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As far as I understand, this has happened when George Mason University decided to hire a bunch of looked-over straight while male libertarian economists, and got a powerhouse is in the form of a single department at an otherwise unknown school with Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, and Tyler Cowen.
You also see extreme "over-representation" in any new, unregulated area of economic growth. E.g.
The founding teams of most tech startups and the first few rounds of technical employees,
Cryptocurrency
E-sports
Tech Venture Capital (e.g. Y combinator)
AI and AI safety
Effective altruism
It takes time for the problematizers to notice a new power center and bring the eye of sauron to bear. But this is becoming quicker and more predictable, so first movers are pre-emptively playing the optics game with more effort and finesse. I just worry that someday there won't be any new growth centers to move to.
It would be very amusing if the oh-so-harassed techbros finally get a position of overwhelming dominance over the problematizers: traditional media, finance, academia, politics and so on. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to make enemies of people with enormous unrealized power in terms of proximity to AI. Machiavelli said something like 'if you're going to offend and humiliate someone, make sure to totally cripple them so they can never get revenge'.
But on the other hand, wielding power is not something the tech sector is good at doing, systemically. Musk for example has a lot wealth but he struggles to leverage it to achieve his goals and also makes a lot of enemies.
I actually think there's a decent chance of this happening, and that a whole host of horrors will be unleashed if it does.
They seemed pretty good at it until about the mid 70's.
Do you mean the aerospace or atomics sectors? Defence sort of counts as tech, it certainly would've then when it was the leading sector of the economy... It's an interesting question of how one defines technology.
I meant more stuff like this, but generally wasn't the zeitgeist of the post war period one of science / rationality / industrialization / technology?
Oh technology generally was more fashionable back then. Scientific prestige was higher. Tom Swift was the hero in 'Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster'!
I really think lobotomies come under the aegis of medicine. Eugenics too, for that matter. Medicine just doesn't feel like tech, it feels like something else. The pharma-industrial complex has a different essence to the military-industrial complex or the big tech that we know today IMO. They tend to hold less of the limelight, the profile of Pfizer and Johnson&Johnson was very low compared to tech. Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos... these are mighty names! Who has heard of Alex Gorsky, former CEO of J & J? But on the other hand, they are called biotech companies.
With tech, I think it's a case of the more physics are involved, the techier it gets. Aerospace, ballistics, Silicon Valley, Massachusetts. Computer science is sort of like physics, it's all precise rules and mathematics. I reckon the bombards that were used to break the walls of Constantinople would be classified as tech, that's physics/engineering.
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