I would not be surprised if lurking in the background of my thought is Tyler Cowen. He's a huge influence on me. But I was thinking of specific examples. I don't know of a good general history of "humanizing".
What I had explicitly in mind was the historical development of automobile safety: seatbelts and airbags. There is a history of invention, innovation, deployment, and legal mandating that is long and varied for these.
How long did it take between the discovery of damaging chlorofluorocarbons and their demise? Or for asbestos and its abatement - how much does society pay for this process? What's the delta between climate change research and renewables investment?
Essentially, many an externality can be internalized once it is named and drawn attention to and the costs are realized.
Well said.
The casual policing of positive comments about Sam Altman is unnecessary. Is this Sam Altman sneer club? Grok the author's intent and choose your own example. SA is a polarizing figure, I get it. He can be a distraction to the point of an example, but in this case I thought it made sense.
It is something for authors to be on the lookout for though. Some examples invite "missing the point." Sam Altman is increasingly one example of a name that invites distracted thoughts other than the point intended.
Yes I'm assuming a locally run open weight model will be useful, but not ultimately not sufficient for very complex tasks. I hope that something of the sort I describe can and will exist before too much regulation and optimized monetization occurs.
And we don't have good social models of technology for really any technology, even retrospectively. So AI is certainly one we are not going to align with human flourishing in advance. When it comes to human flourishing the humanizing of technologies take a lot of time. Eventually we will get there, but it's a process that requires a lot of individual actors making choices and "feature requests" from the world, features that promote human flourishing.
At my school all the students have to deposit their cell phones into pouches at the office the beginning of the day.. cell phone strictness alone does not create interpersonal chatter. You just also spend a lot of time and work creating an actual culture of conversation. It's an explicitly taught skill!
Your data on the elasticity of behavior matches my experience well..
Oh weird! I didn't create this one.
You are correct! Let me fix that!
I for one am definitely worse off.
From a historical perspective this is an excellent treasure cache. Truly when you are the cutting edge of something ideas, relationships, personality, and economics all truly come together to drive history.