- The AI techie subculture is a relatively small subculture of youngish people in San Francisco and the peninsula to the south, who often live in group houses and who are loosely clustered around the AI industry.
- Money enables the AI techie subculture, but fundamentally it’s about dreams – feeling like you’re part of something new and special and amazing that no one else is a part of.
- Beliefs that stem from and help to intensify this romantic feeling of momentum and importance include the belief that the AI boom is just getting started and will supercharge the economy, the conviction that AI will replace most human endeavors, worries about malign artificial general intelligence (AGI), and a believe in the crucial importance of AI alignment (designing AI to be human-friendly).
- The bohemian/yuppie optimal control problem is a balance between the desire for romantic bohemianism and the desire for upward economic mobility.
- The new AI techie culture is a bit different than the culture that built the internet – it feels more conservative, drugs and alcohol are frowned on more than they used to be, there’s more rhetorical support for things like monogamy and childbearing, and there’s much less passion for social justice.
- Monogamy and Childbearing – AI techies are less likely to go to local Burner events and more likely to go to Vibecamp, which is described as “Burning Man for autistic people”. There is less passion for social justice and more disgust with SF’s homelessness situation.
- Immigrants from Conservative Regions – Techies nowadays are more likely to be children of immigrants from more conservative regions of the globe, such as East and South Asia, East Europe, the Middle East, and West Africa.
- Nature of Technology – The internet was inherently a utopian, humanistic project, while AI is generally framed as a way for companies to replace human beings.
- Money – As the startup world has become a big, institutionalized business, money has become more and more available to a younger and younger set of people.
- Yuppies – Young urban professionals who dedicate their time to climbing the economic ladder.
- Multi-Armed Bandit Problem – Finding a balance between yuppie social climbing and bohemian youth.
- Constrained Optimization Problem – Without living two full lifetimes, you don’t get to be both entirely bohemian and entirely yuppie.
- Network – People used to working in AI need to network to meet VCs, engineers, founders, and people who might give them ideas about how to solve technical problems.
- Echo Chamber – AI techies’ need to network can cut them off from the wider community around them.
Published February 26, 2023
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