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Top Investor [Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz] Says AI Startups Are Filled With Saboteurs Trying to Destroy Them From the Inside (futurism.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven’t already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.

That’s like, Goal No. 5 or something. There’s four goals that are way more important than that. And that’s not just true in the big tech companies. It’s true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500.

I would say Goal No. 1 is, “I’m a good person.” “I’m a good person,” is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It’s why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It’s why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what’s in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation — they’re just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period.

I find it’s funny, because the only true groups of people who think that corporate C.E.O.s are just profit-optimizing machines are people on the far left, who are full-on Marxists, who really believe that, and then people on the far right, who I think fear that the C.E.O.s are like that but also maybe hope that they are and then later realize that they’re not.

So the primary response from the Silicon Valley tech companies and the kinds of people that you’re talking about was not “Here’s what we need to do to make money and to live under a Democratic regime.” The primary thing was the complete exact kind of panic that you saw in the rest of corporate America and that you saw in the press.

utterly delusional

notice that Ross fails to ask him what numbers 2, 3, and 4 are

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Also “I’m a good person” is a statement. “Be a good person” is a goal. Is this pedantic? Very, but these dumbass CEOs can barely string two words together without their marketing department holding their hands and it’s one of a thousand reasons why I despise them

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago

He's really just openly stating that CEOs, etc really care about marketing the idea that they are "a good person" (just like Dems do), not actually doing anything objectively "good".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I have never in my life heard of a CEO in this heap that actually cared about being a good person (or even just not a terrible person) over making money

If you presented them the option to press one button and kill an unknown number of people they had never met for 10 million dollars, or to press another button to prevent an equal number of people from dying of preventable causes, the lacquer on the 'give 10 mill' button would be worn off before the other button saw a single press.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

they would film a video deceptively edited to show them pressing the save people button, release that, and then spend the rest of the day hammering the money one

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I like that he even gives us an unusual leftist strawman. We don't think CEO's are profit optimizing machines. In fact, most leftists I know believe that if you got rid of your C.E.O. you would probably get more profit, because you don't have a 10 million dollar a year albatross pretending to work at the top of your company. What we believe is that C.E.O.'s, regardless of their intentions, are systemically forced into attempting a position of profit maximization, as will forever under a capitalist system, because that is what the system requires you to do.

Which means any and all 'socially progressive' measures they take are, whatever their intentions or beliefs about their own intentions, are ultimately for show. They went bananas over D.E.I. because it was the pizza party they give workers, but for liberals.

Truely a cursed liberal mind, if he actually believes what he says.