The problem isn't imagining and building the future, it's the particular political narrative out of which the tech class is trying to build the future.
The problem is the future is being created by sociopathic, crony capitalist neo-reactionary cultists who want to rule over a broken world as its brutal philosopher kings, and consign everyone else into the mouth of Moloch. These are the people for whom the meme "Please don't create the Torment Nexus" was made. These people are the reason Ted Kaczynski is so popular amongst the tech underclass.
I don't know what the alternative is, but we should be concerned.
I've seen the preamble to his manifesto quoted enough to know that isn't the case. Kaczynski's views on "the left" are point for point mainstream within internet culture now, and plenty of people will defend his views on technology, if not his violence.
There was a recent thread about him here[0,1]. Plenty of people denouncing him, of course, but also lots of sympathy. I've also noticed a trend to reform (and excuse) his violent actions as being the effect of psychological torture by the CIA and MKULTRA. The linked article goes a bit deeper into how influential his manifesto has been on the culture.
Unions and taxes are the alternative. Nobody should be a billionaire. If there wasn't such a concentration of wealth among a few, detached sociopaths we wouldn't have to worry about their pseudo-religious delusions.
Exactly—and I would add onto that regulations with teeth, especially antitrust regulations.
The gutting of antitrust under Reagan was instrumental in allowing the massive hyperconsolidation in all markets, with tech very prominent among them. The Biden administration's repudiation of the intellectually and morally bankrupt Chicago school interpretation of antitrust paves the way for a much better future, but it's going to take time, and it's going to need our support.
Well sure but why blame it on sci-fi?
Sounds to me like those people would create the torment nexus with or without sci-fi.
It’s not like it’s super hard to come up with the concept of e.g. colonising Mars.
The article isn't blaming sci-fi, it's blaming tech elites for missing or ignoring the deeper implications and warnings in what they read, and twisting it into some wierd, dark mirror utopian fetish.
I mean, one could just as well be a fan of sci-fi and realize the torment nexus is a bad thing, and not create it, even if one is a nerd with all the time, power and money in the world.
Scifi can deliver an illusion of understanding. A metaphorical description of something very strange that the reader never actually experienced firsthand.
That's a deep kind of dream. Not saying the vision is entirely invalid, but maybe it isn't as intimate an understanding as the reader thinks.
Capitalism is bad; Communism… how do we describe excruciatingly bad?
We’ve tried it, it’s never worked, and because it relies on a fundamental denial of basic human freedoms, it will literally never work. The only question is how much misery it causes in the latest attempt.
Nope, it’s not. It has a very capitalist society in terms of structure, regulation, safety nets, etc. On paper, sure, land is a 70-year lease, but China appears to just want to renew them.
This is also because China already tried pure communism. There were no corporations, all industries were state owned. This lasted about a decade and was a bloodbath with famines, and almost all intellectuals or people with degrees were executed for promoting inequality by their existence (not kidding - actual history (“Stinking Old Ninth”) - go look it up at your library). Be careful what you wish for when putting communism and inequality in the same sentence.
Do not assume China is the only guilty party. The USSR, as just one example, imprisoned 3,000 biologists for being on the wrong side of an evolution debate for being against Lamarckism. This culminated with banning study of neurophysiology, cell biology, and other fields. (The “Lysenkoism” purges - showing that, ironically, communist countries are among the most dangerous places to be a scientist.)
All anyone who espouses communism can ever seem to reliably produce is a never-ending dictatorship of the proletariat (which always seems to be run by people who strangely look like the bourgeoisie) and I don't think that should count for much, if anything. It's not just a dead end, it's a well documented dead end with body counts totaling in the millions.
The notion that we'd be able to design a society from the ground up in the manner dictated by Communism is fundamentally science fiction as well. This isn't unique to Communism, overall I think the degree a society can be controlled by anyone in power is significantly overstated. It's quite a parallel to the project of terraforming Mars. Nobody is doubting we might affect a change with policy or violence, but what's missing a degree of control in the magnitude and direction of that change.
We can design it. That is what Congress should be doing by passing laws.
We have a system that is kind of working. Laws and regulations are ways to tweak the system, tune it for better performance.
So, lets say we notice that huge wealth inequality is having a negative impact, then we can tax the wealth, and yes, 'distribute' it, like to build roads. That does NOT mean suddenly we are communist.
People stuck in the Capitalist's/Communism argument, if they think it is binary, then really don't understand either one.
> We can design it. That is what Congress should be doing by passing laws.
They sure are passing laws, yet there has been repeated failures at affecting the desired change despite near unilateral agreement among the lawmakers about the direction of the desired change. This includes the war on drugs, the prohibition, and so on.
I'm not disputing these laws have some effect, I'm disputing the ability to envision an outcome, and pass a law such that it has the desired effect.
I'm just saying, we do have a system in place to make corrections. Because they have not been doing it, doesn't mean we can toss it all out and start over.
I'm not sure that would follow in the first place. If the thesis is that strong guidance over the shape and direction of a society is largely impossible, then starting over wouldn't really make much of a difference.
Communism seems bad because Western countries still have a good quality of life for a large percentage of the population. The moment this stops being the case, people in the West will be clamoring for communism. This is just a matter of time and perspective.
In recent years, the term fascism has grown to expand almost anything with an authoritarian or totalitarian bent, which would certainly include at least the Lenin and Stalin years of the Soviet Union.
Though I think this is a bit of unfortunate expansion of its definition, as it leaves us with no term to use when talking about Fascism.
I could sort of see that, though I think authoritarian does a fine job of saying the same thing. But to say the communist party of the Soviet Union wasn't communist, that they used the word communism to make communism/themselves look bad? Thats hard to even follow the logic.
Well by Marx' predictions, this should already have happened. It throws a real spanner in the works for the theory that the evolution of a society is quite so inevitable and predictable.
But this comes back to my point. This is essentially putting faith in Asimov-style psychohistory.
Well that's why they use tools like tiktok to try to convince the West that life is terrible and everyone is miserable. They need to speed things along
Marx theory is about the fight of classes in society. There is nothing predictable about how this fight will happen. The only prediction is that in the end only one class will remain. It cannot be the bourgeoisie simply because they don't work! Moreover, even if only the bourgeoisie happened to survive without work, their instinct is to kill each other (economically) until only one remains. So his observation, that the final state must be some form of socialism or total destruction, makes complete sense.
We could reserve the scifi for an esoteric inner circle of enlightened thinkers. People better able to handle the fire of scifi without munging things up.
The exoteric hoi polloi get pablum and propaganda. (They can't appreciate good scifi anyway). Give them moral fables wrapped in cowboys with laser-guns.
There was a time when they gave meaningful direction to young readers.
Albert G. Ingalls, "The Back Yard Astronomer."
Martin Gardner, "Mathematical Games"
C. L. Stong. "The Amateur Scientist"
After Stongs death, SciAm displayed a halfhearted attempt to keep a few back pages, but around 2000 they dumped the whole idea of citizen science.
Despite the launch of a nationwide "Maker Movement" SciAm's new management couldn't understand why anyone would care. Today, the publication has made itself irrelevant.
This generation has found a new outlet for DIY science and it is called YouTube. Maybe you should check it out. You might learn something.
Seen iRobot once... tries to make self-driving cars and underground tunnels :o)
I still want to see what is on the other end of the galaxy though. Requires more lifespan and faster than light/instantaneous data transmission. So some entangled particles stored in space relay expansions?
Well, the way I've seen it explained, seems like it's similar to being able to dereference some object locally to read a value (observation) but not having access to that global state between the two variables to write it (we don't know yet at least).
The problem being that dereferencing (observing) is a mutating operation.
So, maybe we will find something some day.
A bit of a professional deformation :o)
Or (and I think this is the problem) it requires us thinking about how to enable it for a generation so far in the future we don’t directly identify with them. We like to not care about anything unless we get to benefit from it.
Funny how we think about needing to live longer or travel faster than light.
If the people inspired by sci-fi have a "dangerous political outlook" then what does that say about the people who write it, like the author Charles Stross?
Stross greatly over-estimates how much influence sci-fi has. I've been in the tech world my whole career and have encountered plenty of sci-fi references in that time. It never went beyond cute codenames for projects. In particular, I've never encountered a project that could be traced back to someone saying, "hey that sci-fi story had this cool thing in it, how do we make that?". It just doesn't happen.
The boring reality is that new tech or even long term research visions tend to be extrapolations of what already works, occasionally disrupted by an accidental breakthrough. ChatGPT didn't get invented because researchers watched Star Trek and then sat in a brainstorming session wondering how to make it. It came out of a decade long research programme in which many different directions were explored to see what could be done with GPU powered neural nets. When we finally did get AI that talks like Cmdr Data, it was almost accidental and the next year was spent figuring out what exactly had been built.
Similarly, the idea that colonizing Mars or living in space wouldn't have occurred to anyone except for sci-fi is just daft. These ideas are extremely obvious. Musk isn't inspired by sci-fi; he's explained many times that what drives him is the idea that humanity should be multi-planetary as a risk reduction measure. Peter Thiel wants to extend life because living forever has been a dream since before the start of writing. Why should we give sci-fi authors any credit for these common visions?
I think it's pretty well understood that few things happen in a vacuum and while you're probably right that it's rare for people to sit down and say to each other "alright, let's make star trek" people certainly gravitate to things that interest them and I imagine that certain genres of fiction have embedded themselves deep within the psyche of a lot of people in tech.
Related tangent, the first time I met a meme IRL was when I first sat down with the CTO of a pretty well funded "startup" in the valley and as he was trying sell me on working there, regaling me with the story of him and his cofounders (good 30 years my senior) hustle and grind in the Stanford library before they started while I looked at his model of the Enterprise on his desk...
I mean sure I thought it was well understood too, but the article opens with:
"Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook."
So the author seems to think that tech billionaires do actually sit down and ask how to make Star Trek real.
People being generically inspired by science and technology can happen in many ways. Like, is Musk primarily inspired by sci fi, making money, a love of business, a love of engineering, politics .... you can't really separate out the different factors like Stross wants to do.
I once came across the take that the shift in popular sci-fi from utopian to dystopian lead to a generation of wealth that has been shaped by these stories.
The logic is that if you have lots of popular fiction describing the future a certain way, these ideas will influence the future to become that way to an extent.
I think it's a bit understated just how much popular culture shapes our view of the world, not only of what's true, but also of history, what might come true, inevitable patterns in history, and so on.
But then, many alive today have probably seen more of the world through a screen than outside of one, so it perhaps shouldn't be surprising.
Dunno, maybe Plato was onto something when he wanted to ban fiction in his republic...
It's not clear to me that that's the order of causality.
It's easier to be optimistic and to write optimistic when your society has high marginal tax rates and visibly uses those rates to combat poverty, fund research, and subsidize college (and when you're part of the demographic receiving most of those benefits).
When you see societal protections being stripped away and privatized, the suffering that was caused by that, and the callous nature of your fellow citizens who "got theirs" and continue to vote for politicians who attack and tear down the systems that enabled such growth and optimism, you're more likely to write stories shaped by that world view.
Dystopian fiction has a long history, but from stories I've read it feels like the inflection point was, as with so many things, the Vietnam war, which for many people shattered the myth of technological infallability.
> from stories I've read it feels like the inflection point was, as with so many things, the Vietnam war
There's not just one inflection point where things get dark. There are many. Vonnegut might be associated with the Vietnam generation, but I think living though the WWII firebombing of Dresden as a POW probably had a bigger impact on him, for example.
Yup! LLMs are literally the most “life imitates art technology” situation of all time! By writing a bunch of shit about how an AI is supposed to behave, lo and behold, the AI acts stereotypically.
That’s why people need to STFU about Rokos basilisk.
> the shift in popular sci-fi from utopian to dystopian
As a kid I used to want things to like Star Trek.
I now have a smart phone instead of a communicator, touch screen tablets, a universal translator, my house responds when I call it "computer," and I've seen those expensive in-wall coffee/tea makers . . .
But that wasn't what I really wanted. I wanted the future where people didn't have to worry about money, where the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy wasn't a concern for anyone, and where people were enabled to learn and produce and contribute as they truly desired, so they did.
Gene Roddenberry died. Everything Star Trek turned dark and twisted. And I realized that I didn't get my dream so much as a pile of consumer goods, most of them trying to advertise at me, surveil me, or both.
I think I'm not the only one with this experience.
Making plans for the future is incredibly hard. People are not naturally cooperative so actually affecting positive change is always met with illogical resistance. This creates an environment which punishes any attempt to rationally discuss plans which are actually going ahead. The Saudi line city makes the dynamic obvious to anyone, without taking a stand on the merits of the project.
It's the strawman and steelman argument on a societal scale.
We also have a lot of skeletons in the closet. In some cases the tech is just exposing an underlying problem and not introducing anything new. Good tech also enables society do something about its foundation of sand.
Not perfectly cooperative, sure, but shockingly cooperative. Just recently I was sat in a commercial airline for 9 hours and struck by how much harder it would be to transport several hundred consciousness chimpanzees.
People are naturally cooperative. Just observe any disaster to see it. People come out of the woodworks to help each other.
They myth that when things break down, people revert to some ultra-survivalist hyper-individual bloodline protecting supersoldier has to die.
What happens is that society reverts to pre modern relationship templates where who you know and interpersonal skills reign supreme. Our modern society enables this myth and makes us more like it in our everyday lives than our natural cooperative base state.
Seems billionaires are obsessed with both sci-fi and the middle ages, they want to fly to mars and also they want to have a wild-west era free lawless everything for them with no to little rights for others and having them as slaves.
Thech billionaires seem to either want tech feudalism, where obviously they are the feudal lords, or go straight to oligarchy. Feudalism has the added benefit of higher, perceived legitamicy of the rulong class, and the resulting stability makes the rulers' lives so much easier.
This is another evidence that democracy is not possible with the existence of tech billionaires. These robber barons will continue to exercise power to mold the world into their own desires, it doesn't matter what the people really want. Democracy, a concept that the West pays lip service to, cannot survive in a world dominated by multi billionaires. They need to be completely destroyed (as billionaires not as people) for democracy to survive - a concept that Americans from 100 years ago understood.
Checks and balances were supposed to use this greed for power in opposing parties and roles to keep this in check. It worked fairly well for a long time (as best as could be, not perfect mind you) but now we're in a bit of a hole where power comes from getting the largest number of people to react emotionally to the "opposition" which is real but also an exaggeration and intentionally misunderstood.
What are the checks and balances on demagoguery? I actually don't know.
It's curious that so many tech billionaires are the type that don't recognize that Starship Troopers is supposed to be a satirical depiction of a dystopia and that's why they poorly choose which SF to make real.
This article ignores the fact that three-letter-agencies are behind many of these tech moguls' "successes", and they're in fact being used for total surveillance by the intel community.
I.e., while the tech moguls may dream these SF visions, they're really just a front for dark forces.
Sci-fi is inspirational, especially for people who use STEM to change the world. However, contrary to this opinion, this isn't inherently negative or bad.
"In the beginning was the Word," everything else is plagiarism. Humans are not original--even our mythological creatures are amalgamations--because we can't create without a frame-of-reference which exists prior (creation) to us and is collectively shaped (society, culture, education, mentors, etc.)
Humans, not capable of true originality, are either innovative or derivative. For all the talk of these tech billionaires as geniuses I only see derivatives with tons of money behind it.
They lack both a healthy, wise, and deep-rooted frame-of-reference and the ability to imaginatively innovate within it.
We need stories to be able to imagine and build the future.
I empathise with the author but he doesn’t really offer an alternative
After the rain comes sun. After the sun comes rain again.
(Underwater Love, Smoke City, 1995)
With a particularly memorable film clip which was the first time I remember seeing the equivalent of what the Wachowski's later called Bullet Time.
And the film clip doesn't seem to be on YT...
Edit: can't find the full music video, but there's a clip just showing the "bullet time" bits:
https://youtu.be/ZWXafUHFQu4?si=KL7-ICpWKvUyXczb
The problem isn't imagining and building the future, it's the particular political narrative out of which the tech class is trying to build the future.
The problem is the future is being created by sociopathic, crony capitalist neo-reactionary cultists who want to rule over a broken world as its brutal philosopher kings, and consign everyone else into the mouth of Moloch. These are the people for whom the meme "Please don't create the Torment Nexus" was made. These people are the reason Ted Kaczynski is so popular amongst the tech underclass.
I don't know what the alternative is, but we should be concerned.
…is Ted Kaczynski popular among tech workers? Even the hardcore socialists I know aren’t really fans beyond acknowledging he had a good point or two.
At this point most people don't even know who he is let alone read his writing.
I've seen the preamble to his manifesto quoted enough to know that isn't the case. Kaczynski's views on "the left" are point for point mainstream within internet culture now, and plenty of people will defend his views on technology, if not his violence.
There was a recent thread about him here[0,1]. Plenty of people denouncing him, of course, but also lots of sympathy. I've also noticed a trend to reform (and excuse) his violent actions as being the effect of psychological torture by the CIA and MKULTRA. The linked article goes a bit deeper into how influential his manifesto has been on the culture.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36392976 [1]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/19/unabomber-te...
Au contraire, his name and his views are common knowledge among Gen Z/Gen Alpha.
He is a minor TikTok celebrity.
Interesting. Where can I read some of this stuff? Anywhere apart from tiktok?
For some reason he is worshipped on this site.
Unions and taxes are the alternative. Nobody should be a billionaire. If there wasn't such a concentration of wealth among a few, detached sociopaths we wouldn't have to worry about their pseudo-religious delusions.
Exactly—and I would add onto that regulations with teeth, especially antitrust regulations.
The gutting of antitrust under Reagan was instrumental in allowing the massive hyperconsolidation in all markets, with tech very prominent among them. The Biden administration's repudiation of the intellectually and morally bankrupt Chicago school interpretation of antitrust paves the way for a much better future, but it's going to take time, and it's going to need our support.
And our votes. They won't go down without an ugly fight. "I welcome their hatred" - Roosevelt.
Well sure but why blame it on sci-fi? Sounds to me like those people would create the torment nexus with or without sci-fi. It’s not like it’s super hard to come up with the concept of e.g. colonising Mars.
The article isn't blaming sci-fi, it's blaming tech elites for missing or ignoring the deeper implications and warnings in what they read, and twisting it into some wierd, dark mirror utopian fetish.
I mean, one could just as well be a fan of sci-fi and realize the torment nexus is a bad thing, and not create it, even if one is a nerd with all the time, power and money in the world.
Scifi can deliver an illusion of understanding. A metaphorical description of something very strange that the reader never actually experienced firsthand.
That's a deep kind of dream. Not saying the vision is entirely invalid, but maybe it isn't as intimate an understanding as the reader thinks.
It's a bit like religious literature that way.
Communism is the alternative.
Always has been.
Capitalism is bad; Communism… how do we describe excruciatingly bad?
We’ve tried it, it’s never worked, and because it relies on a fundamental denial of basic human freedoms, it will literally never work. The only question is how much misery it causes in the latest attempt.
Seems to be working reasonably well for China. Or maybe that’s not considered “real” communism.
China is authoritarian-capitalist lol
It isn't "real" communism. It's a semi-socialist dictatorship, just like the USSR was. It just has more elements of capitalism.
Nope, it’s not. It has a very capitalist society in terms of structure, regulation, safety nets, etc. On paper, sure, land is a 70-year lease, but China appears to just want to renew them.
This is also because China already tried pure communism. There were no corporations, all industries were state owned. This lasted about a decade and was a bloodbath with famines, and almost all intellectuals or people with degrees were executed for promoting inequality by their existence (not kidding - actual history (“Stinking Old Ninth”) - go look it up at your library). Be careful what you wish for when putting communism and inequality in the same sentence.
Do not assume China is the only guilty party. The USSR, as just one example, imprisoned 3,000 biologists for being on the wrong side of an evolution debate for being against Lamarckism. This culminated with banning study of neurophysiology, cell biology, and other fields. (The “Lysenkoism” purges - showing that, ironically, communist countries are among the most dangerous places to be a scientist.)
All anyone who espouses communism can ever seem to reliably produce is a never-ending dictatorship of the proletariat (which always seems to be run by people who strangely look like the bourgeoisie) and I don't think that should count for much, if anything. It's not just a dead end, it's a well documented dead end with body counts totaling in the millions.
Calling a country that has 100 billionaires in congress, communist, is an interesting take for sure.
If by "reasonably well" you mean 12-year-old kids working on slave labor assembly lines, I suppose.
The notion that we'd be able to design a society from the ground up in the manner dictated by Communism is fundamentally science fiction as well. This isn't unique to Communism, overall I think the degree a society can be controlled by anyone in power is significantly overstated. It's quite a parallel to the project of terraforming Mars. Nobody is doubting we might affect a change with policy or violence, but what's missing a degree of control in the magnitude and direction of that change.
We can design it. That is what Congress should be doing by passing laws.
We have a system that is kind of working. Laws and regulations are ways to tweak the system, tune it for better performance.
So, lets say we notice that huge wealth inequality is having a negative impact, then we can tax the wealth, and yes, 'distribute' it, like to build roads. That does NOT mean suddenly we are communist.
People stuck in the Capitalist's/Communism argument, if they think it is binary, then really don't understand either one.
> We can design it. That is what Congress should be doing by passing laws.
They sure are passing laws, yet there has been repeated failures at affecting the desired change despite near unilateral agreement among the lawmakers about the direction of the desired change. This includes the war on drugs, the prohibition, and so on.
I'm not disputing these laws have some effect, I'm disputing the ability to envision an outcome, and pass a law such that it has the desired effect.
I'm just saying, we do have a system in place to make corrections. Because they have not been doing it, doesn't mean we can toss it all out and start over.
I'm not sure that would follow in the first place. If the thesis is that strong guidance over the shape and direction of a society is largely impossible, then starting over wouldn't really make much of a difference.
Communism seems bad because Western countries still have a good quality of life for a large percentage of the population. The moment this stops being the case, people in the West will be clamoring for communism. This is just a matter of time and perspective.
The children yearn for the state-owned mines
USSR wasn’t communist it was fascist.
That it was communist was propaganda so communist == bad.
It’s not about economics but the emotional tone of a society.
Under capitalism in the US I can let you die in the streets without lifting a finger. Guess you didn’t capitalize hard enough.
Your position is the state communist party of the Soviet Union wasn't communist, they were fascist, but they called themselves communist to make communism look bad? These guys? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_Communist_Part...
In recent years, the term fascism has grown to expand almost anything with an authoritarian or totalitarian bent, which would certainly include at least the Lenin and Stalin years of the Soviet Union.
Though I think this is a bit of unfortunate expansion of its definition, as it leaves us with no term to use when talking about Fascism.
I could sort of see that, though I think authoritarian does a fine job of saying the same thing. But to say the communist party of the Soviet Union wasn't communist, that they used the word communism to make communism/themselves look bad? Thats hard to even follow the logic.
Yes, I think it's a bit of an unfortunate linguistic development.
(Also I agree the notion of the Soviet Union as an elaborate Fascist false flag operation is pretty hilarious)
Well by Marx' predictions, this should already have happened. It throws a real spanner in the works for the theory that the evolution of a society is quite so inevitable and predictable.
But this comes back to my point. This is essentially putting faith in Asimov-style psychohistory.
Well that's why they use tools like tiktok to try to convince the West that life is terrible and everyone is miserable. They need to speed things along
Marx theory is about the fight of classes in society. There is nothing predictable about how this fight will happen. The only prediction is that in the end only one class will remain. It cannot be the bourgeoisie simply because they don't work! Moreover, even if only the bourgeoisie happened to survive without work, their instinct is to kill each other (economically) until only one remains. So his observation, that the final state must be some form of socialism or total destruction, makes complete sense.
Nature is capitalistic. Big fish eat little fish.
A communist system would have to be a layer over a capitalist one. It would be maintained by a foundation of billionaire dictators.
But, assuming a system controlled by billionaire dictators, we probably don't need any "ism". Just dictate. Ideally to everybody's benefit.
We could reserve the scifi for an esoteric inner circle of enlightened thinkers. People better able to handle the fire of scifi without munging things up.
The exoteric hoi polloi get pablum and propaganda. (They can't appreciate good scifi anyway). Give them moral fables wrapped in cowboys with laser-guns.
I'd watch this movie. Thank you
Maybe OP can burn any science fiction books they find in billionaires houses?
Lol. Yes, I'd tell them that it's "for their health". Everybody likes that one.
"Science fiction, therefore, does not develop in accordance with the scientific method."
The author provides an alternative, but perhaps readers might miss it.
Science fiction is fiction not science.
The alternative to science fiction is the scientific method and the elucidation of scientific fact.
But these individuals are outcasts, dropouts, social failures.
Not interested in education generally.
Not interested in conventional occupations.
They believe they know enough yet they barely know anything.
Understanding computers is a far cry from understanding life.
It's arguable, due to the time committment required, the more one understands computers the less one probably understands "the real world".
Are these individuals interested in scientific fact, or are they more interested in fantasy and belief.
Like Elisabeth Holmes.
Charles Stross, the author of this op-ed, makes his living writing science fiction and fantasy.
"Stick to what you know." Unlike "tech billionaires", Stross knows what he is talking about.
Scientific American needs to look in a mirror.
There was a time when they gave meaningful direction to young readers.
Albert G. Ingalls, "The Back Yard Astronomer." Martin Gardner, "Mathematical Games" C. L. Stong. "The Amateur Scientist"
After Stongs death, SciAm displayed a halfhearted attempt to keep a few back pages, but around 2000 they dumped the whole idea of citizen science.
Despite the launch of a nationwide "Maker Movement" SciAm's new management couldn't understand why anyone would care. Today, the publication has made itself irrelevant.
This generation has found a new outlet for DIY science and it is called YouTube. Maybe you should check it out. You might learn something.
.
Seen iRobot once... tries to make self-driving cars and underground tunnels :o)
I still want to see what is on the other end of the galaxy though. Requires more lifespan and faster than light/instantaneous data transmission. So some entangled particles stored in space relay expansions?
> So some entangled particles stored in space relay expansions?
Entangled particles aren’t going to help us. (Wish i could find that video that explains why…)
I don't know about the video but here are a couple of other sources explainingwhy quantum entanglement doesn't allow FTL communication[0,1].
[0]https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/512504/in-layman...
[1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-quantum-entan...
Well, the way I've seen it explained, seems like it's similar to being able to dereference some object locally to read a value (observation) but not having access to that global state between the two variables to write it (we don't know yet at least).
The problem being that dereferencing (observing) is a mutating operation.
So, maybe we will find something some day. A bit of a professional deformation :o)
Science evolves.
Or (and I think this is the problem) it requires us thinking about how to enable it for a generation so far in the future we don’t directly identify with them. We like to not care about anything unless we get to benefit from it.
Funny how we think about needing to live longer or travel faster than light.
If the people inspired by sci-fi have a "dangerous political outlook" then what does that say about the people who write it, like the author Charles Stross?
Stross greatly over-estimates how much influence sci-fi has. I've been in the tech world my whole career and have encountered plenty of sci-fi references in that time. It never went beyond cute codenames for projects. In particular, I've never encountered a project that could be traced back to someone saying, "hey that sci-fi story had this cool thing in it, how do we make that?". It just doesn't happen.
The boring reality is that new tech or even long term research visions tend to be extrapolations of what already works, occasionally disrupted by an accidental breakthrough. ChatGPT didn't get invented because researchers watched Star Trek and then sat in a brainstorming session wondering how to make it. It came out of a decade long research programme in which many different directions were explored to see what could be done with GPU powered neural nets. When we finally did get AI that talks like Cmdr Data, it was almost accidental and the next year was spent figuring out what exactly had been built.
Similarly, the idea that colonizing Mars or living in space wouldn't have occurred to anyone except for sci-fi is just daft. These ideas are extremely obvious. Musk isn't inspired by sci-fi; he's explained many times that what drives him is the idea that humanity should be multi-planetary as a risk reduction measure. Peter Thiel wants to extend life because living forever has been a dream since before the start of writing. Why should we give sci-fi authors any credit for these common visions?
I think it's pretty well understood that few things happen in a vacuum and while you're probably right that it's rare for people to sit down and say to each other "alright, let's make star trek" people certainly gravitate to things that interest them and I imagine that certain genres of fiction have embedded themselves deep within the psyche of a lot of people in tech.
Related tangent, the first time I met a meme IRL was when I first sat down with the CTO of a pretty well funded "startup" in the valley and as he was trying sell me on working there, regaling me with the story of him and his cofounders (good 30 years my senior) hustle and grind in the Stanford library before they started while I looked at his model of the Enterprise on his desk...
I mean sure I thought it was well understood too, but the article opens with:
"Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook."
So the author seems to think that tech billionaires do actually sit down and ask how to make Star Trek real.
People being generically inspired by science and technology can happen in many ways. Like, is Musk primarily inspired by sci fi, making money, a love of business, a love of engineering, politics .... you can't really separate out the different factors like Stross wants to do.
Powerful people with poor taste is our primary problem. Lots of power but lacking the perception to use it properly.
These wealthy unperceptive persons are perfect candidates for VR heaven. Being unperceptive they see no problem with that.
Then, safely sequestered in their trillion-dollar VR coffins like a crazy uncle locked in a cellar, us poor people will be free to get some work done.
Take away endless supply of free money, unplug their computers from the network and these folks are all but useless.
I once came across the take that the shift in popular sci-fi from utopian to dystopian lead to a generation of wealth that has been shaped by these stories.
The logic is that if you have lots of popular fiction describing the future a certain way, these ideas will influence the future to become that way to an extent.
I think it's a bit understated just how much popular culture shapes our view of the world, not only of what's true, but also of history, what might come true, inevitable patterns in history, and so on.
But then, many alive today have probably seen more of the world through a screen than outside of one, so it perhaps shouldn't be surprising.
Dunno, maybe Plato was onto something when he wanted to ban fiction in his republic...
It's not clear to me that that's the order of causality.
It's easier to be optimistic and to write optimistic when your society has high marginal tax rates and visibly uses those rates to combat poverty, fund research, and subsidize college (and when you're part of the demographic receiving most of those benefits).
When you see societal protections being stripped away and privatized, the suffering that was caused by that, and the callous nature of your fellow citizens who "got theirs" and continue to vote for politicians who attack and tear down the systems that enabled such growth and optimism, you're more likely to write stories shaped by that world view.
Dystopian fiction has a long history, but from stories I've read it feels like the inflection point was, as with so many things, the Vietnam war, which for many people shattered the myth of technological infallability.
> from stories I've read it feels like the inflection point was, as with so many things, the Vietnam war
There's not just one inflection point where things get dark. There are many. Vonnegut might be associated with the Vietnam generation, but I think living though the WWII firebombing of Dresden as a POW probably had a bigger impact on him, for example.
I was referring to a societal inflection point, not any one person - of course there are individual counterexamples.
I consider Vonnegut cynical but not dystopian in most cases (Player Piano being a notable exception)
Yup! LLMs are literally the most “life imitates art technology” situation of all time! By writing a bunch of shit about how an AI is supposed to behave, lo and behold, the AI acts stereotypically.
That’s why people need to STFU about Rokos basilisk.
> the shift in popular sci-fi from utopian to dystopian
As a kid I used to want things to like Star Trek.
I now have a smart phone instead of a communicator, touch screen tablets, a universal translator, my house responds when I call it "computer," and I've seen those expensive in-wall coffee/tea makers . . .
But that wasn't what I really wanted. I wanted the future where people didn't have to worry about money, where the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy wasn't a concern for anyone, and where people were enabled to learn and produce and contribute as they truly desired, so they did.
Gene Roddenberry died. Everything Star Trek turned dark and twisted. And I realized that I didn't get my dream so much as a pile of consumer goods, most of them trying to advertise at me, surveil me, or both.
I think I'm not the only one with this experience.
Making plans for the future is incredibly hard. People are not naturally cooperative so actually affecting positive change is always met with illogical resistance. This creates an environment which punishes any attempt to rationally discuss plans which are actually going ahead. The Saudi line city makes the dynamic obvious to anyone, without taking a stand on the merits of the project.
It's the strawman and steelman argument on a societal scale.
We also have a lot of skeletons in the closet. In some cases the tech is just exposing an underlying problem and not introducing anything new. Good tech also enables society do something about its foundation of sand.
> people are not naturally cooperative
Not perfectly cooperative, sure, but shockingly cooperative. Just recently I was sat in a commercial airline for 9 hours and struck by how much harder it would be to transport several hundred consciousness chimpanzees.
People are naturally cooperative. Just observe any disaster to see it. People come out of the woodworks to help each other.
They myth that when things break down, people revert to some ultra-survivalist hyper-individual bloodline protecting supersoldier has to die.
What happens is that society reverts to pre modern relationship templates where who you know and interpersonal skills reign supreme. Our modern society enables this myth and makes us more like it in our everyday lives than our natural cooperative base state.
I understand the concern. I meant that in the context of making plans people tend to diverge.
You are right in that in solving present problems people do converge.
It would be nice if people could follow plans to avoid having problems in the first place.
Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the SciFi They Grew Up on Real
18 points by cratermoon 9 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38712101
Seems billionaires are obsessed with both sci-fi and the middle ages, they want to fly to mars and also they want to have a wild-west era free lawless everything for them with no to little rights for others and having them as slaves.
Thech billionaires seem to either want tech feudalism, where obviously they are the feudal lords, or go straight to oligarchy. Feudalism has the added benefit of higher, perceived legitamicy of the rulong class, and the resulting stability makes the rulers' lives so much easier.
Peak FUD. Tech writers need to actually make something, even scifi, instead of baiting their readership into being unprincipled pseudo-luddites.
This is another evidence that democracy is not possible with the existence of tech billionaires. These robber barons will continue to exercise power to mold the world into their own desires, it doesn't matter what the people really want. Democracy, a concept that the West pays lip service to, cannot survive in a world dominated by multi billionaires. They need to be completely destroyed (as billionaires not as people) for democracy to survive - a concept that Americans from 100 years ago understood.
Or we just need a functional Congress that understands modern issues and can actually debate and pass legislation regulating industry.
If only people would stop acting in their own benefit and increasing in power thereby.
Checks and balances were supposed to use this greed for power in opposing parties and roles to keep this in check. It worked fairly well for a long time (as best as could be, not perfect mind you) but now we're in a bit of a hole where power comes from getting the largest number of people to react emotionally to the "opposition" which is real but also an exaggeration and intentionally misunderstood.
What are the checks and balances on demagoguery? I actually don't know.
It is not an "or". We need to do that (destroy multibillionaires) to have a functional congress that represents people.
Yup - I feel this.
They were warnings - but tech bros with no imagination and lots of money think it was a prediction.
It's curious that so many tech billionaires are the type that don't recognize that Starship Troopers is supposed to be a satirical depiction of a dystopia and that's why they poorly choose which SF to make real.
This article ignores the fact that three-letter-agencies are behind many of these tech moguls' "successes", and they're in fact being used for total surveillance by the intel community.
I.e., while the tech moguls may dream these SF visions, they're really just a front for dark forces.
Source?
I don't mind if they make sci-fi real, but can they please fuck off with the dystopian ultra-capitalist cyberpunk sci-fi.
Its paywalled
Here's my original talk: four times the length, much more detail, and not paywalled! https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
Actual title is "Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real"
Which makes more sense. But just why do I have certain visuals and a certain person in mind reading it?
The submitter needed to shorten the title to fit HN's 80 char limit.
So many words... so little actually said.
Sci-fi is inspirational, especially for people who use STEM to change the world. However, contrary to this opinion, this isn't inherently negative or bad.
"In the beginning was the Word," everything else is plagiarism. Humans are not original--even our mythological creatures are amalgamations--because we can't create without a frame-of-reference which exists prior (creation) to us and is collectively shaped (society, culture, education, mentors, etc.)
Humans, not capable of true originality, are either innovative or derivative. For all the talk of these tech billionaires as geniuses I only see derivatives with tons of money behind it.
They lack both a healthy, wise, and deep-rooted frame-of-reference and the ability to imaginatively innovate within it.
The best government is a kind dictator.
The best dictator is an immortal, brainlinked hivemind.
Therefore scifi inspired tech will save us.