Some harm is even willfully hidden: the tobacco industry hiding that they knew about cancer risks, oil & gas hiding that they knew about climate change, chemical companies that knew about the risks of PFAS and environmental leakage; it goes on and on.
Some ten years ago I relalized that the tech industry has little regard for what the socetietal consequences of tech developments will be. Since then work has not been fun in the same way. For example, social media fun to use, but when you think about it, it is just using our human vanity and desire to be seen to gather as much data from us as possible to use in ways that the users will never imagine. These uses of will not be in best intrest of the users, but of the business that collect the data. I foresaw that giving away strong encryption for free, will give criminals the tools they need to build there own empires. My thesis was proved by encrochat. Of course that service was exposed, but of course theere will be new ones, harder to crack. As for AI the dice has been rolled, no way to put it back. We have been taugth that it is fun to develop new technology, that progress is good and to earn as much as possible. Who teaches us to philosophize about the consequences? Wouldn't it be better if our developments were saving the world and our human race? We are tapping the life out of our planet.
Social media doesn’t primarily exist to gather data.
Social media companies’ primary mission is to keep people hooked auch that they can show them more ads.
The data collection and targeting is ok order to better target these ads.
There is no big conspiracy to somehow do something unimaginable with that data
Social media exists so that profits can be made from advertising. And that implies the gathering of data.
Invoking the word "conspiracy" is a cheap way to dismiss any argument. No conspiracy was asserted by the GP. And any time there is hidden information and people are similarly motivated it can appear to be a conspiracy. This could be why whenever I play poker everyone else at the table seems to be conspiring to take my money away . . .
This article seems to assume that this is an isolated incident or that the CEO and other CEOs in question are somehow not responsible for the murder of their consumers. This wasn't somehow being risky trying to find a solution to cold fusion or how to grow food the size of a car to solve world hunger...they wanted to skim money from the wealthy to go see a monument to the folly and decadence of wealth.
This is as true of Tesla, meta, Amazon, alphabet, M$ and apple and the reason this incident has sparked such catharsis is that it happens constantly. There is a great article to be written on why there is such hatred for these people but it has to start by admitting that people's feelings are valid and this article simply didn't have the spine to explore that idea. It was clearly written to allow the author to convince themselves of something they know they don't really believe and it doesn't deserve to be read by anybody on here, go read a vacume manual and you will find more thought provoking content.
> This article seems to assume that this is an isolated incident or that the CEO and other CEOs in question are somehow not responsible for the murder of their consumers.
I think you completely misread the article, which actually suggests that this is commonplace: "we should perhaps give pause to consider that in America, we seem entirely comfortable with sociopaths (or those with such tendencies, at least) driving progress at the expense of human life, and even continue to financially support them."
In the skeptical community, they typically put people like Rush on a spectrum (it's almost never a simple binary) between grifter and true believer. Perhaps the reason that so much ink has been used to study Elizabeth Holmes is that she's almost impossible to figure out within that spectrum.
But Rush seems to lean heavily towards true believer. If he wanted to scam people, he could have found much more remunerative ways to do it, and he certainly wouldn't have piloted the sub himself.
Rush seems like a true believer, which wouldn't influence if he was a sociopath.
Holmes was pretty clearly a grifter. I have no idea why that would be a hard question, but of course maybe you have some indicators going the other way.
It is worth a reminder that a healthy human's emotions are calibrated to perform optimally in a <1,000 community stuck together for life with scarce food, no technology and opponents who are fought with sharp sticks and blunt stones.
That moral framework doesn't function at the extremes of how human societies work these days. People keep demanding that leaders behave in a way that makes sense for a tiny community, and therefore regularly get ineffective or deceptive leadership. One of the reasons capitalism is so powerful is it puts rationalist guidelines in place instead of religious ones.
>>It is worth a reminder that a healthy human's emotions are calibrated to perform optimally in a <1,000 community stuck together for life with scarce food, no technology and opponents who are fought with sharp sticks and blunt stones.
Really though? Healthy human emotion state is still calibrated at the experience of several thousand years ago?
While I do agree that healthy state is NOT calibrated for our current rapidly-technologized environment, I'm not sure it's correct that it's still stuck in the stone age.
Happy to be proven wrong though if you've got something interesting to read on the topic!
The author asks "Is loss of human life really necessary to innovation?" The answer is: yes. In fact the loss of human life is really necessary to the simple continued existence of civilization (at pretty much every level). This may sound trite, but every change introduces new risks and dangers. I think most people would agree those risks should be reasonably minimized. Society can argue about what is "reasonable".
The jump from criticising OceanGate to Americans loving when sociopaths run companies, doesn't make any sense. I guess he believes Rush was a sociopath and not just a cheapskate. It is a hell of an assumption to make with no backing. Especially weird when the author thumbs his nose at the general consensus that OceanGate was run in an unsafe manner, a position with a lot of evidence behind it
The capital class's criteria for investment as well as the self-selecting nature of risk creates an environment where sociopaths will be highly over-represented in certain arenas.
No sane person would want to be Elon Musk. Some of you here might think you would like to be him, and you might for an afternoon or a day, but not a lifetime.
Calling CEOs sociopaths is like your ex a narcissist. It's trendy, and might even be true in some cases, but I gotta think there's some projection going on here.
A lot of studies have shown that sociopaths are far more likely to become a CXO than a non-sociopath. They are definitely over represented in that group.
They are still the minority of individuals (~20%), but the most likely place people will interact with them.
The argument that musk is a sociopath because his cars have had 17 fatalities on autopilot, despite that being less than human drivers, is ridiculous. That proves the exact opposite point - that musk cares about human life.
Heh. Your average human driver will have zero fatal accidents in their driving career. The fatalities happen in the margins, in the fractional percentage points.
Arguably, this makes autopilot, with its singular set of fuzzy logic, worse than human drivers. It’s flaws, after all, will continue to exist even if it kills its host.
"Fatalities per distance driven" is a terrible metric unless FSD is doing all the driving for the trips the data is pulled from. Otherwise what tends to happen is FSD/autopilot drives the low-risk highway miles and the human has to take over in the high-risk city miles, skewing the stats.
driver assist not autopilot. Tesla is calling their driver assist an "Autopilot"(tm) and actively misleading people that they can 'let go of the wheel'.
Such language and marketing campaigns are actively killing uninformed drivers.
17 fatalities don't indicate that musk is a sociopath, but they certainly don't prove that musk cares about human life. They provide no useful information one way or the other.
There's something to the idea that Americans tolerate devil-may-care risk-takers but the idea that Stockton Rush and Elon Musk are sociopaths is absurd. Hell, Rush went down with the ship (so to speak).
What's of interest here is not the (small number of) deaths caused by "captains of industry" but the irrational fixation of people like the author on these figures.
One way to define sociopaths is that they are willing to do what it takes to achieve their goals without regard to others.
It certainly seems Stockton was willing to do this, ignoring the evidence that his sub was safe and willing to kill others on the off chance that it failed.
That he died as a result is not relevant to his disregard for others.
Of course his willingness to take risks matters. It shows that he didn't value his own safety over others'. It also shows that he thought the sub was safe. Being wrong doesn't make you a sociopath.
As I said, the interesting thing here is the attitude shown by posters like you and the author of this piece.
If we required all human innovation to be completely safe, fire would still be in the early alpha stage.
There is absolutely a balance between safety and progress. Progress depends on the ability of the first version to be imperfect. Perfect is the enemy of good, and so many technologies both cost lives AND save lives in greater proportion.
Profits over people.