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More Everything Forever
- c0rtex 1y agoAlso reviewed by Cory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...
- cousin_it 1y agoThe phrase "grift behind AI doomerism" suggests that either the book author or the reviewer (or both) don't have a clue. AI will cause real and huge problems.
- _vertigo 1y agoI think that depends on whether your definition of “doomerism” is the same as theirs.
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- amarcheschi 1y agoBut the main figures behind the Ai doomerism are nutjobs either applying bayesian math in a bad way or right wing extremist believing that black people are inferior for genetics reason (I know it's an overreach that doesn't represent all the population of Ai doomers, but the most important people in that sphere are represented by what I said). Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific past in philosophy. Although i do agree that investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic context
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- foobiekr 1y agoWhy is this downvoted? It’s clearly a reference to the zizians and MIRI and Bayesian nutjobs is an absolutely correct assessment.
- hollerith 1y agoKeep on telling yourself that.
- derektank 1y agoStuart Russell and Geoffrey Hinton have both expressed concerns that AI could lead to human extinction and neither are nutjobs
- amarcheschi 1y agoI wasn't explicitly referring to the more "sane" people expressing doubts regarding Ai. Hinton at least says that other issues in Ai should be dealt with, rather than just being an Ai doomer who only fears Ai takeover he actually realizes that there are other current issues as well At this point, how many times should we have been dead for eliezer?
- hollerith 1y agoLike almost all the other doomers, Eliezer never claimed to know which generation of AIs would undergo a sudden increase in capability resulting in our extinction or some other doom, not with any specificity beyond saying that it would probably happen some time in the next few decades unless the AI project is stopped.
- amarcheschi 1y agoIdk, a few years ago when chatgpt came out he was saying things like "if we're still alive in 3 years (...)" where chatgpt 3.5 was still a glorified transformer. And modern llms still are. It's the constant fear mongering that stings my nerves. And well, I'm not surprised nobody knows which generation of Ai could undergo an increase causing our extinction, it's not even sure if there could exist such a thing, let alone know which generation
- lazzlazzlazz 1y agoCars have killed millions of people. Add to that the consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization, and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous luxury when measured against recent history -- but they wouldn't have existed at all. Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support and improve the lives of billions (if not trillions on a long enough time scale).
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoThat's one vision of how things play out. But I do think it's possible that AI ends up killing every last person, in which case I think "everything good comes with tradeoffs" is a bit too much of an understatement.
- gusmally 1y agoEven if AI doesn't kill every last person, I think it will almost certainly increase the wealth gap. I agree that the tradeoffs will most likely not be worth it.
- arduanika 1y agoAh, so if that's what you mean by AI downsides, then you might find this useful: https://www.wikihow.com/Leave-a-Cult https://www.wikihow.com/Leave-a-Cult
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoI came to this conclusion on my own, so, no.
- amarcheschi 1y agoYesterday I had someone here tell me timnit gebru didn't contribute to hard science She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach
- elefanten 1y agoPutting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"... She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique. It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand. It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.
- amarcheschi 1y agoOh, and I don't necessarily agree with all what she says, I don't want to know what happens when someone which 100% agrees with her enters the room
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- owlninja 1y agoGift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everything-forever-adam-becker.html?unlocked_article_code=1.B08.V_sF.Mez_71R_m1gt&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everyth...
- deadbabe 1y ago[flagged]
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- oceanplexian 1y ago> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us. While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)". For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
- nuancebydefault 1y agoI don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoIt is more important. We spend > $2T per year fighting climate change. We spend > $10T per year on social welfare programs. We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.
- LunaSea 1y agoAnd both of these amounts seem to not be enough based on the resulting state of the world.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoGiven that world GDP is only $100T, it's impossible to spend significantly more. (where significant is defined as an order of magnitude).
- elefanten 1y agoAs others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve. So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound. Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- philipkglass 1y agoThis is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism). While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation. I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture": https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federovs-rapture.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federov... Fyodorov/Federov also shows up in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy. It's a bundle of ideas that has produced some very good science fiction, but I wouldn't reorganize my life around it.
- gwern 1y agoThis also illustrates the bad research that goes into this sort of thing. There are no deep roots of 'TESCREAL' (which doesn't exist to begin with) in Russian Cosmism, because there are no roots of any of those ingredients separately in Russian Cosmism. Stross just made that up, as pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. There are no sources, and he got it from Hannu: https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 Stross has chosen to never revisit the topic to try to substantiate his suggestion. This quote winds up being rather exemplary: for example, that one parenthetical description manages to make at least 3 errors: 1. Fyodorov was born in 1823, so he obviously could not have invented anything in the '18th century' (ie. 1700s); 2. Cosmism included many things, not just the 'Great Common Task', and the Great Common Task itself went far beyond reviving ancestors, including many overall more important things like colonizing the entire universe or conquering death; 3. and further, the revival part was not about computer simulation at all (that's Hannu's _Quantum Thief_ fictional version of the idea that he came up with for his Sobornosts!) but reviving them physically, in the body, possibly using cloning - and was no more about "inside of a simulation" than Jesus reviving the dead was. You're right that Hannu made great use of Cosmism as world-building in the Quantum Thief trilogy which I highly recommend (see my review above) - but that could only work because the ideas of Cosmism are so novel & exotic, and not part of Western transhumanism. If they really were as foundational as Stross claims, the 'taproot' of Western ideas, they would make about as exciting fictional worldbuilding as suggesting that you have some sort of 'laws' for AIs, starting with 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."...
- glitchc 1y ago[flagged]
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- bko 1y agoThis book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt. I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts? I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
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- f1yght 1y agoI think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.
- bko 1y agoI don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models. What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more? Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population. So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
- iNic 1y agoIt is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)
- moolcool 1y ago> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure. I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.
- ctoth 1y agoI had a deadly childhood cancer, Retinoblastoma, which would have killed me without modern medicine. I'm pretty fond of existing. These developments sure altered my humanity. By making it possible.
- moolcool 1y agoModern medicine saved my life as well. It seems like splitting hairs, but changing _who_ one is is different from changing _that_ one is. My point is that technology isn't going to do anything to alter the core human experience: envy, passion, jealousy, gratitude, love, etc... aren't mutable in the way that rationalists or transhumanists would have us believe.
- ctoth 1y agoI'm sorry but I fail to see how I could have any envy, passion, or love if I am dead. If these things are important in any way, then literally changing whether or not someone experiences these things seems important? You can't have the one without the other. Also I'm not sure where Rationalists or transhumanists said "it would be cool to live way longer" and you read "get rid of love." That seems like a weird failure of your own imagination. You can't have love if you're dead, so the transhumanists want you to live longer and... experience more love!
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- bee_rider 1y agoColonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man. Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so. But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
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- cgriswald 1y agoYou don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical. I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
- psalaun 1y agoIn the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children. So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
- aeturnum 1y agoI am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium. Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships. I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
- margalabargala 1y ago100 years optimistically? We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade. We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications. It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.
- aeturnum 1y agoI really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time. If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.
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- ctoth 1y ago"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.
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- janalsncm 1y agoThat is a much darker tone that I’ve ever thought of that passage in. On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admission that his political project had failed.
- lurk2 1y ago> I believe Jesus also believed this Jesus predicted his death several times, most explicitly in Matthew 20:17–19. > Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death, and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He will rise again.” - Matthew 20:17–19
- alganet 1y agoIt is known that the specifics of the story were modified. The current text is kind of frozen by its own similarities to itself. The use of extracted quotes is probably a mistake. You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information, very faint, very difficult to do with translated versions.
- dmonitor 1y ago
- blaze33 1y ago> The “ideology of technological salvation” On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!". I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see. Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth. Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
- janalsncm 1y agoWe are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy. If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it. That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy. Yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been higher nor has the rate of increase.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoI'm fairly certain the rate of increase has been higher, whether you mean in percentage or absolute terms. It could be a decade long blip but since we've peaked per capita and various large nations have peaked and we have extensive research on what the causes are and active programs to mitigate those it's probably more reasonable to say that CO2 (and Greenhouse gasses generally) are growing but at a slower rate with some credible hope to reverse that growth. Don't get me wrong it is fucked up that we partly squandered a few decades and let it get this far and things could still go badly wrong but we have enough data that we can stick to the scary facts.
- janalsncm 1y agoI will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun. I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
- chadcmulligan 1y agoIts not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money from business is treated like they're the smartest person in the room by many people. The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago"not necessarily pretty smart" is a very nice way of putting it. I don't know where the threshold ought to be, but beyond a certain size a pile of money can only indicate bad things about its owner. Either they're too unimaginative to turn that potential into action, or their designs are so against the will of the people that it's going to take gargantuan amounts of coercion to get them done. Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.
- derektank 1y agoMost rich people aren't sitting on piles of cash; their capital is (usually) invested in a corporation which is busy turning potential into action, as you put it. I think there's an argument to be made that amassing and hoarding great wealth, particularly near the end of one's life with the intent to pass it directly onto one's heirs, is morally questionable if you believe in any kind of universalist ethic. But I think criticizing someone as uncreative simply because they're not selling off all their equity to go pursue some other venture is way off
- thingsilearned 1y agoDid this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like this?
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThere's a "controversy filter" that downrates articles with more comments than points.
- codr7 1y agoExplains a lot, there's no such thing as substance without controversy.
- Smaug123 1y agoBasically false, I think? From the first couple of pages of the top-of-all-time HN posts: * War stories (e.g. "How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 ) * Anything by ciechanow.ski (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443229 ) * Strange bits of personal whimsy (e.g. "I sell onions on the Internet" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 ) * Neat toys (e.g. 2048, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566 )
- codr7 1y agopopularity != substance
- Smaug123 1y agoYou might have noticed that I didn't quote upvote figures, and that I omitted a bunch of possible options. I sorted by popularity and then selected ones with substance. (I presume you're not asserting that they have no substance by virtue of the fact that they were popular.)
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- aethrum 1y agoIf you like optimistic Sci-Fi, I would recommend the Culture Series. It really changed me when I read it in university.
- cousin_it 1y agoThe Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will look like that, but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a path but it would require AIs to be built for public interest already now.
- foobiekr 1y agoAM for example could plausibly be trained on 4chan and war footage.
- robertlagrant 1y ago> but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". How do you know that?
- schnitzelstoat 1y agoIs there any optimistic sci-fi that doesn't have something like superpowerful perfect AI? It feels like such a thing is a bit of a cop-out as it removes all the problems that arise from human imperfections and yet our own history is that of an improving standard of living despite these imperfections.
- deeThrow94 1y agoKim Stanley Robinson is pretty good utopian sci fi. Some of his works are more plausible than others.
- deeThrow94 1y ago> The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality. The difference is that there's no need to build AIs with "motivation". Computers don't view us as anything right now, even if they're better at working with bits than us. What would change this in your mind? Naturally, we will anyway because that's a short-cut and we're not very imaginative. But any kind of AI that would want anything will have to be explicitly built by us.
- fullstackchris 1y agoIf I see another mention of the paper clip example I'm gonna lose it. Perhaps better is to kindly refer everyone to a physics 101 text book.
- m463 1y agoWhen I read this, I sort of resist the idea. Which reminds me of the "Dogma of Otherness" by the scifi author David Brin: "Think about it. 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans." https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html
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- 11101010001100 1y agoThat story is just an anthropologist discovering Russell's paradox. There, I did it again.
- kazinator 1y ago> [Mars colonists] would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth, presumably via Musk’s company SpaceX Any vessel taking water away from Earth should be shot down with extreme prejudice.
- mikhailfranco 1y agoThere is water ice on Mars and the Moon. Solar energy electrolysis can turn water into rocket fuel. In an emergency, you could burn that rocket fuel to get energy and water.
- golemiprague 1y ago[dead]
- CommenterPerson 1y agoI would like to mention Bill Gates as a tech bro who has been doing "good works". Like fighting malaria, funding vaccine development (yes), Na reactors, and so forth. He was the nasty tech bro in the 90's and early 00's but evolved into a good tech bro. I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.
- ur-whale 1y agohttps://archive.ph/liq8S https://archive.ph/liq8S
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- golol 1y ago>“We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for,” Becker writes. “We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos.” I don't like this mindset. Be grateful for what you have. Maybe the world is not that great yet for many people and we should aim to improve things substantially, not marginally. This is something that the shuffling around of ressources on a political level can never achieve. Those dreaded tech entrepreneurs have correctly identified technology to be the only way substantial improvements can happen. So then it all blils down if you can make things happen and here the article and some comments here just claim, well, they NEVER deliver!
- nektro 1y agocan we invent our way to eliminating billionaires? because that's the common denominator in every problem they claim to be the savior of
- rudolftheone 1y agoWe already invented that. It was called the 20th century. Tried wealth caps, nationalizations, revolutions - you name it. Usually ended with gulags, breadlines, or both. Billionaires are a symptom, not the disease. You don’t cure a fever by smashing thermometers. If we want fewer billionaires, we need systems that don’t reward monopoly power ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- sameasiteverwas 1y ago[flagged]
- hnbad 1y ago> They would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth That's one of the core challenges techno-optimists like Musk constantly handwave and ignore when grandstanding about humanity becoming a "multi-planetary species". Yes, we can settle Mars. We could probably even do so with the technology we have today, certainly if we invest resources into further research and development with that specific goal in mind. But we can't do so in the political and economical landscape we have today. We have a massive resource allocation problem here on Earth. We're overproducing goods because it's less economically damaging to destroy surplus products than to sell at cost or only produce to meet actual demand. We build for planned obsolesence and encourage wasteful competition between ten different companies owning a hundred different brands of the same product just to perpetuate an artificial demand via "FOMO". We're siphoning global wealth into the hands of a few people who waste our resources on superyachts like Bezos or actively prevent public infrastructure projects like Musk's attacks[0] on public mass transit. We're subsidizing legacy fossil fuel production and consumption instead of developing more efficient energy use and storage technologies. Meanwhile Russia suicide-bombed the European economy by invading Ukraine and now the US rapidly disassembles its decades old network of allies and trading partners. None of this is stabilizing let alone sustainable - and we need a sustainable human presence on Earth before we can build out a persistent presence elsewhere. If Musk truly believed in making humanity a multi-planetary species to ensure the survival of our species, his main focus would be terraforming Earth, not Mars. Instead he sells visions of a future that only considers the extremely wealthy, with point-to-point rocket shuttles and hermetically sealed self-driving underground robotaxis. Just like Bezos uses his dildo rocket[1] for a girlboss publicity stunt after getting visibly upset when William Shatner had a genuine moment of realizing the fragile beauty of Earth and humanity[2] because Bezos' vision is to send all the unsightly refuse, industry and laborers into space so the rich and beautiful can have Earth to themselves[3]. But people like Musk aren't actually interested in making a multi-planetary species a reality. It's just a sexy mission statement that justifies their business ventures. He may actually believe in it but if he thinks that's what he's doing, he's not nearly as smart as people claim he is. [0]: The Hyperloop concept was infamously pushed by Musk to sabotage the public infrastructure proposal of a highspeed rail network but this isn't the only example. A lot of his mass transit concepts boil down to "busses but smaller" or "trains/trams/metros but on wheels". When he first pitched the idea of FSD allowing Tesla owners to let their cars "work for them" as robotaxis, he also floated the idea that this could be used to pay for the cost of the car, which would allow Tesla to run a form of car sharing that offloads the actual risks and maintenance costs to the "owners" of the cars. Tesla's early vision also explicitly included the goal of making EVs affordable to the general public, which Musk no longer seems to be interested in. [1]: Blue Origin's rockets have rightfully been criticized for being excessively phallic. While rockets necessarily have a phallic tendency, Bezos' rockets stand out for looking specifically dildo-like even by rocket standards. Given that there is no technical necessity for making it look this much like a dick and that the design hasn't been modified to make it any less dildo-like, the appearance can be considered deliberate even if we grant the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn't originally intended to be so blatantly phallic - at some point everyone in charge agreed that the rocket should continue to look the way it does now. [2]: There's a widely circulated video clip of Shatner having a moment and being interrupted by Bezos fetching and spraying a champagne bottle. Shatner stated that he went on the trip expecting to be overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of space because he had always been fascinated by it but that the experience had fundamentally changed his outlook by showing him the contrast of the vast emptiness of space and the vulnerability of Earth containing all that ever has and and ever will matter to him - an experience he apparently shares with many others who got to see Earth from space. Of course this isn't why Bezos took him on the ride and isn't a message Bezos cares for - the vapid girlboss soundbites by the more recent ride carrying female influencers is a much better match for his intented PR, especially the insistence on referring to the space tourists as "astronauts". [3]: Although Bezos hasn't been in the news much over his visions (probably because when Musk did so he had a more receptive audience because there was a general pop culture of space optimism which largely seems to be gone now) he has floated the ideas of launching Earth's waste into space (presumably especially radioactive waste, which might be a bad idea if there's a chance of rocket malfunction) and of moving dirty industry into space to reduce pollution on Earth - the latter included the idea of creating habitats for the laborers, which had certain undertones.
- schnitzelstoat 1y agoWithout the hope of technological progress, human expansion and economic growth the world becomes zero-sum. In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else. The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we struggle to comprehend. Of course, some people are overly optimistic about the near-term possibilities of technology, but I much prefer that to the alternative.
- red-iron-pine 1y agobollocks. nature has found equilibrium for millions of years. things like the Nash Equilibrium or game theory also find healthy balances. what you're talking about is capitalism becoming unsustainable
- thelastgallon 1y agoNeil Degrasse Tyson on Mars colonization: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5D-0xrhwbR8 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5D-0xrhwbR8 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOwTtxgcYeg https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOwTtxgcYeg
- e40 1y agoWhy on Earth do shorts have to loop!!!
- rldjbpin 1y agobeing critical about the messaging and the timeline of achieving these goals is fair. however the rest of the thesis seems too harsh, despite the author's credentials. there is nothing wrong with "shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars" aspect about these literal moonshot projects. regardless of what you think about the people running them, but these initiatives tend to bring out a lot of innovation.