In this context, I hope at some point sama has a chance (if he hasn't already) to read the post "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" by Mencius Moldbug:
The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone.
It's a long post, but if you're interested in examining the problems we face from a fresh and unusual perspective it's worth reading the whole thing.
It's also critically wrong in understanding technology:
"one run of a time machine, with a printout of Wikipedia, would be pretty much all the real 1950 needed. Send the technology back to 1945, and you'll have iPads by '55 at the latest. Those guys got things done."
That kind of thinking betrays a common misunderstanding. The limiting factor on what we can build at any given time is very rarely ideas. In 1950, people already knew enough physics to build an iPad. The idea of integrated circuits had already been proposed. The first one was demonstrated in 1958 -- only three years later than Moldbug's alternate history.
And yet no iPads in 1960. Because there's a vast global capital structure that needed to evolve first. Technology is not an external factor. It makes no sense to argue whether society is better after factoring out technology, because technology cannot be factored out. It's all part of the same web of interrelationships.
Edit to add:
I had to add this, because it's so wrong it's perverse: "At the base of the pyramid are air, water and food. How does 2013 do at supplying oxygen, hydration and nutrition? How did 1950 do? Just fine. Gentlemen, a draw."
Only if you limit yourself to the wealthiest 10% of human beings. Out here in reality, global food security for everybody else is dramatically better than it was in 1950. Much of the developing world is starting to worry more about obesity than starvation. Moldbug is simply ignoring the biggest economic story of the last 40 years, presumably because it didn't happen in The West.
Not only capital structure, but lots and lots and LOTS of various minor improvements in all areas.
They would not be making iPads, because simply having one around doesn't automatically create the production technology to create it. That would still take a whole lot of work. It may well be that it would be more efficient to send them a bunch of C64's if you simply wanted them to improve faster, since the gap between the technologies are lesser.
One way to see how technology can be factored out is to consider a time when it changed more slowly. For instance, technology in ancient Rome hardly changed between, say, 180 A.D. and 400 A.D., at least by 21st century standards, and yet there's no doubt that Roman civilization declined precipitously during that time.
One of Moldbug's claims is that similar declines in the last two centuries or so have been masked by technological improvements. For example, in the 1960s many people routinely left their cars unlocked, often even leaving their keys in the ignition. [1] Meanwhile, technological improvements in the intervening ~50 years have made it much harder to steal cars. The way to factor out technology in this case is to imagine what would happen if modern cars had no alarm systems, no LoJacks, were easy to hot-wire, etc., and if people routinely left keys in the ignition of unlocked cars. It's not even hypothetical—you could actually do this as a real experiment. The result would, I predict, show that (at least in this narrow respect) American civilization has declined in the intervening years.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-alt...
The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone.
It's a long post, but if you're interested in examining the problems we face from a fresh and unusual perspective it's worth reading the whole thing.