Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And many of these things are disappearing now because we feel that our parents might have no idea about how we are living and the environments that we grew up in, the cultures that we grew up in, the milieus that our parents existed in might have no ability to teach us how to deal with this new world. And for many people, that's actually true.
But it doesn't mean that within one generation, we build something that is more magical and more sustainable and more beautiful. Instead, we often end up with an attempt to produce something that looks beautiful. I was very weirded out by the aesthetics of the Vision Pro headset by Apple. And not so much because I don't like the technology.
I'm very curious about what it's going to be like and don't have an opinion yet. But the aesthetics of the presentation and so on, they're so uncanny valley-esque to me. The characters being extremely plastic, living in some hypothetical mid-century furniture museum. Yeah.
Yes, but it was a CGI-generated world. It was a CGI-generated world that doesn't exist. And when I complained about this, some friends came back to me and said, but these are startup founders. This is what they live like in Silicon Valley. And I tried to tell them, no, I know lots of people in Silicon Valley. This is not what people are like. They're still people. They're still human beings.
And culture. And so basically what's absent in this thing is culture. There is a simulation of culture, an attempt to replace culture by catalog, by some kind of aesthetic optimization that is not the result of having a sustainable life, a sustainable human relationships with houses that work for you and a mode of living that works for you in which this product exists.
these glasses fit in naturally and I guess that's also why so many people are weirded out about the product because they don't know how is this actually going to fit into my life and into my human relationships because the way in which it was presented in these videos didn't seem to be credible.
I believe that if we make everything open source and make this mandatory, we are going to lose a lot of beautiful art and a lot of beautiful designs. There is a reason why a Linux desktop is still ugly. And it's difficult to create coherence in open source designs so far when the designs have to get very large. And it's easier to make this happening in a company with centralized organization.
And from my own perspective, what we should ensure is that open source never dies, that it can always compete and has a place with the other forms of organization. Because I think it is absolutely vital that open source exists and that we have systems that people have under control outside of the corporation. And that is also producing viable competition to the corporations.
I grew up in socialism and I learned that corporations are totally evil and I found this very, very convincing. And then you look at corporations like Enron and Halliburton maybe and realize, yeah, they are evil. But you also notice that many other corporations are not evil. They're surprisingly benevolent. Why are they so benevolent? Is this because everybody is fighting them all the time?
I don't think that's the only explanation. It's because they're actually animals that live in a large ecosystem and that are still largely controlled by people that want that ecosystem to flourish and be viable for people. So I think that Pat Gelsinger is completely sincere when he leads Intel to be a tool that supplies the free world with semiconductors.
And it's not necessary that all the semiconductors are coming from Intel. It's just Intel needs to be there to make sure that we always have them. So there can be many ways in which we can import and trade semiconductors from other companies and places. We just need to make sure that nobody can cut us off from it because that would be a disaster for this kind of society and world.
And so there are many things that need to be done to make our style of life possible. And with this, I don't mean just capitalism, environmental destruction, consumerism and creature comforts. I mean an idea of life in which we are determined to not by some kind of king or dictator, but in which individuals can determine themselves to the largest possible degree.
And to me, this is something that this Western world is still trying to embody. And it's a very valuable idea that we shouldn't give up too early. And from this perspective, the US is a system of interleaving clubs. And an entrepreneur is a special club founder. It's somebody who makes a club that is producing things that are economically viable.
And to do this, it requires a lot of people who are dedicating a significant part of their life for working for this particular kind of club. And the entrepreneur is picking the initial set of rules and the mission and vision and aesthetics for the club and make sure that it works But the people that are in there need to be protected, right?
If they sacrifice part of their life, there need to be rules that tell how they're being taken care of, even after they leave the club and so on. So there's a large body of rules that have been created by our rule-giving clubs. and that are enforced by our enforcement clubs and so on.
And some of these clubs have to be monopolies for game theoretic reasons, which also makes them more open to corruption and less harder to update. And this is an ongoing discussion and process that takes place.
But the beauty of this idea that there is no centralized king that is extracting from the peasants and breeding the peasants into serving the king and fulfilling all the roles like Anson and Antle, But that there is a freedom of association and corporations are one of them is something that took me some time to realize. So I do think that corporations are dangerous, right?
They need to be protections against overreach of corporations that can do regulatory capture.
and prevent open source from competing with corporations by imposing rules that make it impossible for a small group of kids to come together to build their own language model because OpenAI has convinced the US that you need to have some kind of FDA process that you need to go through that costs many million dollars before you are able to train a language model.
So this is important to make sure that this doesn't happen. So I think that OpenAI and Google are good things. if these good things are kept in check in such a way that all the other clubs can still be founded and all the other forms of clubs that are desirable can still coexist with them.
Showing 441–460 of 510 · page 23 of 26
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