SoftBank’s Next 30-Year Vision (2010) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

SoftBank’s Next 30-Year Vision (2010) [pdf]

webcast.softbank.jp

116 pointslouis-paul53 comments

Looks like Black Mirror had access to this presentation.

When will people realize that it is not just the number of neurons but the structure of brain that makes it what it is.

I have often wondered what gives these people (the visionaries with the means, think Musk) the arrogance to impose their vision on humanity. It is one thing to work on something you believe and try to bring it in reality, it is quite another to believe one can lead the world to follow some particular path. They may be working with an incredible tunnel vision or may be I am unable to comprehend the scale at which they operate.

Arrogance, hubris... and history is full of dangerous visionaries who pushed, pulled or dragged societies, willingly or kicking and screaming, to unknown destinations in the physical or mental worlds. To deny this trait is to deny what it is to be human.

>I have often wondered what gives these people (the visionaries with the means, think Musk) the arrogance to impose their vision on humanity.

Nothing gives anyone the inherent right to impose their will on others. Governments only have authority because they have usurped a monopoly on violence.

"Power belongs to the people that take it. Nothing to do with their hard work, strong ambitions, or rightful qualifications, no. The actual will to take is often the only thing that’s necessary."

-Tyrell Wellick, Mr. Robot

Sadly yes, it is just because they want to and can. I have come to this realization in recent times. But then again this is true for most of the things in life (if you want it and are able, you do it), so it doesn't provide a detailed insight into where does this particular will come from. I can understand for people to have it when the world was small, but the more knowledge man acquired and sought to control things, the more it exposed the things still to know.So I think there is some willful ignorance involved which discounts this uncertainty or fog of war and generates the will to influence humanity centuries hence.

I Strongly think majority of the people intentionally or without intent like to follow visionaries and hence the vision and then the buy in.

The problem is the education.

Many people think their only option is to slave away 9-5 in an employment and let other people create the visions, while basically everybody could be a bit more like Musk.

What's wrong with trying to steer humanity on the path that you think is right?

What happens when that path is in conflict with someone else's idea of the right path ? What happens to that someone if he doesn't have the ability to counter your force and is at your whim ?

Also to suppose that one's sphere of influence extends to all of humanity for centuries to come, implies one believes himself to be something more than the rest of humanity.

To be honest, that's very much what the UN charter says:

> 5 All Members shall give the United Nations every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the present Charter, and shall refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking preventive or enforcement action.

> 6 The Organization shall ensure that states which are not Members of the United Nations act in accordance with these Principles so far as may be necessary for the maintenance of international peace and security.

In other words, whether you like it or not, you have to adhere to our rules and if you do not, we're free to make any member force you to.

I think the right path for humanity is to remove the tendency for violence from the population pool. To this end, I have been developing in my secret laboratory a retrovirus that can achieve this.

This is the true path to world peace, nay, to serenity. What could go wrong?

A foreign species is waiting exactly for this to happen (cloaking ship behind the moon)... they will invade and destroy us. All because you imposed your path on us ;-)

Well, I believe anyone below IQ of 140 after age 20 should be outright killed. Only beautiful and strong people are allowed to reproduce. Anyone who is unhealthy or have prolonged health problems should be castrated.

Do you have any problems with my vision? I can tone it down so it seems passable, but still, everyone would only benefit from it!

Who says it's right? An angry moustached guy in the first half of the 20th century thought for sure there was a master race and that killing everyone else probably was the right path. Another dude (incidentally also with a moustache) had this vision that the state should be the end-all-be-all and own everything, and killed a bunch of people including his own citizens to try to realize it – right around the same time as the aforementioned fella actually.

I mean, there's plenty of things wrong with trying to steer humanity on to the "right" path, and at the top of that list is probably the arrogant notion that you know what "right" is while others don't.

Everybody else is free to try and stop people whose idea of "right path" is incompatible with theirs. I just don't think that we should generally forbid everybody from trying to change the world.

Well therein lies the problem, doesn't it? The notion that I have to stop someone just to live in peace. I mean, if people have visions for the world and think they're grand and all, that's perfectly fine. The problem starts when you try to impose (or steer, if you will) that vision on others, who may not be interested at all. Unless it's perennially opt-in, there will be conflict, and as history proves sometimes those get real ugly.

There is no problem here you dont have to be violent or hurt people to change the world. Let people try to do what they think is the best thing.

How about the idea that everyone should be allowed to live in peace and pursue their interests without harming anything? Would it be wrong to "impose" that vision upon everyone?

How is imposing universal laws, like "Don't murder", any different? Why don't we allow people to "opt-out" of things like, say, paying taxes?

You see, one way or the other, you are already living under a "vision" of the world imposed by other people, decided for you before you even existed.

You are a consumer, a borrower, a voter, a worker, et cetera. You have lots of power.

Regardless of your feelings of not being at peace, civilization is absolutely a compromise. A world that avoids the compromises of civilization is not one that will be static and unchanging either.

Society expects less of you than ever before.

And are you not allowed to leave, as Christopher McCandless did (and other trancendentalists before him, more successfully). Plenty of mountain people operate under the assumption that they are entitled to be left alone, and they consider the US flag to be a flag of pirates. We should have room for those enclaves if their municipalities allow for them, I guess.

Conflict is inherent to groups of people living together. There isn't much you can do about that.

>They may be working with an incredible tunnel vision

underrated...

There is room for leadership in a democracy. "If not us, then who?"

The problems in the country have more to do with a lack of leadership than too many visionaries with the means pushing various agendas. If the world is moving too much in one direction, there should be more forces pushing elsewhere rather than less of one.

I think an interesting point is that, for example in US corporate culture, it would be unacceptable to have a non-facetious theme of empathy running throughout such a strategic document. Whereas, it seems to me that the Japanese management culture truly allows for this sort of thing, compared to US board rooms. The world needs more of this, so well done Japan!

The money slide for me was the top companies by market capitalization over time, where you see railroads (old transport and information infrastructure) ousted by fuel and steel (car infrastructure), ousted by infotech infrastructure.

I don't buy that. It may not be as facetious as in the US, but it's still facetious. Most manufacturing companies, and all the large ones, have replaced a large fraction of their fulltime blue collar workforce with temp workers whose contracts last for 2-3 years. The mothership will _subcontract_ out work to subsidiary companies (for example, software development work) so that they can maintain their lockstep pay/promotion schedules in the mothership, but pay the subsidiary employees less [1]. Companies in Japan are just as profit motivated as their US peers. True corporate empathy ended a very very long time ago, if it ever existed (probably existed a few hundred years ago)

It's just a matter of what kind of marketing is acceptable and believable to the general public.

Also keep in mind that Son Masayoshi is a master PR user. Nowhere else have I seen someone use PR towards the general public to lobby for things like wireless spectrum auctions and solar energy government subsidies.

[1] most of the time, unless it's a special case company full of researcher types.

OK, so you're saying it's just as facetious.

Much like all CEOs went through a phase of doing a marginal gains presentation, and some are still probably talking about how the internet is an opportunity, I suspect we'll see this kind of presentation trickle down to most orgs that like to think they are innovative.

It's a continuation of some of those mad stream of consciousness presentations we saw from "digital visionaries" a few years back.

10^60 computing elements (presumably doing some computing that we humans want done) with only ~10^80 atoms in the universe? I'm as optimistic a technologist as they come but that seems a bit... extreme

I don't think you're comprehending the sheer difference in scale between 10^60 and 10^80.

Our galaxy has ~10^70 atoms. At an atom per compute element, we will use 1/10^10 of our entire galaxy for our own compute? 10^60 is a bit more than the number of atoms in our sun. Given our sub-exponential space advances over the last 50 years, it seems... ambitious... to turn our sun into a computer in the next 300.

If they're saying we'll be an interstellar spacefaring civilization in much less than 300 years, they really buried their lead :)

> If they're saying we'll be an interstellar spacefaring civilization in much less than 300 years, they really buried their lead :)

If you think we can't reach Kardashev scale I in 300 years you are really pessimistic!

We have, right now, the technology to go visit other stars. It would take a sizable amount of the world's GDP but it is possible. I certainly hope that in 300 years we will have explored other systems!

Actually, people are already working on getting to Alpha Centauri within a reasonable timescale and without exhausting the world's GDP [1] !

[1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/3

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I wouldn't trust these guys to do anything. The funding is basically all from one russian oligarch who probably does it for fun then gets board. Their last initiative was much less ambitious, yet after several years the website just says "Details of the competition will be announced soon."

[1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/2

http://www.positrondynamics.com

Where a sizeable amount is about the size of the Manhatten Project, so, in fact, not all that much.

Perhaps quantum computers 300 years from now won't use an atom per compute element.

Mass of the sun: 2 x 10^30 kg

Mass of a hydrogen atom: 1.67 x 10^-27 kg

So there are 1.2 x 10^57 atoms in the sun. And we need the sun.

The mismatch is caused by someone extrapolating an exponential trend in one area well into the future, ignoring physical reality. Anyone with a good grasp of high-school physics should have noticed this before the slides were released.

The presentation was probably made by business-minded people who are just good at talking and trying to sound impressive.

This is by far the strangest presentation I've seen by someone who controls hundreds of billions of assets. It has a surreal sensibility.

How many presentations have you seen from “someone who controls hundreds of billions of assets”?

Depending on where you are in finance it’s not an irregular phenomenon - any ppt from any major wall street bank would also conform.

Based on conversations with people who have worked with Masayoshi, I don't think he does this for PR. It's a very genuine sentiment.

These VC pitch decks are getting more and more dystopian by the day.

I can't tell if you're joking or not, but SoftBank is not a startup

And this pdf is from 7 years ago.

Considering it's 2010, I'll admit there are some good parts. But it's distracted like hell.

I like the part where we get to communicate telepathically with golden retrievers.

It’s a surprising presentation. I might not agree with several assumptions and implications but I was sincerely put off balance by this mission statement “Endeavoring to benefit society and the economy and maximize enterprise value”... quite a difference from the “fiducial duty” to scorch the earth for a penny more.

Most big companies have similarly lofty mottos and mission statements.

I suppose this 2010 document could have been an early step in Softbank's bid to secure the $90B invested funds from Saudi Arabia and others, which was announced earlier in 2017.

2040 was perhaps the timescale around when Saudi was expecting to need substantial new revenues uncorrelated with burning hydrocarbons.

"Prestige Worldwide"

I wonder how they're doing on the goal of starting 5000 companies in 30 years.

Pretty good - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-29/softbank-...

can someone please breakdown what the vision is? going through the doc was all too confusing.

'extrapolate everything'

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