Make money doing the work you believe in
Are LLMs really more important than fire or electricity?
“Honestly, a ton of what we’ve developed in my lifetime amounts to scaling up the delivery of information and entertainment and the frictionlessness of certain financial transactions. These are real improvements! ... But compare them seriously to what came before and the disproportion becomes almost embarrassing. The fundamental architecture of daily material life - how we heat our homes, how we move from place to place, how we grow and store and cook food, how we build structures - has changed remarkably little since 1970. .….The cars go to the same places. The planes aren’t even marginally faster. The houses are built the same way. People still die of cancer.
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Code cannot insulate your house; no algorithm has ever laid a water pipe; the internet has not built a single mile of high-speed rail. What our current stagnation shows, collectively, is that the improvements in material human life that matter the most - abundance in warmth, in calories, in clean water, in physical safety, in hours of freedom from labor - were all achieved by technologies that operated on atoms: steel, concrete, copper wire, chlorine, penicillin. ...”
