Illiteracy in Silicon Valley

post by kilgoar (william-walshe) · 2025-04-19T18:08:33.866Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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Sam Altman xeeted on Friday, "i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution."

The prediction, of course, is following to the common misconception of history in which the renaissance was a glorious rebirth of classical high civilization. The truth, really, is that Humanism was born out of Europe's greatest mass mortality where a half to two thirds of the population of the cities died off in repeated waves of bubonic plague. It was an absolutely terrible moment, and I think most people would greatly prefer to live even in the early industrialized era.

I'm not going to twist his words any further along this "well achsyhually," line, and I fully understand that he is vaguely trying to say that AI will liberate people into some fantasy renn-faire rather than put them into an Upton Sinclair industrial nightmare. But my true purpose is to treat Altman's ignorance as a symptom of a truly despicable trend in Silicon Valley and among programmers in general. Dunning-Kruger discourse is very overplayed and something I almost never invoke, but in the case of software engineers crossing into the humanities, it's far too applicable.

It is so tempting to take one's limited knowledge of History, apply some logical system, and make conclusions about trends of the past or the future. It's considered total common sense that humanity is on an upwards climb towards greater knowledge and understanding. However, the actual story is much more complicated, and the common narrative of progress, what's called Whiggish history, is not what happened to our humanity. In fact, at the beginning of the modern era, the 1500s, the changes in play provoked persecutions, religious wars, witchcraft crazes, heresy inquisitions, and the continuous growth of state power in a process which reached a crescendo in the legendary wars and mass murders of the 20th century. Indeed, if I presumed Altman had a college-level understanding of European history, I would take his xeet to be more of a threat than a promise of better things to come. But frankly, he doesn't have the slightest clue what he's talking about.

In any truly broad view of history we are living in the darkest of dark ages. The central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival, and to be quite frank, we are generally an ethically and morally misaligned species and behave, both as individuals and as nations, in a way that people of the past would find despicably cruel. If there is an "alignment problem," it originates with modernity. The fact that our standard of living is quite high and scarcity is so low only underlines the utter madness in the absurd, childish behavior of last century.

Over the decades after the World Wars, the process of escalating violence and persecution may have cooled off somewhat, at least in Imperial heartlands, and of course had we not reached some kind of truce our civilization would have surely been set back to an early industrial stage. And in the wider picture, over the past five centuries, the violence and persecution has steadily risen rather than fallen, and this recent cool-off due to mutually assured destruction has not even endured for a single lifetime. The last surviving child of an American slave died only a few years ago, and yet we like to consider so many things as passed when, really, it is only the blink of an eye between us and Hiroshima.

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