, this same exact infrastructure works in Silicon Valley as well. I saw the Devin launch as well, I thought it was fantastic, simply because I've seen the applicability of code co-writers (particularly GPT-4) have helped me in my own coding, and as far as Devin (from the demo) showed the next evolution in this technology, it's definitely impressive.
What's interesting, to me, about all of this technology / AI innovations, is that I am also reading Karl Marx at the same time I am experimenting with AI, Tech, python programming, Machine Learning, etc. And the best connection that I can see between the two is Marx's assertion that a value of a commodity (in this example, coding) is the cost that it takes to produce that commodity. So if it takes a coder an hour to write a particular piece of code, or 100 hours to make a website, the cost of that code is roughly 1 hour (or 100 hours) of that coder's time, so lets say, $100 an hour, either $100 or $10,000. But, if we carry this through to AI, the cost of an AI to create a piece of code (or a blog post, or a tweet), is damn near $0 (I think ChatGPT is something like $0.00001 per 100 words or something very small like that), and THAT difference (the cost of production reaching near zero) could upend things significantly. Even if Devin AI is only able to achieve, say 95% of a complete project, and then an experienced software engineer finishes the final 5%, that drastically alters the landscape of coding / tech / science / society.
Wow I got about 2 sentences into that link on cluttercore before I bailed.
What makes you think coding is a commodity? In any case it would be code, just like the commodity is oil, not oil drilling
It would be funny if some party pooper brought modal logic into this game we are living within.