Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the SciFi They Grew Up on Real | Hacker News Reader

Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the SciFi They Grew Up on Real

scientificamerican.com

19 pointscratermoon19 comments

Why cant they reduce home prices, health prices and education prices? Just like they managed to do for messaging, email, social, video and search.

All they need to do is disintermediate Wall Street/banks/insurance and real estate middle men.

Wouldn't reducing home prices lead to a massive financial loss for people whose biggest asset is a home?

Isn't that most Americans?

It's not like we weren't warned, though. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-15/the-econo...

Article is from 10 years ago. Difficult to claim houses are a bad investment when prices have skyrocketed in that time.

Are current prices going to stay the way they are? Normal people can't afford homes right now.

Absent a population crash or economic catastrophe, people have to live somewhere and will pay to do so one way or another.

Funny you mention that. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/07/20/robert-shiller-says-ri...

Why should they? Serious question. What’s their incentive/motivation?

I agree. This article is for SciAm readers rather than tech billionaires. The examples they give leave a lot out of the equation.

> Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars.

SpaceX seems to be doing just fine as an investment at its current valuation. With any such endeavor there tends to be innovations that can be applied on Earth.

> Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.”

Both AI research and life extension is something that people will always strive to do. The tech billionaires are being singled-out for having the money to do it faster at scale.

> Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash.

The incentive was to own an emerging platform since they are merely participants on mobile/tablet and even desktop. Now they're fighting for AI which is new unowned territory which can be claimed.

The above all looks like capitalism working as intended. Don't blame the players, blame the game.

Elon Musk single handedly pushing usage of solar and reducing fossil fuels in cars. Jeff Bezo drove costs down for consumer products. Peter Thiel and Elon at PayPal reduced financial transaction costs... and then you're complaining they didn't do enough?

I'm pretty unconvinced that 3 of the 4 people in that list did anything.

The US car industry was definitely firmly moving away from EVs so I'll grant that one about Musk. Although; I do think all the chinese EVs would've existed without him.

Amazon is not the cheapest place to get goods. It's wildly convenient though.

Electronic checks pre-date paypal by 2 years so I'm not giving them credit for anything.

> Jeff Bezo drove costs down for consumer products

By resale of $2.99 stuff from AliExpress for $29.99? That’s what Amazon is today, full of discounts from renown brands like BSTOEM and SPHOEN. /s

With education and health care, those making services want to push the prices up. It is in interest of everyone but the customer. And I would guess there is lot of areas where costs have dramatically dropped in health care. But there is more of it and the new stuff is more expensive. And gains for lower costs is captured by providers and middle men.

Similar thing goes for education. Which isn't really a properly free market either.

What seems to work is offering cheaper and better alternative. Email is superior to mail at least in cost, same goes to other tech products. And whole digitization got rid of huge number of workers too. So maybe it is powerful enough buyers being present.

Uh huh. Causing the U.S. sanctions, Foreign Assets Control, and taxation regime to fall over overnight because the populace et al will refuse refuse to implement AML/KYC/OFAC/IRS reporting.

In short, what you propose is the complete dismantling of most of the U.S. regulatory state. Which, of course, the bureaucrats will assuredly take in stride.

In The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of "waves"—each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside. He describes the "First Wave" as the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures. The "Second Wave," he labels society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). That period saw the increase of urban industrial populations which had undermined the traditional nuclear family, and initiated a factory-like education system, and the growth of the corporation. Toffler said:

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.

The "Third Wave" was a term he coined to describe the post-industrial society. For features of Third Wave see

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(Toffler_book...

The meat of the article:

> the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat. Let’s hope there isn’t a cliff in front of us.

I think the (well esteemed) author is overestimating the marginal impact of science fiction, and has mistaken correlation for causation.

Humans expanding their habitats is just plain old humanity doing its thing.

>His magazine’s strain of SF promoted the combination of the American dream of capitalist success, combined with uncritical technological solutionism and a side order of frontier colonialism.

>TESCREAL is also heavily contaminated with Christian theological reasoning, Campbellian white supremacism

>imperialist subtext of colonizing the universe.

>elitism, “scientific” racism, eugenics, fascism and a blithe belief today in technology as the solution to societal problems.

This is a purely political article, how the heck does this meet the criteria to be on this site? It’s just anti-science, anti-technology bait.

Technology and sci fi, two famously apolitical domains of human creativity,,,

I think cstross made an excellent point that sci-fi authors are just entertainers.

I mean, here we have the author of The Atrocity Archives calling the Gernsback continuum "dystopian". If that's not entertaining I don't know what is!

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