Quinn Slobodian
speaker
708 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jun
Quinn Slobodian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It was about protecting the dignity of labor, not just seeing labor as like a payroll commodity.
I mean, I think it's best to see them as being pressured to it from the forces that encircle them, right?
I mean, and it is another way that the past era is so strikingly different from the present, right?
I mean, we live in the United States, walk into the middle of cities, you see museums, you see universities, you see all of these things, libraries that were endowed by that previous generation of oligarchs.
because of a recognition that they needed to meet the population halfway and find some kind of way of giving back, however symbolically and partially, part of the wages that are being taken from them every day in the workplace.
And what's so still to this day amazing to me is how the Silicon Valley class feels no need to do anything even comparable.
In fact, the Musk Foundation is one of the best capitalized philanthropies in the United States.
And yet it's sued every year by the IRS because it doesn't pay the minimum out to anything to count as a charity.
I mean, it's really not bad.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Well, I actually think that effective altruism is kind of underplayed as being still really significant in this story.
Because another correlated philosophy is long-termism, right?
Right.
Which is that you actually need to do the things that will create the breakthrough technologies, which will allow for the future propagation of human lives, you know, millennia into the future.
So to think in the short timeframe of how can I make life better for the present number of people on Earth or even the next few generations is actually way too narrow-minded.
And you need to say, how are we going to be able to colonize the planets, set up Dyson spheres around all of them and have sextillions of digital lives unloaded onto these mainframes that now become interplanetary.
If you take on that way of thinking and Musk and Altman were at the center of that discussion in 2015 when they started OpenAI, then you basically delinked yourself from all the normal impulses of humanitarianism and charity that would lead even someone like Bill Gates to say like, hey, let's make lives a little longer for people in the third world.
Yes.
Right.
Showing 421–440 of 708 · page 22 of 36
← Previous
Next →