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Bezos is right. Most people don't think about the long game. What can we do today to more quickly increase our tech tree 25, 50, 100, 200 years into the futu

Bezos is right. Most people don't think about the long game. What can we do today to more quickly increase our tech tree 25, 50, 100, 200 years into the future? If we spent more of our GDP 50 years ago on R&D, our knowledge would be much greater than today. Solar energy, electric vehicles, etc would already be mainstream, for example. Our ability to treat cancer(s), alzheimer's, heart disease would be 20 years more advanced. "Jeff Bezos, too, is thinking at the species-existence level. “The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” he says. “And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in.” That’s why Bezos is spending a billion dollars a year on Blue Origin, his space travel company—and that’s why, controversially, he thinks that Blue Origin is really the only way to spend such enormous resources. If something you did today could materially improve the lives of trillions of humans in the future, then that benefit would have to outweigh anything you did for mere millions of humans in the present."

thaumasiotes 8y ago
With a trillion humans, a lot more of the energy available to perform work would be human effort. The humans providing low-level effort will be desperately poor, because that low-level effort isn't worth much. The Black Death did wonders for the peasant class of Europe by killing a third of them. Those who didn't die were much richer than peasants had been previously. (Nobles were poorer, because most of the wealth of nobles was the peasants who worked their land. Losing a third of your wealth isn't so great; losing a third of your competition is.) If you want humans to have unlimited resources and unlimited power, you should focus on driving numbers down, not up. In a different but related analogy, Seeing like a State likes to emphasize how intensive agriculture by peasants who are intimately familiar with the local land, weather, crops, and pests is more productive (in terms of food produced per acre) than modern industrial agriculture. The difference is that the local peasant devotes all his time to cultivating a man-sized area of land. The extra productivity goes to him, and he eats it, but he's very poor. One man using inefficient machines to cultivate 20 fields at 80% efficiency is a lot richer than any of the 60 men cultivating a third of a field each at 100% efficiency, and the society around that one man is richer too because, unlike the 60 peasants, he produces a lot of surplus to trade with them.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by the elite and/or powerful. We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle' greed so that you still motivate productive work without allowing those with disproportionate power to game the system in their favor. Technology can help us solve this.
  - Fins 8y ago
    You should start with breeding a new kind of humans, ones that would be compatible with socialism. Of course alternatively, you could just kill a vast majority of them; that's the approach most people attempting to implement socialism end up taking (viz. anything from Soviet Russia to Khmer Rouge). Alas, every time in the output you get lots of mass graves, but no workable socialism.
  - wilsonnb 8y ago
    I think that the idea of technology saving us from our inherent natural tendencies is nice to think about but ultimately naive.
imustbeevil 8y ago
Another benefit of prioritizing future humans is that they're the people on the other side of the Cryo door in a thousand years.
wilsonnb 8y ago
Conversely, why should I care about the trillions of people here after I die? Why should I care if humanity dies in it's birthplace or spreads across the universe like a virus? To me, a future with a trillion happy people is not better than a future with a million happy people just because there are more happy people. Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading.
- Retra 8y ago
  >Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading. This is probably not true, given that you seem to value your own life. (It also runs afoul of failing to meaningfully designate what makes value 'inherent' or not, or why this is a feature of value you should care about in the first place.) But the main flaw in your philosophical argument is that it presumes a particular form of 'self-identity' that just happens to exclude future people. But you are not special. A great number of things that are true of you are true of others, and if you can value your own life, you can value others'. Which means, circumstantially, that any benefit you find for yourself is practically destined to be a benefit for someone else, and more importantly, vice versa. Whatever you want out of your own life is best achieved by figuring out how to create it in arbitrary life, or at least, as generally as possible. At the very least, you have a rational argument that you can distribute needed workload better. EDIT: You might be thinking "if I'm dead, who cares", but this is just another identity problem. There could very well be a future person who is born with your exact brain, and you've got no reason to think such a person isn't also you. In reality, most of us are mostly like you.
  - wilsonnb 8y ago
    I do value my own life, because it already exists. I also value other life that also exists. I do not value future life that does not exist. Future life and current life seem very different to me. Putting your billions towards the long view seems to require you not putting your billions towards the short view. The short view is the one that affects those who are already alive so that seems like a better option to me.
    - 8y ago

thaumasiotes 8y ago

With a trillion humans, a lot more of the energy available to perform work would be human effort. The humans providing low-level effort will be desperately poor, because that low-level effort isn't worth much. The Black Death did wonders for the peasant class of Europe by killing a third of them. Those who didn't die were much richer than peasants had been previously. (Nobles were poorer, because most of the wealth of nobles was the peasants who worked their land. Losing a third of your wealth isn't so great; losing a third of your competition is.) If you want humans to have unlimited resources and unlimited power, you should focus on driving numbers down, not up. In a different but related analogy, Seeing like a State likes to emphasize how intensive agriculture by peasants who are intimately familiar with the local land, weather, crops, and pests is more productive (in terms of food produced per acre) than modern industrial agriculture. The difference is that the local peasant devotes all his time to cultivating a man-sized area of land. The extra productivity goes to him, and he eats it, but he's very poor. One man using inefficient machines to cultivate 20 fields at 80% efficiency is a lot richer than any of the 60 men cultivating a third of a field each at 100% efficiency, and the society around that one man is richer too because, unlike the 60 peasants, he produces a lot of surplus to trade with them.

cwkoss 8y ago
Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by the elite and/or powerful. We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle' greed so that you still motivate productive work without allowing those with disproportionate power to game the system in their favor. Technology can help us solve this.
- Fins 8y ago
  You should start with breeding a new kind of humans, ones that would be compatible with socialism. Of course alternatively, you could just kill a vast majority of them; that's the approach most people attempting to implement socialism end up taking (viz. anything from Soviet Russia to Khmer Rouge). Alas, every time in the output you get lots of mass graves, but no workable socialism.
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  I think that the idea of technology saving us from our inherent natural tendencies is nice to think about but ultimately naive.

imustbeevil 8y ago

Another benefit of prioritizing future humans is that they're the people on the other side of the Cryo door in a thousand years.

wilsonnb 8y ago

Conversely, why should I care about the trillions of people here after I die? Why should I care if humanity dies in it's birthplace or spreads across the universe like a virus? To me, a future with a trillion happy people is not better than a future with a million happy people just because there are more happy people. Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading.

Retra 8y ago
>Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading. This is probably not true, given that you seem to value your own life. (It also runs afoul of failing to meaningfully designate what makes value 'inherent' or not, or why this is a feature of value you should care about in the first place.) But the main flaw in your philosophical argument is that it presumes a particular form of 'self-identity' that just happens to exclude future people. But you are not special. A great number of things that are true of you are true of others, and if you can value your own life, you can value others'. Which means, circumstantially, that any benefit you find for yourself is practically destined to be a benefit for someone else, and more importantly, vice versa. Whatever you want out of your own life is best achieved by figuring out how to create it in arbitrary life, or at least, as generally as possible. At the very least, you have a rational argument that you can distribute needed workload better. EDIT: You might be thinking "if I'm dead, who cares", but this is just another identity problem. There could very well be a future person who is born with your exact brain, and you've got no reason to think such a person isn't also you. In reality, most of us are mostly like you.
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  I do value my own life, because it already exists. I also value other life that also exists. I do not value future life that does not exist. Future life and current life seem very different to me. Putting your billions towards the long view seems to require you not putting your billions towards the short view. The short view is the one that affects those who are already alive so that seems like a better option to me.
  - 8y ago