Highlights
- What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them.
- Sometimes this is because the solution is too expensive, but usually it’s because competing interests create a tragedy of the commons.
- Most problems in the modern age aren’t complicated engineering problems, they’re the same problem: coordination failure.
- There was just one slice of cheese with a gaping hole in it, because it turns out that some manufacturers decided to let users customize their boot image, thinking it would be harmless, and that by itself was enough to wreak havoc.
- Every layer of this problem is a different flavor of coordination failure.
- No one on the team who implemented this either thought that there might need to be a warning about untrusted images, or whoever did bring it up was ignored because it was supposed to be handled by another team.
- We have decades of experience building in-depth QA processes that we are simply ignoring. We could fix this, we just don’t.
- The tragedy of the commons only happens when you have a total failure of collective action.
- It is the original symptom of societal enshittification.
- sickle-cell disease and costs $2 million per patient
- so most people in America simply assume they will never be able to afford any of these treatments
- This is actually really bad, because if nobody can afford the treatment, then biotech companies won’t bother investing into it, because it’s not profitable!
- We have built a society that can’t properly incentivize CURING CANCER.
- This is despite the fact that socialized healthcare is a proven effective strategy
- We don’t need AI to fix things
- We don’t need new technology to solve these problems. We already know how to do better. Our society is bad at cooperation simply because it’s run by people who are incentivized to sabotage cooperation in the name of profits.
- It cannot be fixed by you biking to work, or winning the lottery.
- We must address our coordination failures.
- We must build systems that foster better cooperation, or this century won’t be a turning point for humanity, it will be the end of humanity.