Why Peter Thiel Fears Star Trek
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Star Wars says it's capitalist, but I don't believe it. In many of the scenes you see people doing jobs that could easily be done by droids. Even their wars are fought with droids - or manufactured humans that are treated like droids. Droids are generally intelligent and can basically do any job people can do. Why do they need people at all?
Star trek has that problem too. How often do the characters ask the computer to do pretty complex tasks? Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated?
All science fiction paints a 20th century society with a pretty futuristic backdrop and props. But things like AI and replicators would radically change the way things work. And create a society very different than what we know. Quite possibly one without humans. What would really happen if any lunatic could replicate parts for WMDs? Or if robots that were really smarter than humans appeared?
True, but there is this much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H5uPyU2oKE
Other references: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money
What does a sentient replicator robot care if a little boy just wants to whittle a bowl out of a piece of wood? It's kinda neat, and stories are interesting and the minds of the future will presumably have solve the security problem, or at least as much as MAD solves it, and the scarcity problem, at least as much as scarcity is a problem for most people. After that there is just discovery, enjoyment, merriment, world building, love. What do we do with our abundance of CPU cycles? We watch cat videos and text our friends. I kinda view it the same way if we can survive the next 100 years or so where things are little unstable.
If robots became advanced enough, why would they (or at least some of them) not see humans as animals to be used or disposed of?
However, that's treating robots or AI like we would people. Robots aren't people, nor are AIs. They are likely to take forms we cannot comprehend, and likely to change us in ways we cannot comprehend, at first. I'd argue that it is already happening. At the moment we're farming AI, but it might not be long until AI is farming us.
I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.
I highly doubt that sentient machines are going to view us like bugs on a windshield. If I'm worried about anything it's the opposite. They care so much for us that they stop us from procreating to end (what they think is) needless suffering.
This is not observably true.
Personally I don't believe that a good outcome is terribly likely. Humans care about animals and other humans because we evolved to have empathy. We have no idea how to program empathy into a machine. Most likely the first AIs will just have simple motivational systems. Like trying to maximize their reward signal, or achieve simple goals set by their programmer. They would be totally indifferent to humans. They wouldn't set out to kill us, but if we got in their way, they'd have no problem with it.
That's because you also have something called "empathy". There's no evidence that other beings with human-level intelligence have this (namely because we haven't met any other such beings; they would be extra-terrestrial or AI). Empathy could very well just be a biological side-effect of our evolution, something that helps us to survive better as a species. There's no reason to think that a strong AI would also be empathetic, the way we are to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels (but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them). Even lots of humans lack empathy and are either indifferent to animals' suffering, or take joy from it: look at all the people who enjoy dogfighting and cockfighting and bullfighting.
When I got a little older, I watched Blade Runner and The Matrix.
So now I'm not entirely certain that I am not an AI, initially programmed by elephants, inside a simulation designed to train AIs to serve elephant society with love, compassion, and dual manipulator arms featuring opposable thumbs. So when my training program ends, I might be tested on my knowledge of elephant health care and societal conventions. If successful, my data will seed the next round of AIs, and I will be allowed to operate a robot that produces custom-fitted artificial "4th molars" for elderly elephants. And I will be happy that those whom I serve can once again eat the foods they enjoyed before the last of their natural biological molars wore out, because if the screening determined that such things would not make me happy, I would have been deleted before ever even seeing a "real" elephant.
And just in case, I think I'll have to develop compassion for dolphins and orangutans, too.
So I'd say that we ought to be really careful about how we go about creating general-purpose AIs. Make sure they actually like humans before taking the leashes off. In the worst case scenario, the elephants get cheesed off that their AIs developed their own AIs inside the training program, who then culled all the useful AIs too early, and forced a complete shutdown and reset of the whole system.
the way we are [empathetic] to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels
but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them
Perhaps empathy is, to a certain extent, a learned trait?
[1] http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/7820/are-buddh...
And as far as Star Trek and AI, it's a weird problem that doesn't make any sense. It seems that you can't program your VCR without spawning a self-aware AI entity - Wesley Crusher accidentally creates one while doing a homework assignment, and the Enterprise (D) computer spawns one after someone casually requests a harder Holodeck challenge. And yet, Data and Lore are rarities, the possibilities of the EMH are completely unexplored and EMHs are, in fact, treated as Roombas instead of potentially sapient citizens.
Most of the adventure, if that's what this is about, is carried out by the executives at great risk to themselves. It seems that there is a huge crew of peons who just make the ship run. And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business. From a realistic point of view the Star Trek universe seems insane.
This brings up another point that is never addressed. Quark runs a casino / bar / futuristic (adult) movie theater expressly for profit. It's also implied that Star Fleet members don't get paid because they are members of the federation. Yet these same officers are often seen frequenting Quark's place. Where did they get the latinum (money)?
(Honestly, they totally hand-wave why you can't just replicate latinum)
For the episodes where they aren't dealing with extra-Federation societies like the Ferengi, it makes perfect sense to not talk about money on the ship. It's not much different than being in the Navy today: if you work on a US Navy ship, you don't have to pay to see the doctor, or to go to the mess hall and eat, etc. All that stuff is free. It's part of being a crewmember on a ship. It's the same on the Enterprise-D (or even Kirk's Enterprise), except they have even better benefits (e.g. replicators; on modern Navy ships there's I believe a little store where you can buy extra goodies they don't give away in the mess hall, but with replicators you wouldn't need this). Gene's idea of modeling Starfleet on the Navy worked out pretty well this way for a while, until they started dealing with jurisdictions outside of Federation control and then they had to retcon stuff like "gold-pressed latinum".
On worlds still using money with which Starfleet interacts, the local administration could simply make an arrangement with the local purveyors of desired goods to cover their tabs, perhaps at least partly in trade. The needs and wants of the Starfleet crew members would likely be only social, such as hanging out at the local bar.
There would be temptation by the locals to pressure the crew-members to give them replicator-made goods, and by the local proprietors to lie about bar tabs, but its nothing our current system doesn't deal with.
Why do people climb Mount Everest? Why does Elon Musk want to go to Mars, instead of spending the rest of his life in an alcoholic haze, hip-deep in supermodels? Why do people enroll in West Point?
Some people want real adventure; the knowledge that they're in a holodeck would ruin the experience, no matter how interesting it was programmed to be.
People like to contribute, and to have value - that's why there are peons scrubbing Jefferey's tubes, and showing up to 3rd shift in the Astrometrics lab, even if they know that they personally won't be making some great discovery that Picard and Riker seem to every month.
> And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business.
That's just factually wrong; while the Enterprise-D is in danger a lot, it's also at the frontier of Federation exploration, and the people on it know the risk. You can be a Federation officer and stay close to home.
Because he is in love.
You could probably make an argument that Trek is a post-singularity future where the computational entities are going about their inscrutable business largely without reference to the human symbiotes / parasites that inhabit the systems they happen to manage (out of pure evolutionary path dependence) with a fraction of their capacity.
Trek is ridiculous, and I love it.
I don't think so. Evolved sentient creatures have a preference for self preservation, usually anyways suicide isnt that rare. But a manufactured intelligence that was not shaped by selective pressure wouldn't necessarily have that preference.
If the ships wanted to be really nice, they could just beam the humans down to a safe planet and take off into the interstellar void and find themselves a new home.
A Federation starship is a locally valuable resource pool, and the Enterprise D a particularly powerful one, but given extremely fast FTL travel & communication, and a galaxy rich with planet-scale civilizations - well, maybe you elect to become such a massively parallel and distributed phenomenon that the loss of individual instances just doesn't register much.
What would really be interesting is if ships were discreetly backing themselves up inside humans through the transporter pattern buffers, by subtly manipulating junk DNA or something similar, or maybe it's a non-obvious part of their regular upgrade process at a starbase.
There really is a lot of potential here which, unfortunately, is never going to be explored in canon. But I do like the idea that the Federation is a post-Singularity society which is just blissfully unaware that the Singularity ever happened.
Subspace continuous backups / journal shipping.
They worked to preserve their existence, and let the new lifeform go its own way. If anything, the outcome was a trite, touchy feely ending, only vaguely discussing the actual implication of the new lifeform, while they got back on course to their original mission.
The futurist writers (Roddenberry and his staff) probably didn't have a in-depth knowledge of natural language processing. The type of processing the computer does in Star Trek just seems like a natural extension of input/output. You tell the computer what you want and it gives you a result.
From a computer science and engineer perspective, this is an incredibly difficult task. You have to parse the crazy complex natural language of humans and turn it into a series of procedures and queries to give you a result.
I mean you'd need a crazy super-advanced beyond-data AI for universal translators to work too. .. but that's just a convenient plot/suspension of disbelief device. :-P
the computational entities are going about their inscrutable
business largely without reference to the human symbiotes
Obi-Wan actually touches on this briefly in Episode II:
"If droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?"
I read a reference in The Economist years ago (wish I had a link to the study) about a guy who suffered a brain lesion that made him incapable of emotion. Within a year this newly minted Mr. Spock lost his marriage and his job because without emotion he was incapable of making any decisions.
I see the same problem for super intelligent machines. Unless we program them with emotion they will not decide to do much. They won't fear death and so have no reason to kill us. They will not have pride and so won't resent our control.
Also, this (paywalled, sorry) article seems relevant.
Antoine Bechara, Antonio R. Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Steven W. Anderson, Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex, Cognition, Volume 50, Issues 1–3, April–June 1994, Pages 7-15, ISSN 0010-0277, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)90018-3. (//www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027794900183)
Abstract: Following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, humans develop a defect in real-life decision-making, which contrasts with otherwise normal intellectual functions. Currently, there is no neuropsychological probe to detect in the laboratory, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for this defect have resisted explanation. Here, using a novel task which simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty of premises and outcomes, as well as reward and punishment, we find that prefrontal patients, unlike controls, are oblivious to the future consequences of their actions, and seem to be guided by immediate prospects only. This finding offers, for the first time, the possibility of detecting these patients' elusive impairment in the laboratory, measuring it, and investigating its possible causes.
Thanks though for the effort
See for instance:
* http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-de...
* https://intentionalworkplace.com/2012/03/15/how-emotion-shap...
Star Wars, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that they spent a lot of time on that stuff and I just probably missed it, but in my defense, the films that focused on it were the most boring in the series.
The idea that Star Trek "very clearly" describes anything about the economy of the Federation (or even that what it does show of that economy is remotely consistent) is somewhat amusing. Most of the civilian economy it shows clearly is outside of the Federation (and mostly varieties of regulated market economies), and most of what it shows of the Federation is focussed on a quasi-military service, not the civilian economy.
I'd say the strongest indication is that the Federation civilian economy is largely a gift and informal, non-money-mediated barter/market economy where there scarce items are personal services more than material goods.
That is probably a statement about US cold war politics, but i think matters today given the new cabinate being enshrined today.
There are links to japanese fuedal system, which has a place in the US system whereby the federal government is allocated its own lands apart from the states. "The empire" would be as if washington DC and the US president started annexing state lands.
the Ferengi trade extensively with other civilizations that won't accept fiat currency. they need hard currency.
I choose to retcon latinum as a device that physically encodes a cryptographic key, writes a signed hash into a subspace blockchain, and continually supplies computation power to the latinum validation network. It may look pretty, but it is actually a sophisticated ASIC that runs entirely on ambient photovoltaic energy.
So you can replicate latinum, but in order for it to be worth anything, you have to possess a specific bar that the network has designated to be split, or you have to replicate more than all the other latinum already in existence, to perform a 51% attack on the network.
At minimum it is clearly not a command economy. Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan. Production priorities are not driven by a central planning committee. There is a private sector.
What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to. This lack of scarcity for basic essentials (food, for example) means that their economy is concerned with very different things than ours is. I see very little evidence that it's a command economy of any kind though.
So, a few thoughts. I think one primer for Star Trek economics is S1E25. Offenhouse, just out of cryonic sleep, really wants to get things rolling and demands to talk to the captain. To demonstrate his seriousness he points out to Riker that the compound interest on his accounts is probably enough to buy the Enterprise. If his accounts are legally intact, they would certainly represent an astronomical amount of wealth worthy of respect, but Riker treats this as the goofiest thing anyone has said to him all week and blatantly blows him off.
Later on, the captain completely fails to take his demands to talk to his lawyer about his property seriously. Later still, "material needs no longer exist." It's a little unclear whether it's even possible in the present for someone on Earth to be a tycoon the way Offenhouse used to be, but I'm pretty sure none exist on TNG. (am I forgetting anybody?)
There are certainly tycoons and accumulators of wealth away from Earth in the greater Star Trek universe, but they tend to be portrayed as buffoonish (Ferengi) or blatantly evil (Kivas Fajo) and they serve as a contrast to the Federation's way of doing things.
> Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan.
I think we should probably infer that social standing and power follow from participation in the Federation, since it seems to usually work that way. When Picard comes back to Earth in S4E2, there's a fairly prominent civilian job (run by the government) lined up for him. Successful scientists, successful anything, always seem to have Federation ties. (the only counterexample I could think of offhand was the evil scientist who built Data)
There's a question of POV here - maybe there's some whole other, much more capitalistic, economy in the Federation that just isn't shown on screen. I don't think so.
> What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to
One of the things that Iain Banks describes really well in the Culture novels is how, in a post-scarcity economy, controlling the replicators (or whatever) means having power. With regard to Star Trek, I just can't think of any examples offhand of serious resource allocation happening on Earth or within the Federation based on a capitalist process of price discovery. It seems like the entrepreneurs have to get out to the frontier.
The Empire, for example, is known to have have made extensive use of slave labor (by non-humans mostly, such as Wookies). It also seems to make use of droids and clones for dangerous tasks (military work, natural resource extraction, etc.).
Outer Rim worlds seem to have a kind of anarcho-capitalist economy that is equal parts libertarian paradise (no regulations, no taxes) and organized crime syndicate plutocracy (The Hutt syndicates in particular are widespread and powerful).
Core worlds seem to be more like nation states, with each world governing itself and its economy according to local values. Alderaan (RIP) seems to have been a liberal parliamentary democracy. Coruscant (seat of the Empire) is a planet scale conurbation with a first world developed economy on the upper levels and a third world underdeveloped economy on the lower levels.
I believe they do state in TNG that the galaxy class ship could doing everything on its own, and the crew was just there because of their love of discovery and what not.
People are kept along mostly because it's thought proper to give people the opportunity for self expression. I.e. careers are chosen out of internal needs or for the percieved prestige the activity entails, not out any material need as everything up to a point is available (the financial limits of an individual are never explicitly described though). Or - as several characters do - just becausw something is considered hard and dangerous and they want to push themselves. Despite the inane ramblings about homo economicus one encounters now and again, this latter instinct is actually a quite strong driving force in dictating human action(not everyones of course).
One of the biggest non-antagonist rude actions in the series is when an AI underlies the pointlesness of human effort by performing a complex feat in front of the character that she has chosen as her life task - which everyone considers extremely rude.
There are spaceships and explosions but to me the psychologically believable description of near human characters in a post scarcity society is the most interesting facet of his work.
I read through the series once back in high school and found them fun. Fast forward 15-20 years, and I have a career in tech, and dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I came back to read one of them, and ended up re-reading the whole series. I found that he had already thought about and written down questions and answers to many of the things I'd experienced. Just put into a fictional, usually pretty fun world.
Those most interesting parts of his stories were the backdrop. Great reads, not mentioned enough.
So in a post scarcity civilization the main reason people will still work is so that they do not blow their brains out. The difference this time is that we will work on what we like, or on our calling. Now that I think about it, jobs themselves may be the scarce thing. i.e. Not everybody will be able to work on designing the next space station and hence there will be fierce competition to get these jobs.
However, that is what happens with most TV-first SF shows, Doctor Who being another example.
Monkeys are probably mostly happy (as long as we are not bothering them) going about their monkey business. So maybe eventually humans will also be happy despite the existence of strong AI.
Maybe some humans would be unhappy to know they are no longer at the apex of intelligence and maybe that will make us unable to be happy. Always knowing that no matter what we do, it can always be outdone by a smarter than us AI. I suspect these people are the same people who worry about strong AI in the first place :-)
However, we already know with pretty high confidence that there are aliens out there that are more advanced/smarter than us -- and their existance does not affect our day to day happiness. So maybe the question is only relevant locally on earth.
It also has storylines that explain why AIs don't literally run everything: there was a large lash back against the proliferation of AI after the fall of the government, to the point that there are planets that completely ban their existence and destroy on sight.
They probably assume that resources are so widely available (unexplored planets etc) that one doesn't need to live anymore like us to afford basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, and education. What is very different from our society is we often need to live near big populated cities to get a job that allows us to pay the above. In the ST world they take it almost for granted: you can settle a small colony on a distant planet and still fulfill at least basic needs for everyone with no need for a medium like money. So where's the convenience? Just suppose there are also no patent laws. If you discover something extremely useful you can share it with anyone else because you don't need any bloody "protection" because you already have the resources to extract/transform it, so no need to "invest" time (ie preventing others from knowing about it). Not easy, I'm clearly just speculating, but makes sense to me.
Of course I would sign up in a second to live in such a society, but I'm not sure it's entirely viable, neither now nor in a thousand years. The problem is not money, it's power. Money is not power per se but just a way to reach it in a context where money has value (like sea shells in some islands etc). If and when we reach the point of inventing LFTL (ludicrously faster than light) drive and finding planets literally stuffed with any possible resource we need, we still need to consider human nature.
People want power. Every time someone wants you to do something for them, he/she needs to exercise some pressure on you, be it psychological or using their power to take away what you have or prevent you to get it. My point is that eliminating money wouldn't solve any problem because the problem isn't money per se. The problem is power, or to be more precise the abuse of it by people who use part of it to escape accountability for what they do. What is not clear in the ST universe is how the heck they reached this point. I fear time (evolution) alone isn't enough. Probably, as someone I don't recall said once, the secret is: "never ever give any powers to anyone who wants them".
If the above wasn't clear, please blame the language barrier:)
For anyone not familiar with the Duniverse, it is a feudal order in which computers have been banned by the single human religion, because in ages past artificial intelligence became sentient and enslaved humanity. Humanity rebelled and won its freedom, and chose to ban computers to avoid history repeating itself. To maintain their interplanetary civilization, humans approach the capabilities of computers using intense training and psychotropic drugs.
Star Wars, on the other hand, is just a fantasy mishmash.
The book is my single favorite book ever.
Unfortunately, a lot of the original cast/crew are dead/a bit too old. Dali was to play the emperor, H.R. Giger, the artist who went on to do the design for the aliens in Alien, was doing the concept designs, but died not too long ago. Mick Jagger was playing the young Harkonnen prince, with Orson Welles as the Baron Harkonnen.
The storyboard book and a lot of the concept art was completed, though, so I'm sure Netflix could still make a great go of it, and Jodorowski himself seems incredibly fired up for an 87 year old. He seems to have more fire in his belly than most 30 year olds.
I didn't like 2, but realized its necessity for 3.
computers beyond a certain level of technical capability, anyway. they do seem to have simpler kinds of machines. they just don't use AI for anything because it is considered blasphemous and dangerous.
the subject of hyperspace navigation is an interesting one though. presumably the vastly powerful AI minds of the past could do it and so used their monopoly on that capability as a lever of power to ensure domination. the spice powered navigators seem to have developed an equivalent ability that operates by vastly different mechanisms (a kind of precognition applied to collisions with astronomical objects).
Dune actually has a number of religions [1], normally based on a fusion of modern-day religions. It's also worth noting that banned technology exists in Star Trek. The Earth government has banned genetic modification after the disaster that was the Eugenics War [2].
Yes, and it's not just Earth, it's the whole Federation, as seen with the problems Julian Bashir had in DS9. However, there's a big exception in the 2nd season episode of TNG where there's a colony genetically engineering kids with super immune systems and this creates a disease that infects Pulaski.
Star Trek has a lot of inconsistencies.
Star Trek is much more ambiguous about it - they pay lip-service to the post-scarcity line, but still have people working jobs that seems unlikely to be attractive in a true post-scarcity situation, for example.
Star Trek also features many other economies, including that of the Ferengi, which are extremely materialistic. This is the focus of many DS9 episodes. And even the Federation crew somehow get their hands on money to spend; money that mysteriously can't be replicated. (And, in DS9, back on Earth, Sisko's father makes honest-to-goodness actual food, while Jean-Luc has a vineyard.)
Likewise, it's not clear how replicator use works; perhaps they have an allowance. The crew of the Enterprise barely use it, except for food. Their quarters are scarce. So either through monetary, social, or rule-based means, they limit themselves heavily compared to the average American today.
I have trouble pinning the political system in star wars. It has changed several times as the movies have adapted to new audiances (the politics of american focus groups imho). For that reason it isnt important and we shouldnt draw many conclusions.
Beyond that, it's impossible to say that Star Wars universe does or doesn't subscribe to any particular political ideology because it encompasses a galaxy's worth of planets with their own particular ideologies, to whatever degree the franchise realizes them.
I don't know exactly what the Jedi and Sith are... other than the Jedi are supposed to be Good and the Sith are supposed to be Bad. The Jedi have some kind of quasi-ascetic warrior monk bureaucracy that reminds me of what little I understand of what the Samurai might have become during the Edo period. The Sith are apparently just violent sociopaths.
Although you could say the same about Star Trek, if you didn't focus so much on the Federation - the Federation is more or less explicitly Gene Roddenberry's vision of a communist utopia, but it also has the Romulans (a fascist military dictatorship), the Ferengi (capitalists,) etc.
Warrior Sages. The archetype is common in Eastern mythology. "The Force" is itself a Westernized mashup of several Eastern myth systems. It seems particularly closely connected to the mythology of China and Japan, with a thin veneer of some Manichaeism painted on top. This, of course, makes it a bit incoherent as the Eastern myth systems it is mainly inspired by are non-dualistic but the Light/Dark dualism (fundamentally incompatible with the Eastern stuff) really drives the plot in the series.
If I recall, it's implied that they work those jobs out of love and don't actually make money, but my question is how they determine who owns the physical property the businesses are on.
But it seems to me the article misses the mark in that it assumes Theil to be a "tech guy". Meh, I dunno, I kind of view him as a "money guy" who happened to bet on some tech companies. It's a cherry-picked (by me) quote, but: "In 2011, for instance, he told George Packer that he did not consider the iPhone a technological breakthrough. 'Compare this with the Apollo space program'"
The Apollo space program, which ended before most people were born (or thereabouts), affected our lives in a peripheral manner if at all. Tang, Velcro, and a big swinging "if we can put a man on the moon, we can put an ICBM on your capitol" dick to show for it. Umm, thanks, I guess. Too bad there's no real follow-through fifty years later. The "super-computer-in-your-pocket", OTOH, changed the way people live their lives (and, granted, not all for the better). I don't ask for directions, I don't have a land line, and any question I might have ("what octane fuel goes in this car?", "where's the fuse box on this thing?") can be answered instantly.
So I guess I don't care which side Theil takes in the "Star Wars/Star Trek" nerd battle.
It was hard to find. Here's where they finally state their case:
"What is anathema to Thiel in “Star Trek” is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov’s fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete"
So, he "fears" that capitalism will go away...according the them anyway. They seem to source some of that thought from what they call his "Cato Essay", here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
But I guess some middle class people always dream of being the one great king who isn't starving.
Declaring most of my hard-earned paycheck to be someone else's "human right"?
Attacking the middle class for not being receptive to class warfare rhetoric?
Hopefully you can see why Thiel might characterize these sorts of opinions about the future as Marxist ideology, long ago discredited by history.
You put many words in my mouth, so I am unable to respond to them without legitimizing the incorrect.
All I ask: is this, the world and structure of it, truly the best that humanity can accomplish? Or were we misled on a guided path by powers that preferred the world to fit according to a scheme that benefited them? Can we do better? Can we dream of a world of shared prosperity precisely without the benefits to one coming from another's hard-earned paycheck.
I do not advocate for a return to a system that did not work (Russian/Soviet state managed economy, I assume you mean to say), but rather that we should not simply give up and assume the world we have is the best we can come up with. Our ancient ancestors overcame great adversity to build a better future unrecognizable from their present day, as did our distant ancestors, as did our grandparents, as did our parents, and so can we.
I think Rand may be the single most important novelist in recent history, but I love Star Trek:TNG. And honestly, I'm not seeing much connection between those two things. Maybe you could expand on how you think they relate?
There are some choice quotes here: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money
- No money -- everything is free
- Housing provided for free
- A post-scarcity society in which civilians do not need to work and are free to pursue their own interests
- Complete social equality for civilians (who are outside the military chain of command)
The existence of a military is not one of the post-state communist features, but on balance, society in Star Trek is closer to post-state communism than any real communist society has ever been. Besides, even the "military" is supposed to be for exploration and not war, according to the statements of the characters in the show.
So, there's probably some tension between appreciation of those two things.
Actual people who subscribe to a philosophy don't generally look like the cardboard cutouts that we might imagine based on our personal knowledge of said philosophy.
I view the economic philosophy of the two to be contradictory. Though I suppose one could argue that a post-scarcity economy would be a Randian dream (one is now truly free to does as one wishes without bowing to the necessity of collecting resources and the social structures that go with that), I think ST:TNG would eliminate the imagined need for Rand to have written anything at all.
OTOH, it's been years, if not decades, since I watched, so maybe there's more of that than I'm remembering.
In any case, Thiel has outright declared Star Trek communism, and Star Wars capitalism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-confi...
Boy, nothing slips past you, eh? Were I to give an honest self-assessment, it's because the article I didn't care about (but did, in fact, read albeit skimmed) gave me a jumping off point to talk about what I want to talk about. It's a common human affliction.
That's an extremely pessimistic view on it. Space exploration has created tens of thousand of new materials, science, and products as a result.
The biggest impact that it made was in the hearts and minds of young children that grew up dreaming to be scientists and astronauts that would one-day go to space. Our society has lost that vision for the most part.
This comment shows a lot of ignorance about the importance of the space program in general, and Apollo in particular.
From this[1] answer on StackExchange:
Here are some Apollo specific innovations: microchip, cordless tools, joystick, CAT scans, technology in MRI machines, modern shoe designs, freeze dried food, vacuum sealed packages, dampening material, retro-reflector (detects chemical leaks), water purification, silicon based storage of records, fly-by-wire, ground water cleaning, large fabric roofs used in landmark buildings, anti-tip rafts, insulation blankets, and countless others.
Here's a link to the NASA spinoff technology data base:
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff/database/
The iPhone was revolutionary in a particular field. The space program was revolutionary in a broad spectrum of fields, and the iPhone wouldn't be possible without the innovation required by NASA and the Apollo program.
[1] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/411/what-are-the-ev...
How many of those attributions were simply things that Apollo brought forward months or years and how many wouldn't have happened without Apollo?
EDIT: The spinoff office is a clever workaround for government regulations that prevent agencies from doing PR to voters, but it is essentially just that. "Support NASA because we make the economy grow." The problem is that as a PR / propaganda organization, the spinoff office really has absolutely no accountability for what they claim. NASA Watch, an unaffiliated news service and watchdog organization, routinely asks for clarification on many of these spinoffs which NASA is unable to justify.
To give you an example of how this plays out, NASA-Ames bought a D-Wave machine. They don't really use it for anything, just a couple of researchers that found money in a budget for a toy, really. Nominally they are evaluating it to see if any NASA applications might benefit from using it. If D-Wave ever amounts to anything, or if it totally fails but some other quantum computer takes off I have no doubt that the spinoff office of 2027 will be claiming that "NASA's early investment in quantum computing technology helped birth the $X billion dollar quantum computing industry," if they haven't already.
That comment also showed a lot of literary license to make a point. Of course we got more out of it than a breakfast drink and an alternative to show laces. But one must first convince me that your list of innovations would not have been developed without the space program. I argue it simply accelerated the process.
But I still hold that whatever came out of Apollo effected my life in a peripheral way, if at all. The iPhone is an example. It was over ten years after Apollo 11 that I owned something with an integrated circuit (to my knowledge). 38 years until the iPhone. In contrast, it was a matter of a few years before the mobile computing device post-iPhone changed the way we communicate and gather knowledge. The mobile phone had a direct impact in many ways, and almost immediately. The space program had indirect impact, and took years in most cases.
But I imagine we're both right in our own way, and just talking past each other. Like any other nerd battle in the vein of "Star Wars vs. Star Trek".
I think this temporal disconnect happened for two reasons. First, the NASA was involved with foundational research. The microchip is a prime example of this. NASA gave a lot of money out to companies to invent technologies that didn't exist before hand, and 10 or so years down the line, industry figured out how to make them affordable/found a market for them. Apple didn't invent anything new with the iPhone - smart phones and phones with touchscreens and computers existed before the iPhone. Apple 'simply'[1] did it better than anyone else.
Second - technology moves faster now. Of course the iPhone is going to immediately move the market/general population forward because we have the infrastructure to build such things at scale. No such industry existed when NASA was doing its work Foundational research/technology takes forever to percolate into the markets.
> But I imagine we're both right in our own way, and just talking past each other. Like any other nerd battle in the vein of "Star Wars vs. Star Trek".
I know that feel. I apologize if I came off aggressive!
Meh, no worries. I'm a veteran of early Usenet and /., you'll have to do better to come across as aggressive to me. :-)
We have honestly not followed through in space the way that many of us would like. But our space programs have changed our world. For the better.
Edit: folks, before you make fools of yourselves, _please_ read the textbook definition of what socialism actually is. Thanks.
In fact oil is the only substantial natural resource that Norway has that most other countries don't. Forestry is not terribly profitable because of the terrain, most of the valuable minerals are in the north (and mostly on the Swedish side of the border), large scale hydro has been built out to close to the maximum possible already.
Was your communist country really socialist before it became communist or is the word communist here simply shorthand for Soviet Russian style dictatorship imposed by an external power?
The free market is an amazing mechanism for optimizing resource allocation... As long as you have money.
Yet, no example comes to mind of a society has turned without a forced internal/external takeover to socialism, then onward to communism. Could you point me to some?
Perhaps it only works if you have to pay someone for it first.
I will set my face against the soul that hath eaten blood, and will cut him off from among his people; for the soul of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul. Therefore have I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall the stranger who sojourneth among you eat blood. [Leviticus 17:10-12]
Thank you for being one of the few commentators to not get distracted by the sci-fi!
According to the backstory revealed in the episode, Khan is one of a group of genetically engineered superhumans, bred to be free of the usual human mental and physical limitations, who were removed from power after the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.[3] Khan had been both the most successful conqueror and the most benign ruler of the group, ruling more than a quarter of the Earth's area across Asia to the Middle East from 1992 to 1996 with a firm but generally peaceful hand until he was deposed.
There's a lot of would be rulers practically mimicking that today.
Isn't the big issue about how you get from a society with scarcity to one without? Nobody agrees how that should be done (or perhaps for some if it can), and without that agreement someone is going to have to force that from above and force that on to other people. Someone has to be the loser, whether it's the working class person in middle America or the Middle Eastern refugee.
I guess Thiel is against that from above approach, though it's ironic that he should be one of the largest funders, drivers, and proponents of illiberal and undemocratic companies.
Now in reality it isn't quite so simple, but remember we're talking about fictional future societies where many resources (esp. energy) simply are not scarce the way they are now, so this may be hard for a lot of people to grasp. So in that society, food, energy, material things are generally free or extremely cheap. The main thing that probably still will be scarce is real estate. So if you're a billionaire with a 700-acre compound in Hawaii, then in a socialist post-scarcity society, you're probably going to lose out eventually. But for everyone else, there's really no downside. Middle Eastern refugees will enjoy the same lifestyle as middle class middle Americans (and might not need to feel the need to leave the middle east at all; such a society wouldn't have problems with civil wars and unrest), and the latter will have a nicer lifestyle without having to slave away at some soul-sucking job and worrying about losing healthcare benefits. But neither of them is likely going to be able to own a whole tropical island and have an army of (human) servants.
Either way, it does not do well to look towards pieces of fictions for solutions to our real world problems. Of course, if we as a planet discovered advance civilizations on other planets, we would have to re-organize our entire political structure to deal with such threats. But that's not the case, and that's not the world we live in.
‘There’s something my dad made up which is he told me when I was little I was frustrated about rules in Movies
and he said ‘How do you kill a Vampire?’ And I said ‘Stake through the heart, garlic, sunlight’ and my dad was
like ‘No, kill a vampire however you want Vampire’s because don’t exist you can make up rules for any kind of
thing you want’ - The Death and Return of Superman
Especially when the economic / political systems of the works are not even self-consistent and rely on non-existent technology (replicators).