I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Any system no matter how well intentioned will outlast its usefulness and eventually dies. I think the key is to see it in the moment and immediate future — Serbia's Gen Z's GDP/GINI/what-have-you is a good yardstick to measure that. So its kind of weird to say we believe because every time something like this is tried it really is different and whatever you/I believe in _never_ lasts even our lifespans.
In a muddled political system(democratic or otherwise) today its about power and how is it balanced. When Nandan Nilekani was creating India's UIDAI(the national aadhar system), he insisted that he would only do the project if he was given a cabinet level post[1]. His is one of the few technology examples to succeed in India when most large government run projects are a disaster. ISRO is probably another decent example of success. I think Nilekani succeeded because he had a clear moral compass and a defined goal.
But there is a problem with kings, soon they have an asshole child.
Metaphorically speaking at least. UIDAI is being used stupidly enough like an SSN now and in ways it was never meant to be.
Singapore is the opposite of the ivory tower rule. Most high-ranking officials hold either a master's or a professional degree. You wouldn’t find many PhDs with no prior executive experience.
Politicians are very well compensated there. And part of their pay is linked to how well they perform.
Prime minister gets 3 million per year for example.
thing with Mugabe n his government - those guys were mostly just lawyers and other PHDs in things social studies etc
they grew up on communist rhetoric, got support from communist countries - so their main ideology had already failed in the real world. so accumulating degrees without practical experience is a recipe for failure as seen in most african countries.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Seeing the billions of people who believe in the imaginary, and a few millions of these fight and kill others over these imaginary things, I would say, rationality is not a solved problem.
How were the Nazis technocrats? The core of the Nazi party were weirdo political extremists and violently nationalistic army veterans. The only example I can think of which matches your idea of an 'extraordinarily capable technocratic leader' is Speer, and like his military counterpart Rommel, his reputation has been somewhat laundered and propagandised both during and after the war.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
The latter, maybe? The former, I'm not so sure. However we don't have many examples of competent organisations trying to enact genocide to compare against. (Fortunately.)
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was
less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people
in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would
ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from
richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and
they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich.
Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single
one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded.
France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape,
so it will drag the whole EU down.
Estonia and Poland. I’m going to France and Estonia every year, and Estonia seems more developed and comfortable, I’m now seriously thinking of retiring there so good it is
Hint: Norway has oil and Switzerland has been fairly rich for a while. No country got rich with the EU and that's a good sign, otherwise it would probably also imply that many got much poorer. But the living standards for a lot of people certainly went up in comparison to what they had before.
Being able to freely and easily trade with the EU, and not wanting to be controlled by Russia, are probably the most important two reasons to join the EU!
It does not pay into EU budget - it contributes to and participates in specific programs and projects. The treaties are rather sectoral agreements which are always under the threat of swiss direct democracy. Bilaterals III has not yet been approved neither by the referendum nor the parliament - while it will likely pass the opposition is every significant.
If the engineer, without being hacked, could take 5 billion dollars from your company and flee the country to go buy an extradition-free island, you have already gravely fucked up as an enterprise. The only way this happens is if your system is designed to allow this to happen.
This is how virtually all "crypto" exchanges work -- especially the closer you get to "shitcoin casino". Proper role and system isolation is a challenge if you support just one cryptocurrency. It would be incredibly hard for dozens, assuming service supporting dozens bothered.
I agree it's a grave fuckup but its a common one. You should just assume that when you deposit coins somewhere there are dozens of people who could just walk off with everything on their own. It's remarkable that it doesn't happen more often.
I'd like to see their position on just computers and the internet in general before taking any comments about AI. Maybe they just dislike everything tech anyway. Despite any good points, for example the Unabomber would also oppose AI, but he also opposed most technological progress. And they could be both right on the wider point also, but it's not worth the same if they'd say the same thing about most modern living.
I would ask you to please read it again and very deeply. Do not skim the words, do not skip over a sentence that you think is too wordy. They very very clearly state this in terms of what they think in the Internet. They do not oppose these things. This entire outreach from them seems to be quite literally and in their own words an elder family brother looking at a much larger family and trying to communicate how much danger is on the horizon for that family, which happens to include them.
Who is this person who considers himself an “elder family brother” to humanity as a whole? Imagine a technologist speaking in such terms; they’d get publicly crucified.
While I grant you that the authors don’t appear to express generic luddite sentiments, nothing in this letter suggests that their understanding of AI extends even a millimeter below the surface.
... which, does not - does it not? - preclude them having profound understanding of things -other- than AI, which might be nonetheless, deeply needed for those developing it. And, us all, I'd posit.-
Speaking to those trying to build the Artificial surrogate, I firmly believe they understand, experience and live by the natural one, and have done so for a long time.-
Don't focus on what upset you. Don't focus on your internal desire, maybe, to say that you require an authority. Read the words specifically on how humanity treats itself and its surrounding environment, and I guarantee you, you will see connections to just about every area of science and sociology and anything between, and you absolutely should. That is the point of this letter, and it is a subtle one, and it is an uncomfortable one for a lot of people, but it is a very valid point.
And I would absolutely disagree with you, by the way, because this is not so much a simple letter about "AI", but the fundamental way that it is being built and constructed and used by a massive part of this world. And, I would continue to disagree that they don't have anything that extends, as you said, below the surface. The way they describe the technology is actually much, much more factual and humanistically relevant than many people I've talked to that literally build these models. Just because you were able to glue things together and compute numbers, does not mean you understand the outcome of what you are doing. That is almost literally something that is said in this letter, and I really suggest you please try to read it again and understand where it is saying that, because I think there's a lot more you will be able to internally glean if you let the words about what it is saying about humans enter your brain.
> Read the words specifically on how humanity treats itself and its surrounding environment
I did read them. They sound incredibly generic to me, and actually more like a colonial parody of what tribespeople supposedly believe than like anything genuine.
... then I will be blunt, and this is coming from a completely random Internet person that you have no idea about anything whatsoever, but I absolutely think you need to do a much deeper dive on what you would call "a colonial parody of what tribespeople supposedly believe".
I do not believe you have actually sat with what it is saying, or with the concepts that have been talked about for many many years outside of this particular letter, are actually trying to get you to sit with.
This is not about beliefs of flows of water or connectedness of nature or anything that you would probably consider simply silly.
This is about the outreach of a completely separate way of life that is entirely aware of the current state of the world and the humans in it, and an attempt to bridge some sort of understanding and awareness of what needs to be dealt with as a collective.
This is a treatise on the nature of humanity, and whether or not you care about the way in which they're describing the nature of the planet and the cosmos, you clearly have done none of the labor of piecing apart someone's perspective on the nature of humanity that is very clearly evident in this writing.
TL;DR: what I got is that no they do not oppose technology per se, but they observe that how we use it is often very negative and destructive.
I can’t disagree with that part. We are a society full of angry unhappy people who like to break things. It’s deeply unhealthy.
Their view is that this grows out of our greed and imbalance, which demands eternal growth, which then when it runs into any limit reacts violently and aggressively.
This is where I stop entirely agreeing, though I don’t think it’s entirely wrong either. But I’d have to write a book for that.
In short I think there’s some truth here but there is also a lot more context and a lot more to it, and I’m not sure I come to exactly the same conclusions.
The country is in shambles, beyond bankruptcy, in cases literally starving. Because of it"international" sanctions. Severe shortages of petrol, water and energy.
So it wouldn't be surprising if, by moving the clock every year in just one direction, petrol, water and electricity is saved. And it wouldn't even be suprising if that actually happens.
In Scandinavia, lack of air condition in homes vs. presence in cars has nothing to do with carbon programs.
What options become standard in cars, and what options are cheap to implement in cars (adding a bit more piping during assembly), follow an entirely different market dynamic than the retrofitting homes (most houses are either pre-WW2 or from a boom in the 50's to 70's) with air conditioning to handle what used to be very short bursts of heat.
Not only did weather not demand it, old brick houses have significant thermal mass and during sudden heat waves you'll often find the inside to already be noticably cooler.
It's being considered now both because weather got weird and our construction went so far in energy efficiency that while new construction barely require any energy to heat in the depths of winter, they become literal ovens in peak of summer.
That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted
The CVE system is far, far from perfect and NIST has faced increasing criticism (even before 2025) about its ability to triage and process the backlog. But I don't think their role is limited to simply posting what’s sent to them?
The name is amusingly often misunderstood in Germany as a French government agency (this is anecdata, I‘ve just heard that several times in the last few months). It just sounds French, I guess.
What's your point? Do you mean "everyone is equally bad", so reducing your resource usage is pointless? Because that's not true, clearly.
Do you mean that owning any electronics at all is morally wrong? That's a more consistent point, but what are you posting from then?
This sort of all-or-nothing mentality is really reductive and pointless. It's like saying you shouldn't go to the gym unless you plan to become the worlds strongest man.
In my opinion, it is the responsibility of each and everyone to live as frugally w.r.t. the environment as possible, while keeping in mind that each of us has a job to manage in order to feed our families.
I own a phone, but it's as old as I can have in order to still have access to banking. I own a car, but it's as old as I could find while still driving well and being reasonably fuel efficient. I drive as little as I can, while still allowing myself to travel to meet family. I eat food but I buy organic and avoid imported food as much as possible. And so on.
Another important factor is that one should strive to improve the laws. Because clearly, reducing your own impact is not enough. And the political work one does, of course needs to be calibrated to what time one has available.
I'd never judge somebody for prioritizing family over political work, or buying a second-hand iPhone in order to save time on setting up a Fairphone or similar.
I will judge somebody who buys the latest car, or latest phone, or something like that. I will not judge but gently inform someone of the facts, if they buy meat that I consider coming from an unethical animal industry. And I will listen to a vegetarian if they'd like to inform me about the realities of the industry that produces the meat I eat, even though I personally consider it "ethical enough", because perhaps they'll change my mind.
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