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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

157 pointsc0rtex291 comments

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everyth...

I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium.

Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.

I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.

100 years optimistically?

We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.

We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.

It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.

If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.

Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.

I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.

Remember that the quote is coming from the same guy who has been promising FSD for years and hasn't come any closer to delivering it because it turns out that the devil is in the details. Elon Musk allegedly has a photographic memory that allows him to commit entire science books to memory but he apparently fails to appreciate real-world complexity. Even if you would want to give him credit for being a hype man, ideas guy, visionary, whatever, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't concern himself with the nitty gritty of every step of the way and he also doesn't seem to actually conceptualize them.

It's very much like the reasoning problem many of us software developers face: because we're used to working in extremely complex business domains without having actual real-world domain expertise, we overestimate our understanding of those domains and thus underestimate the complexity of various domains in general. We look at problems, recognize patterns we're familiar with and think the problem is trivial to solve. Hence "second system syndrome" and all that - even when looking at software we underestimate the complexity because we see the general structure and mistake the complexity for cruft.

The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years".

Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.

Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.

I think you're imagining a limited mission that's pretty far outside the tradition of space travel up 'til today. Consider the public reaction to Apollo 13 or Vladimir Komarov. Certainly, we could deliver a one-way small number of people more quickly, but I didn't think that's what we were talking about (it's certainly not what the article is talking about).

Edit: I suppose I should have said "a few humans [permanently settled] on mars, [able to return whenever they like]" in 100 years.

I suppose grandparent comment is saying that a possible timeline is to send some people there today and finish building the rocket to pick them up and bring them back in say 5 years. A bit like the Boeing clusterfuck last year...

It'd also be cool to send an empty rocket with auto-landing capabilities and supplies way before the manned mission, and when those Mars visitors arrive, they can move the tech needed for survival (which would've been invented/improved in-between) to the return rocket.

But that all sounds like Kerbal scenarios rather than real life ones.

We also haven't specified if we're sending live humans to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send over and call it a night.

Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a sustainability plan.

There’s always an element of risk in any endeavor, just because prior space missions (the ones that get recorded and remembered) were successful does not mean that this outcome was certain. There are records of space missions that were known to be unlikely to sustain human life prior to launch.

The same is true of early expeditions around the world. The odds of making it back alive were low, yet plenty of people signed up. We remember the ones who made it and forgot the ones who didn't.

There is the odd school of thought that sending a bunch of tardigrades would be better. They'd have a chance of surviving, and they'd evolve there, and in only a few million years we might have another planet teeming with life. In the (very) long term, a much better use of our resources than trying to colonise Mars ourselves.

To some degree, wasn’t the exploration of the poles that took place at the beginning of the previous century similar? For country and glory. Motivated tons of men to have a go at the foolish. Many died, some prevailed. After all that we get to maintain a station there.

Don’t take this as support of mars colonoziation which I think is a fools errand. Just pointing out that “suicide mission” seems to actually be motivational to the intrepid adventurer.

There's a big difference between being wildly over-optimistic about your odds of making it back and expecting from the get go you won't make it back.

Consider what it takes just to keep McMurdo Station (staffed by only 200-1000 people) running on Antarctica, and that's on our own planet. I don't know what the cost is, but according to [1] the budget for the US's Antarctic program overall was $356M in 2008. And it depends on reliable logistics to get people and things to and from it.

From there, step up to the ISS, which costs about $4B/year to maintain and operate, an order of magnitude more.

It's likely another order of magnitude (tens of billions/year) and probably more like two (hundreds of billions/year) to do the same thing on Mars.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Antarctic_Progra...

Which makes it just a matter of priorities. If the USA spent 10% of its defence budget for a year on it, we'd be done. Would humanity benefit more from a Mars base than it does from 10% of the USA's defence budget? Almost certainly.

Though, to be fair, there are a lot of other things we could spend 10% of the USA defence budget on that would benefit humanity a lot more in the short term.

10% is not even 100 billion. You are wildly optimistic. 100B a year is likely closer to the cost of just maintaining a mars base. The cost to actually build one is likely an order of magnitude higher.

The defense budget is a subsidy to oil companies to protect oil supply chains and pipelines. Which rich person/companies assets are being protected on Mars? Tax money is spent mostly as a direct/indirect transfer of money to the super rich while using words to manipulate the gullible: security, defense, laws, etc.

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go to Mars, AT ALL.

This whole idea is the stupidest thing I've heard people seriously discuss.

What would be the point?

If you want to experience "life on Mars", bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year.

If there's some burning need to go live underground, as you would on Mars, why not just do it in Nevada? The grocery store is a lot closer.

The post at the top of this thread is correct in saying the logistics of supporting a colony on Mars would take decades, and cost billions (at least).

I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.

> there's no reason the trip can't be one-way

If the crew includes elon, I am actually in favor of this...

Humans are better at exploring and doing science than rovers, they could get things done a lot quicker and better. They can repair things and are very adaptable. A mission to spend 6 months on the surface would be great. Perhaps not worth the risk and expense though.

When it comes to doing science where there is no food, water, or air, robots are actually much better at it.

It depends how you are defining "better". Much cheaper and safer sure, but also much slower and much more limited. If it was me making the decisions I'd still go with robots, but I wouldn't call them "better".

Apollo 17 astronauts drove roughly 12 miles in around 8 hours to get to a site and do some science. The curiosity rover's longest drive in a day is around 150 meters. If it drills a rock and encounters some difficulty, it has to wait send a reply home, wait another 4-24 minutes for the message to get there, wait 4-24 minutes for a message to come back before proceeding. It's also obviously unable to conduct repairs on itself or it's tools, or even do something as basic as cleaning the dust from itself.

Robots certainly have the advantage in longevity; curiosity has been operating since 2012 and is still going, but it's like comparing a roomba vs a team of professional cleaners. I think if you asked a planetary scientist if they'd could go back in time and instead of sending curiosity, send a couple of people for six months, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

There's no reason a robot couldn't do repairs on itself or clean dust from itself.

Think of all the science the robot will get done in the decades of research and engineering necessary to figure out how to get a human there and back to do science without immediately dying.

There are many reasons why that you're dismissing with a wave of the hand. But regardless, we are both in agreement that sending robots right now is the wise decision.

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go west, AT ALL

- Portugal, 1490

Except that the Americas were already inhabited prior to 1490 because they were in fact relatively easily reachable at an earlier point in history and extremely habitable. Mars by contrast is an environment that is actively hostile to life. Even the dust is lethal. And you're so far away from the rest of humanity you can only get resupplies every few years. The Americas had water, soil, edible plants and animals - and practically infinite amounts of breathable air. If you want to go homestead on Mars, dysentery is going to be the least of your worries.

The explorers were seeking new trade routes with clear routes economic purpose.

there were lots of reasons to go west, since Europe was desperate and starved for spices and goods from the Silk Road.

the Ottomans had cut them off following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (or where they didn't they taxed the hell out of them).

they knew for sure there was good stuff over there, and just wanted a new way there.

we know for sure that Mars is blasted, toxic, rock ball with less metal than Earth. what great and grand spices will future explorers be returning with? the Portuguese could prove that nutmeg and silk existed...

A lot of people would have been better off if they hadn't. This argument only works if you value the lives of Europeans (and their descendants, who often were equally racist against the indigenous peoples) over the native inhabitants.

> I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.

Can you write this with a straight face? This feels like the opportunity of a life time for someone who wants to push the envelope on what is possible. Yes it will be expensive, but the tech and lessons we learn will surely be worth more. Consider all the developments from the Apollo program. This level of pessimism always shocks me, shouldn’t we rise to the challenge?

A rover is expendable, a human much less so. The PR cost of having a human smash into the surface of Mars the way it happened with a rover would easily outweigh the PR boost of having a human successfully land on Mars. And even if we managed to actually land someone, they'd most likely die there before we could bring them back.

A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medical supplies, stable temperatures, radiation shielding, etc etc just to survive, let alone actually do anything. Unlike sunshine, Mars has none of those things. And if any of them fail, your human rover would quickly go kaput.

It seems far more reasonable to use automation to build a livable outpost before sending a human there - especially because a human is going to need that outpost to survive anyway. So even if we want to send people to Mars eventually, automation would be step one.

I agree that automation and robots are a good proxy for exploration. And yes it will be tough. That won't stop people from trying.

PR or not, there are still skydivers and wing suit people pushing the envelope. I really don't agree with the doomerism/well actually crowd on these sorts of things, there is still the indomitable human spirit, no matter how irrational it seems. We still have field scientists that get sent to the edges of the earth to explore and find things, even when we think they have completely been explored. A friend of mine is an arctic botanist that spends 3-4m a year in the high arctic tundra doing research on plants in that biome.

There is no rational reason to want to cross the entirety of Antarctica, and yet humans have done it.

I'm not saying we won't possibly land someone on Mars eventually. I just don't think that's going to happen in a reasonable near future. The resources involved are too much for one person willing to go on a suicide mission to do it themselves (and those who do have the resources are very much not interested in dying) and for a government to sponsor this you would need a culture of self-sacrifice rather than rugged individualism - in other words, a country like China might be more likely to take the lead here than the US and even that seems unlikely.

Again, the big problem here is scale. It takes a lot more resources to send someone to Mars than to Antarctica and it takes a lot more resources to keep them alive there. Your friend in the high arctic trundra probably also isn't living in collapsible tents and foraging for food - all the infrastructure available to him (even if it's just shelter) needs to be built on Mars too and is orders of magnitude more complex and more resource intense and the materials are much harder to ship and assemble - plus of course material failure is signficantly more lethal.

Hate to break this to you, they do in fact go on expeditions in tents for quite a bit, with guns (polar bears). You've got them insofar as they don't forage for food, turns out we have portable food tech. There is a base camp but there are areas where they go far. They get govt issued Canada Goose jackets! What a perk! O Canada!

I agree with all you are saying, and those techs can be developed. I am a tech optimist. I see these as problems to try to solve, not a list of reasons why they can't happen.

We can agree as well that it will be fantastically more expensive and yes an order of magnitude etc etc. These are engineering problems, not physics problems. Probability vs possibility in my mind. We can disagree about if the resources are worth spending (that's not my call, I vote, which doesn't seem to do much). I can't predict the future.

Another point against it is it used to be a boat with dudes sent into the unknown with no way to know what to know what was happening. This was totally affordable for imperial seafaring nations at the time relative to the cost of rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_Age_of_Antarctic_Explor...

After this age there was a rise in using tech to do it. (mechanical age I think?)

It will be an insane feat to pull off, and I hope it happens in our life time.

>Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.

This is the ultimate admission that it can't be done. Anyone sane would at least propose a free-return trajectory like Artemis 2. Even if you are crazy enough to sacrifice your astronauts on a one way trip, you would still need to practice a lot of free-return trajectories just to train your astronauts and test the hardware.

This is a dumb argument. We are doing it now, already, no crazy budget explosions needed. Just some medium expansions of existing projects.

Orion is going to send humans past the moon this year, and could theoretically send humans to mars not much further out than that. It is literally on the Lockheed Martin website that they would like to send humans to mars sometime in the 2030s, provided they can get the funding.

I'm not involved in the project any longer, but this has been the ideal vision of the project since the mid 2010s. Currently the plan is to put people on the moons of mars, as we have no way of getting them back if we actually put people on the surface of mars.

Rockets are the easy part. More:

The Shape of a Mars Mission: https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

Why Not Mars: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

We haven't created a self-sustaining human population in earth orbit yet. We need to constantly supply the space station and even when we do, the health impact of staying there is really serious. That's table stakes for a Mars mission and no improvements in rocketry will compensate for the fact we simply can't keep someone alive for that long outside of earth atmosphere.

Honestly, the number of people who think they know the ins and outs of living on Mars because they saw a Matt Damon movie is bizarre.

> Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that,

"of course"? Why? Putting people in space, on the moon, or on Mars seems like a huge waste of resources.

We could have (conservatively) 100 JWST or 1000 Pathfinders for the price of a human mission to Mars.

I agree that missions to colonize exoplanets should be low on the priority list per marginal dollar - and also I think we should fund such research because its popular and interesting. We should fund it on the lowest practical level, which probably means establishing a 'starter' base on the moon and a base on mars in the coming centuries.

There is no pleasing the NYTs or other tech critics like Wired, Axios, or Arts Technica. Either tech is too profit-focused, too focused on mundane or minutia, violates user privacy, or its proposals are too far-fetched or unworkable. What would be the perfect tech or the perfect tech company? One that makes minimal profits , works on products that are not too outlandish, does not make big promises yet is able to secure large investments with modest proposals.

Most of the criticism on display here is the outrageous, implausible lies that the tech industry leaders are telling to stupid people who believe it for propaganda purposes to avoid regulation and scrutiny.

None of the bullshit coming out of Musk, for example, is real, it’s not even plausible, it’s just lies for dumb people.

No you

Well said, I can’t imagine what the perfect tech company to the NyT journalist is, I assume it is something run by committee that uses 100’s of their journalists opinions to make every simple decision.

>actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future

I think this is called techno-utopianism. The "leaders" in technology have been doing this ever since the industrial revolution.

People sold the idea that street lights would fix "public morals" and eliminate crime.

Also see the progress trap and professor Simon Penny's work and what he calls the end of the anthropocene.

There is some evidence that street lights reduce crime! E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6

Reduce, yes, absolutely. Eliminate -- no.

Were there any serious claims that street lights would entirely eliminate crime? A "sizable reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes" sounds like a pretty positive result.

I can't claim anything objectively because I never truly looked at it scientifically.

I simply come from bad neighborhoods and the amount of times I heard "shhh, don't go there, people will see you" from guys who clearly were looking to start for trouble, was substantial in its own right.

Anecdotal evidence, sure, but from a psychological point of view the people who want to steal or harm others feel much safer doing so in the darkness, I have found.

100 years optimistically!? That's an incredibly pessimistic timeline, maybe one of the most hardline "nothing ever happens" outlooks I've ever heard articulated.

Eh, it's a reasonable prior. The timeline is "it will never happen" until the leap forward happens that makes it "within 2 years." Basically the same as air flight.

You can't know when the leap will happen so it's basically picking a year that seems far enough off to be pretty darn sure.

It doesn't require a leap forward, we could put boots on the ground with 1990s tech.

aye we could have. and they'd all be long dead on the surface of Mars by this point. getting them there isn't enough.

Keeping them alive and returning them doesn't require "a leap" which is the central point of OP I am disagreeing with. We have all the technology, material science etc to do it.

Sure, it requires some research, engineering and a crapload of investment, but it doesn't require anything that is currently "science fiction".

Have you read about the natural conditions on Mars?

I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.

I think you are both on different pages about settlement vs just a visit.

that's crazy to say. mars is very cold and very dry and not shielded from radiation and doesn't have much air and that air isn't breathable.

i wouldn't say we've settled antarctica, which is on our planet and has air.

100 years would be a wild amount of time for us to settle mars.

Add to that a soil and dust that's toxic to humans. Our biology, unsurprisingly, is only compatible with a single planet.

We purposefully decided not to settle there socially, yet we have settled there permanently with research and military stations.

Just as we will with Mars.

And yes we grow things there, even if just green onions and herbs.

Not to mention the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by.

100 years is beyond pessimistic. We could easily have settled Mars with 1970s tech.

> the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by.

times a few orders of magnitude and this is the main reason to doubt a settled Mars colony.

Possibly a research outpost, but why would that be staffed by humans rather than robots?

There is no 'few orders of magnitude', because it's conquered, you're not allowed to settle there, and it's not a new frontier.

Yet Mars is a new frontier, and endless, massive numbers of humans would go to Mars in a heartbeat.

Frankly, settlers travelling to the new world in the 1400s faced a far more dangerous journey and living conditions than a trip to Mars.

We're talking first explorers here, so many died on boats, of starvation the first year, on and on.

Modern tech does not remove said risk, but it tips the playing field.

Given that no one has yet traveled to Mars, “faced a far more dangerous journey” seems a ridiculously hyperbolic statement. (Thinking even about the lost colony at Roanoke.)

It's also particularly awkward to land on, as it has just enough atmosphere to be annoying, but not enough to be particularly helpful. Most Mars landings have involved some sort of ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine or other (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_crane_(landing_system) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder#Entry,_descent... ) which would not be viable for humans (and were only arguably viable for the probes they were used for; the risk of failure was high).

Colonizing Mars isn't a problem. Colonizing Mars is a goal. Making that happen requires addressing a ridiculous number of problems and sub-problems.

If history teaches us anything, the biggest problem is supply chains - and supply chains have been so difficult to get right that they've led to countless famines, lost wars, failed businesses and economic crises. And those have all been supply chains here on Earth, mostly between fixed locations at fixed distances with relatively few environmental hazards and risks compared to space travel.

If we want to create a sustainable multi-planetary future, we need to solve this incrementally. Colonizing the moon would be a logical stopgap. But as it stands now we haven't even established a presence on the moon - let alone a permanent one. The only presence we have off-planet is the ISS and that one's still in Low Earth Orbit, no different from regular communication satellites, so that only qualifies as "off-planet" by not being on the surface of the planet.

Remember that we can't just scale up space travel indepently either. Even if SpaceX figures out how to do space launches every other day, that still requires a supply chain for fuel, parts, refinement, resource extraction, etc, all of which also needs to be scaled up accordingly. And that's just for launching stuff into space, which so far has mostly meant LEO.

> low-information escapism

What a great way to describe it.

It's like a good sci-fi or fantasy novel, but for people who don't read.

>wants to get paid for the idea of the future today

One response (also by an abundance crowd?) to a similar sentiment:

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/serbia-limits-academics-...

"Serbia limits academics’ research time to just one hour a day"

These articles which are little more than blind scarequotes peppered with ad hominems invite little more meaningful discussion than more ad hominems. What is the value of a comments section filled with little but "this is stupid and anyone who believes it is a snake oil salesman"?

Why "of course" you support colonizing mars? What's your reasoning?

Getting paid before delivery is clearly an Elon Musk strategy and in some cases it does mean that he (Tesla) will be able to deliver but he's clearly full of shit with crazy ideas like living on Mars because the Earth is doomrf or whatever. BS does also bring money or fame or whatever sometimes.

Doubled or tripled NASA's budget? NASA has spent 32 BILLION on SLS with nothing to show for it. Each launch is expected to cost 2.5 BILLION https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System.

Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. NASA is a moribund jobs program.

> Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this.

Starship does not exist.

Starship is the name given to a design for a fully reusable superheavy launch vehicle intended to take 100t to LEO.

The things being launched by SpaceX are not Starship.

They are impressive, but are not Starship.

They are called Starship, but are not Starship.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that Starship will not exist.

What I am saying is that today, right now, Starship does not exist and SLS does.

You implied that Starship does exist, and is cheaper.

Nobody, not you, not me, not Lord Ketamine, can predict when it will exist or how much it will cost with any degree of accuracy.

I genuinely, sincerely, and earnestly WANT Starship to exist, but as of today, April 24th, 2025 it does not.

We can argue technicalities all day long but to me, this exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGiNKcVSek

The payload on that flight was a single stuffed toy banana, for scale.

On all test flights with a payload exceeding the mass (~300 grams) of a single stuffed toy banana (for scale), the flight has failed.

Flight 7: 20,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 7m39s

Flight 8: 8,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 8m04s

Flight 9 is not currently planned to carry a payload.

None of this is a technicality. It is technicreality.

Agree there are obviously still issues, but you've just made the case yourself. We are discussing Flight 9 for Starship ~5 years into development. 10 years into the development of SLS we won't even see launch 2.

They just operate in different universes no matter how much you dislike the CEO.

You are misunderstanding me.

I am on two embryonic programs that are not viable without starship or an equivalent.

If starship exists I will be able to cash out, buy a 54-foot catamaran and spend the rest of my life sailing around the world scuba diving and spear fishing.

I want starship to exist and do not care who builds it.

It does not exist and I know this because I am currently on the third floor of a boring cookie cutter business park building right now staring at computer screens and not off the coast of Gili T doing mushrooms after a dive.

>If starship exists I will be able to cash out, buy a 54-foot catamaran and spend the rest of my life sailing around the world scuba diving and spear fishing.

Highly doubt this is true. Everyone's rich on their wild little minds.

For one, where is Starship and when did it last launch?

For another, this hypothetical spacecraft (which does not yet exist) would not be wherever it is in terms of completion had NASA not existed.

1. More recently than SLS :) 2. Agree 100%.

lol - fair.

Climate change can near certainly be served with technology, if society didn't stand in the way. We could all switch to nuclear - France did it decades ago, technology is not a problem, society is - hence the subjects of these articles. Looks at solar in China or even Texas vs California. Everything is like that.

Putting humans on Mars is purely a technological problem.

Inequality is not a real problem.

I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun.

I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.

Its not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money from business is treated like they're the smartest person in the room by many people. The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

"not necessarily pretty smart" is a very nice way of putting it.

I don't know where the threshold ought to be, but beyond a certain size a pile of money can only indicate bad things about its owner. Either they're too unimaginative to turn that potential into action, or their designs are so against the will of the people that it's going to take gargantuan amounts of coercion to get them done. Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.

Most rich people aren't sitting on piles of cash; their capital is (usually) invested in a corporation which is busy turning potential into action, as you put it. I think there's an argument to be made that amassing and hoarding great wealth, particularly near the end of one's life with the intent to pass it directly onto one's heirs, is morally questionable if you believe in any kind of universalist ethic. But I think criticizing someone as uncreative simply because they're not selling off all their equity to go pursue some other venture is way off

That sounds very good but it's difficult to square with the behavior of those corporations. Can it really be that the change all of these well meaning rich people want to see in the world is... products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment?

Either these investments are not paying off, or they are and the investors have a very dark vision for us. Neither reflects very well on the investor.

> products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment?

You seem to have a very narrow view of the range of products that exist. Are you basically just talking about smartphones?

When I wrote that I was thinking about the coersive trend of SaaS products in general, the labyrinthine firmware used by my HVAC system, and land investments that result in rainforests being burned to make room for more cows.

I would guess it's not so much that they "want to see this change" as much as "they want to make as much money as possible and don't care about these consequences"

Yeah, I agree. But of what use is that money, if not to ensure that you can shape the consequences according to your vision? If you have to make things worse to make money, and you need money to make things better, then a sane person would course-correct.

Beyond a certain point, supposing that your investments continue to yield monetary returns at the cost of making others tolerate worse outcomes, it's just an indicator that you're a junkie.

> Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.

This sounds like the "poverty is a moral failing" argument in reverse. See eg https://unherd.com/2017/08/remembering-time-poverty-often-bl...

I think there's a pretty significant difference between criticizing somebody's lack of resources and criticizing somebody's allocation of resources. Both might be the result of choices they made, but the connection for the latter is much more obvious.

> The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

Quite literally in the case of former Apple CEO John Sculley.

VCs won't be expert level in every area, but they are in a unique position to have a deep knowledge about a lot of different things. It's necessary to be able to invest effectively.

They really aren’t. And I know a lot of them personally.

Most VCs I know are just people with too much money throwing it at anything and everything they can hoping to get that 1 unicorn that multiplies their investment by 100.

I'm sure there's plenty of very intelligent ones, but there's also plenty of morons who started life off with an advantage and have managed to keep it up

Even if they were, they have absolutely no incentive to tell you their expert analysis. A16Z spent the cryptocurrency mania years pumping and dumping shitcoins. They weren't telling the world these scams were revolutionary because they had any inherent value, but because saying that made them the most money. They are just people with money trying to turn it into more money.

I blame the experts. It's their responsibility to explain things to the public and engage in forums that the public is paying attention to (e.g. podcasts). They don't have to bloviate about everything under the sub, but they do have to be able to break down and communicate their ideas to the non-expert public. Failure to do so creates a vacuum that is filled by the Marc Andreesens and Peter Thiels of the world.

Absolutely not. That turns the experts into politicians and pundits. Experts should stay in their lane and provide accurate and trustworthy information.

Yes, it should be accessible and digestible, but should not be pushed.

If you go on Marc’s Twitter he spends most of his time subtweeting with emojis and one word responses. And he has millions of followers (for what reason?).

A scientist, aside from their day job, is now also supposed to spend time debunking whatever half baked topic of the day is?

The only world where that works is one in which MA’s reputation is built on not saying dumb stuff all the time, like a scientist’s reputation is. If his follower count dropped for example. But it’s not, and that’s not how it works. People like him will move on to the next thing tomorrow.

I've gone on a science communication podcast to talk about my work: https://braininspired.co/podcast/202/

This does not seem to have stopped anyone bullshitting to the media about AI.

I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia.

I would say it's similar to politicians. We won't really have your, I don't know, career Costco Manager in political leadership. We'll get AOC or a Vance (staying bipartisan to make the point, moving off this topic next sentence). The former knows more about basic commutes and the condition of public bathrooms than your average politician or tech mogul. Our tech leaders are not well-rounded or even representative. That's why they talk crazy shit because they are in a crazy rich insulated world. We tried some contrived way to get women and minorities to become CEOs, but I think it should start more grass roots and maybe think about stopping something like ycombinator (or Google for example) from constantly recruiting based on old boys club pedigree. Regular folks just don't get put into the mix for C-Level for whatever reason unless they are gifted at the ladder-climbing thing.

Exceptionalism dictates that we will never put them into the mix, and I think the world is probably missing out on some good practicality and humanity just based on sheer regular folk experience some people can bring.

Funny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru8WeRqB0ts

You know AOC was a bartender before running for congress right? While most reps are lawyers, many come from a diverse range of backgrounds, there probably is in fact someone in congress who used to manage a supermarket. This diversity of backgrounds is generally seen as a good thing when it comes to understanding the impact of upcoming legislation.

I understand that but she is pretty much in the mold of Hilary at this point (career politician). It's bartender to straight Congressional aid or something like that and I believe straight to national politics. So, by 27 she is already in the stratosphere (earlier even, in terms of being in the circuit) and no longer down to earth. Talk about going to mars. She's supposed to represent the Bronx, and I can assure you she knows nothing about walking in the Bronx. You need to get robbed in the Bronx a few times before representing it lol.

I don't know, for both the politicians and CEOs, I sort of wonder like when do you get to say "okay I got enough out of regular life to now manage regular life for others"?. Thirty? Fourty? Fifty? So Elon is 55, but we see that simply being fifty is not enough. I'm open to having the wrong line of thinking here.

> I can assure you she knows nothing about walking in the Bronx.

Huh? You think a bartender in the Bronx wouldn't walk while living there?

Clearly in this fantasy the middle class of the Bronx all have chauffeurs

I’m not sure where you get this impression of AOC. From her Wikipedia article:

> After college, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender and waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home.

That sounds pretty “real Bronx” to me.

As for her campaign:

> Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign in April 2017 while waiting tables and tending bar at Flats Fix, a taqueria in New York City's Union Square. "For 80 percent of this campaign, I operated out of a paper grocery bag hidden behind that bar,"

I don’t think there’s an age when you are “ripe” to become a politician. I think that in order to be good at it, you have to maintain contact with ordinary people and listen to their concerns. Elon sucks at it not because he’s 55 but because he thinks he knows all the answers and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

Yeah I get it, Jensen Huang worked at Dennys too (I sound nippy, but I'm not trying to be). I just don't think these people stayed in those environments long enough, but her upbringing definitely sounds "for real". If you are out into national politics before 30 you are out of any normalcy imho. Some people are bartenders for a lot longer if you catch my drift.

I don’t really catch your drift. Part of the reason I’m digging in on this is because you picked a perfect counterexample as your example. AOC came from a working class background, was elected on the basis of grassroots organizing against a guy with a huge war chest, and is widely known for staying involved in her community (to a degree many politicians don’t) so she can best represent their interests. As a result of her local activism and accessibility her constituents love her and as a result she has been able to beat back candidates from both parties running on massive budgets and even has crossover support from Trump voters in her district.

ivape thinks AOC is out of touch, funny how his written assumptions and lack of actual familiarity with her shows that he's the one out of touch. I follow AOC on Instagram (all the haters can now jump to dismiss me as a biased fanboy), and she does things in her area like charity runs, attend local events and organize townhalls...

And she grills "witnesses" of congressional hearings the way a politician who is actually doing her work grills them. Compared to "career politicians" who are probably too busy golfing with rich "campaign donors" to read the briefing and understand the issues they need to deal with..

You are skipping the part where she moved out of the Bronx at 5 and grew up in Westchester for the entirety of her schooling, graduated cum laude from BU and worked in DC. She only moved to the Bronx to leverage her Puerto Rican heritage after having her political ambitions shaped. When "after college" did she even move to the Bronx? Her registration in 2016 was still Westchester.

I like her, but to pretend that she's just some up-start from the Bronx to go against the grain is absolutely false. She was selected, groomed, and installed because she fit a profile and she is a very manufactured candidate.

Her house in Westchester that people are somehow portraying as a 'rich' upbringing: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhCMERUXUAAY68Z?format=jpg. It had two bedrooms and sold for only $350k in 2016!

It’s a problem with representation generally. The political theorist Benjamin Studebaker uses an analogy of getting into a hot air balloon: there are ways you can be of service to those below, giving them an overhead view, maybe warning them of danger, etc. But the further up you go, the less you have skin the game, and the less the little ant-people can truly be real to you.

Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, I’d say this a case for refactoring bicameralism: one house of professionalized legal specialists and technocrats, another house chosen by rotating lottery for short stints of public service by random citizens (sortition).

AOC was an intern for Ted Kennedy before being strategically placed in a "bartending" position as part of her background grooming. Her family owned multiple New York Brownstones in the rich part of the city. She has as much claim to humble background as Trump.

Source for any of those claims? It's pretty well known after a few weird political fights that she grew up in a tiny house in Yorktown and that her dad died when she was a freshman in college and that her mom was a house cleaner. [her childhood home: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhCMERUXUAAY68Z?format=jpg&name=...]. Hard to square with her family "owning multiple brownstones".

Trump's dad gave him millions of dollars to start businesses and then left him somewhere near a billion when he died.

I think those are two pretty different upbringings!

Wikipedia supports the claim that she was an intern for Ted Kennnedy, but none of the rest. Interestingly she has an asteroid named after her.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez

Right - the rest is pretty much nonsense. She grew up in a 2-bedroom house and went to the ~4th best school in Boston and we're supposed to believe she's some long con plant? Just silly.

Looking into this she seems to come from an upper-middle-class background but nothing elite. I will say before looking it up for some reason I had the impression that she came from a very humble working-class immigrant background.

I'm not an AOC fan, but I was an intern on Capitol Hill, and I'm sure as hell not from an upper crust background. I'm not holding that against her.

Here's the New York Posts' investigation: https://nypost.com/2019/02/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-no...

The actual land records that prove this are impossible to link, for reasons that are charitably described as "Monstrous incompetence of government officials".

None of which mentions brownstones or growing up wealthy.. the land records are accurate but she’s renting the spaces so her landlords name is on ACRIS.

Nothing in this article talks about her family owning multiple brownstones. At all. Nothing about land records.

This article talks about her dad's Bronx condo that she lived in, or claimed to live in. No offense to the people of the Bronx, but that is not a "rich" part of NYC. Units for sale in the building mentioned are rather cheap for NYC, in fact.

> https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/about > > After high school, Alexandria attended Boston University, and graduated with degrees in Economics and International Relations (and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans). During this period she also had the opportunity to intern in the office of the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

She was indeed a congressional intern, but then her father died and family finances got rough, and a year later Ted Kennedy died (August 25, 2009) so she lost the job in his office.

> Following the financial crisis of 2008, tragedy struck when her father passed away suddenly from cancer. The medical bills and other growing expenses placed their home at risk of foreclosure. Alexandria pulled extra shifts to work as a waitress and bartender to support her family,

Her father seems to have been in the business of home remodeling and renovations. I haven't found any source for "owned multiple brownstones", but a little bit of house-flipping or some rental properties wouldn't be weird to see in that kind of business. Being a landlord with a mortgage doesn't necessarily mean huge wealth, and it it's easy to believe a combination of cancer treatment bills/being unable to work/2008 housing crisis could take a situation like that from comfortable to house-poor to foreclosure on upside-down loans in an awful hurry.

I think the ideal foundation of democracy consists of:

1) All citizens get mandatory high education on Math, Science, Language and Logic (what level is high enough is open to debate. I'd say college level), regardless of career -> This is to make sure they have the basic knowledge to participate in meaningful discussions;

2) All citizens are encouraged, and by law mandated to attend and organize political stuffs -> This is to ensure that they can speak out when they are not happy about anything;

Mandatory as in what? You go to jail if you can't pass calculus?

>mandatory ... college level

I'm curious what your experience is with the world that makes you think every citizen is capable of completing college level classes. People with an IQ of 85 or less are like 15% of population and I think most of them with have a very hard time with high level logic.

This is pretty much Plato with the (major) caveat that full citizenship was restricted to a subset of the population

>“We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for,” Becker writes. “We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos.”

I don't like this mindset. Be grateful for what you have. Maybe the world is not that great yet for many people and we should aim to improve things substantially, not marginally. This is something that the shuffling around of ressources on a political level can never achieve. Those dreaded tech entrepreneurs have correctly identified technology to be the only way substantial improvements can happen. So then it all blils down if you can make things happen and here the article and some comments here just claim, well, they NEVER deliver!

If you like optimistic Sci-Fi, I would recommend the Culture Series. It really changed me when I read it in university.

The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will look like that, but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a path but it would require AIs to be built for public interest already now.

AM for example could plausibly be trained on 4chan and war footage.

> but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice".

How do you know that?

Is there any optimistic sci-fi that doesn't have something like superpowerful perfect AI?

It feels like such a thing is a bit of a cop-out as it removes all the problems that arise from human imperfections and yet our own history is that of an improving standard of living despite these imperfections.

Kim Stanley Robinson is pretty good utopian sci fi. Some of his works are more plausible than others.

> The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality.

The difference is that there's no need to build AIs with "motivation". Computers don't view us as anything right now, even if they're better at working with bits than us. What would change this in your mind?

Naturally, we will anyway because that's a short-cut and we're not very imaginative. But any kind of AI that would want anything will have to be explicitly built by us.

> The “ideology of technological salvation”

On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".

I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.

Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.

Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!

We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.

If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it.

That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.

>We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.

Yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been higher nor has the rate of increase.

I'm fairly certain the rate of increase has been higher, whether you mean in percentage or absolute terms.

It could be a decade long blip but since we've peaked per capita and various large nations have peaked and we have extensive research on what the causes are and active programs to mitigate those it's probably more reasonable to say that CO2 (and Greenhouse gasses generally) are growing but at a slower rate with some credible hope to reverse that growth.

Don't get me wrong it is fucked up that we partly squandered a few decades and let it get this far and things could still go badly wrong but we have enough data that we can stick to the scary facts.

The only time we have seen a drop in emissions has been during covid or recession.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Some of the problems are political not technological though.

If nuclear power had continued to grow at a normal rate since the 60's the developed world would all have emissions per capita in line with France.

The only thing "wrong" with it is that both parties are being intentionally vauge and operating at a "higher level" than the actual problem they are dealing with.

You can immediately rule out "carbon-sucking machines or whatever" because it will take at least as much energy to capture and sequester the carbon as you got from burning it and spent extracting it. Which directly brings us to the actual solution of getting energy from a renewable resource that is cheaper.

Over time all tech will cause issues but if it's well designed the issues won't be exorbitantly expensive to fix compared to the benefits. innovation will always be a cure-all, cause otherwise the problem is already solved, showing or educating people about which solutions are already optimal energy-wise will do more than enough to set their expectations straight, or at least convince them that they don't want to carry around tnt in their pocket.

Making Mars habitable will be a thousand year project which implies that the earth is not uninhabitable. Nobody except a conman will tell you that we have to "escape" earth to go live on mars.

Without the hope of technological progress, human expansion and economic growth the world becomes zero-sum.

In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else.

The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we struggle to comprehend.

Of course, some people are overly optimistic about the near-term possibilities of technology, but I much prefer that to the alternative.

bollocks. nature has found equilibrium for millions of years. things like the Nash Equilibrium or game theory also find healthy balances.

what you're talking about is capitalism becoming unsustainable

It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)

> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent

I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure.

I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.

I had a deadly childhood cancer, Retinoblastoma, which would have killed me without modern medicine. I'm pretty fond of existing.

These developments sure altered my humanity. By making it possible.

Modern medicine saved my life as well. It seems like splitting hairs, but changing _who_ one is is different from changing _that_ one is. My point is that technology isn't going to do anything to alter the core human experience: envy, passion, jealousy, gratitude, love, etc... aren't mutable in the way that rationalists or transhumanists would have us believe.

I'm sorry but I fail to see how I could have any envy, passion, or love if I am dead. If these things are important in any way, then literally changing whether or not someone experiences these things seems important? You can't have the one without the other.

Also I'm not sure where Rationalists or transhumanists said "it would be cool to live way longer" and you read "get rid of love." That seems like a weird failure of your own imagination. You can't have love if you're dead, so the transhumanists want you to live longer and... experience more love!

> I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.

That just means that field can be static (or just updated for modern references). It doesn't mean there aren't lots of things to improve in other areas.

Technological developments have massively changed our morals. I think it is even likely that without technological progress we would barely have any moral progress! Humanity was more anarchist back when we were foragers. Becoming farmers made us sedentary and allowed morals to focus more on "family values" and religion. Similarly moving from a pre-printing press world to a post-printing press world forced civilization into a more "free-speech" stance and brought about massive religious and cultural changes. We might still have the same emotions, but they are now shaped by different environments and I really believe that that makes a difference. Check out Foragers Farmers and Fossil Fuels by Ian Morris.

Did this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like this?

There's a "controversy filter" that downrates articles with more comments than points.

Explains a lot, there's no such thing as substance without controversy.

Basically false, I think? From the first couple of pages of the top-of-all-time HN posts:

* War stories (e.g. "How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 )

* Anything by ciechanow.ski (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443229 )

* Strange bits of personal whimsy (e.g. "I sell onions on the Internet" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 )

* Neat toys (e.g. 2048, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566 )

popularity != substance

You might have noticed that I didn't quote upvote figures, and that I omitted a bunch of possible options. I sorted by popularity and then selected ones with substance. (I presume you're not asserting that they have no substance by virtue of the fact that they were popular.)

I wonder if the "active" link lets those articles come to the top:

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

When I read this, I sort of resist the idea.

Which reminds me of the "Dogma of Otherness" by the scifi author David Brin:

"Think about it. 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans."

https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html

That story is just an anthropologist discovering Russell's paradox. There, I did it again.

Neil Degrasse Tyson on Mars colonization:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5D-0xrhwbR8

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOwTtxgcYeg

Why on Earth do shorts have to loop!!!

https://archive.ph/liq8S

being critical about the messaging and the timeline of achieving these goals is fair. however the rest of the thesis seems too harsh, despite the author's credentials.

there is nothing wrong with "shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars" aspect about these literal moonshot projects. regardless of what you think about the people running them, but these initiatives tend to bring out a lot of innovation.

This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism).

While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.

I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federov...

Fyodorov/Federov also shows up in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy.

It's a bundle of ideas that has produced some very good science fiction, but I wouldn't reorganize my life around it.

This also illustrates the bad research that goes into this sort of thing. There are no deep roots of 'TESCREAL' (which doesn't exist to begin with) in Russian Cosmism, because there are no roots of any of those ingredients separately in Russian Cosmism.

Stross just made that up, as pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. There are no sources, and he got it from Hannu: https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 Stross has chosen to never revisit the topic to try to substantiate his suggestion.

This quote winds up being rather exemplary: for example, that one parenthetical description manages to make at least 3 errors: 1. Fyodorov was born in 1823, so he obviously could not have invented anything in the '18th century' (ie. 1700s); 2. Cosmism included many things, not just the 'Great Common Task', and the Great Common Task itself went far beyond reviving ancestors, including many overall more important things like colonizing the entire universe or conquering death; 3. and further, the revival part was not about computer simulation at all (that's Hannu's _Quantum Thief_ fictional version of the idea that he came up with for his Sobornosts!) but reviving them physically, in the body, possibly using cloning - and was no more about "inside of a simulation" than Jesus reviving the dead was.

You're right that Hannu made great use of Cosmism as world-building in the Quantum Thief trilogy which I highly recommend (see my review above) - but that could only work because the ideas of Cosmism are so novel & exotic, and not part of Western transhumanism. If they really were as foundational as Stross claims, the 'taproot' of Western ideas, they would make about as exciting fictional worldbuilding as suggesting that you have some sort of 'laws' for AIs, starting with 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."...

Good counterpoints. They prompted me to search through the old Extropians mailing list archive. Fedorov was discussed there in the early 2000s, but those discussions were much too late to be foundational of Western transhumanism. One of the messages pointed me to this now-long-dead link, helpfully preserved via Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010211141901/http://members.nb...

I probably hadn't read that page in 20+ years, but it was familiar as soon as I saw it.

Yeah, early 2000s lines up with what I can tell. There were a few translations like https://web.archive.org/web/20021207080806/http://www.berdya... which surfaced somewhere around 2001 or 2002, and they appear to have been about the first anyone had ever heard of 'Cosmism'. Which still wasn't much at all - I was on SL4 myself starting around 2003, and I don't remember ever hearing of it (except possibly as a footnote to a footnote on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) until Stross's post. So you can imagine my surprise to learn from Stross that despite me never having heard the name, and having never seen any of this discussed on SL4 or Extropians or OB or in _Great Mambo Chicken_ or in Ettinger's _The Prospect of Immortality_ and Yudkowsky and Metzger and Max More and all the rest of us having never heard anything about this, this was nevertheless foundational to Western transhumanism... Remarkable the things you learn if you hang around long enough!

Sarcasm aside, that was a bit of a pity, because even if it had no relationship to anything in 'TESCREAL', Cosmism is an interesting historical artifact. When I was in LA back in 2019, I was able to visit the Museum of Jurassic History where there was an exhibit of Tsiolkovsky stuff like drawings on how humanity might live in space, and it was much more interesting when you knew a little bit about the Cosmism background there.

I agree this is somewhat manufactured. Both Hugo de Garis and Ben Goertzel identified as Cosmists in the mid to late 00s, but I don't remember it ever coming up on SL4/singularitarian/transhumanist mailing lists as a major source of ideas at their peak.

I think you might have taken this snippet from Cory Doctorow's review, not the NYT article here?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...

The NYT article does not mention the dreaded T word, and is not clear to me whether this notional acronym plays any large role in Becker's book.

Yes, you're right. I read both articles but I should have placed my original comment as a reply to the Pluralistic link.

If I see another mention of the paper clip example I'm gonna lose it.

Perhaps better is to kindly refer everyone to a physics 101 text book.

Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man.

Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.

But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).

You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.

I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.

In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children.

So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.

Gilgamesh went on a quest for immortality and lost it, the Pharaohs built grand monuments in their effort, which ended with their carefully-prepared bodies ground up in paint and medicine by Empire-building Brits and French.

Today the rich pray for the singularity and freeze their bodies. And want to colonize Mars I guess.

Vanitas.

Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space.

Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.

While habitats are definitely the way to go long term (planets are just sooo inefficient!), Mars still has some useful features: - while the atmosphere/graviti combination is a bit annyoing, the atmosphere still enables some nice propelantless manuevers (aerobraking, aerocapture, plane changes, etc.) - the gravity should enable reusable single-stage-to-orbit rockets with current technology, unlike on Earth - day length & atmosphere reduce the insane temperature swings you get on the moon (and no 14 day nights) and also makes the dust particles less sharp & thus safer - powered atmopsheric flight is possible (already demonstrated) - a lot of elements up for grabs bound in rocks & the atmosphere (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, iron,...) - two ready to use asteroid moons already in low Mars orbit - another body that could host a space elevator built with current materials

I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount, but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of not solving pressing issues.

Earth would have to go to shit by an unimaginable amount to be as bad as Mars already is.

Mars as a backup plan isn't about the changes we are making on Earth, but about civilization-ending or extinction-level events (e.g., asteroid collisions). These types of events are inevitable.

In any case, going to Mars isn't mutually exclusive with solving issues on Earth.

> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea.

A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.

And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.

You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.

The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet.

> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc.

I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal.

We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.

Yes, we waste a ton of money on military. Historically (middle ages) it’s been even higher as a percentage of GDP. A higher peace dividend would probably be good.

But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.

> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc

All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."

You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?

Current international law prohibits nation states from establishing permanent territories or settlements, but the Artemis Accords both afford states the opportunity to exploit resources and establish "safety zones" around operational settlements that prohibit other actors from interfering with them. This means that, practically speaking, whoever establishes a permanent operational presence on any celestial body has a right to exclude other actors from those settlements, which establishes a bit of a land grab.

Given the current geopolitical climate, it's possible we could see nation states feel an urgent need to stake their claim in order to not lose out on access to those resources forevermore. This is just as much, if not more, of an argument to colonize the Moon rather than Mars, but both are subject to the same international laws.

The Artemis Accords don't establish a land grab, they just don't prevent one.

So this argument is: we need to get there first so we can mine it. But what can we mine? We have no evidence of anything on Mars that's valuable to mine for any reason other than Mars colonization or further space exploration.

If you don't already believe Mars colonization or space exploration are intrinsically valuable, there's no evidence of anything worth mining on Mars.

Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?

There are places on Earth that are probably 3-5 orders of magnitude less terrible than Mars, and we don't even have a reason to colonize those areas. Let alone a cold, barren, lifeless, radiation-covered, nearly atmosphere-less rock.

One of the cool things about humanity is that we do stuff that doesn't seem to make much sense, like set sail in a direction without any idea if there is even land out there

The reason to colonize Mars is to see if we can

For a lot of people that's a sufficient reason

And frankly it may be worthwhile because if we can colonize Mars we may be able to colonize a large asteroid full of resources that we need, or something else

Or create a chain of fueling station colonies on planets on the way to a new, habitable planet

Who knows. But sometimes we just should set sail and see what happens

People stopped being interested in the moon landings pretty quickly.

There's a lot of interest in visiting Mars because it hasn't been done. There are a lot of exploration fans. It'll stop being novel once we've made a few visits.

I suspect that if there was suddenly a huge effort to put a base on the moon like the ISS and have humans live there part time, people would get pretty excited

We stopped being interested in the moon landings because they weren't doing anything new

The appeal I imagined for a particular type of person was the promise of sovereignity.

It's very difficult to bootstrap a new state on Earth. The failure of seasteading initiatives suggests land is a requirement for credibility, but virtually all land is either claimed or considered not viable (i. e. Bir Tawil).

But other planets offer new land that you could prop a flag on and potentially get existing states to acknowledge. You can set up a captive legal system, potentially find a way to domicile your paper wealth there, and potentially blow out the airlock of anyone who dares question you.

It's not that someone wants to be king OF MARS, they want to be KING of Mars.

> They would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth

That's one of the core challenges techno-optimists like Musk constantly handwave and ignore when grandstanding about humanity becoming a "multi-planetary species". Yes, we can settle Mars. We could probably even do so with the technology we have today, certainly if we invest resources into further research and development with that specific goal in mind. But we can't do so in the political and economical landscape we have today.

We have a massive resource allocation problem here on Earth. We're overproducing goods because it's less economically damaging to destroy surplus products than to sell at cost or only produce to meet actual demand. We build for planned obsolesence and encourage wasteful competition between ten different companies owning a hundred different brands of the same product just to perpetuate an artificial demand via "FOMO". We're siphoning global wealth into the hands of a few people who waste our resources on superyachts like Bezos or actively prevent public infrastructure projects like Musk's attacks[0] on public mass transit. We're subsidizing legacy fossil fuel production and consumption instead of developing more efficient energy use and storage technologies. Meanwhile Russia suicide-bombed the European economy by invading Ukraine and now the US rapidly disassembles its decades old network of allies and trading partners. None of this is stabilizing let alone sustainable - and we need a sustainable human presence on Earth before we can build out a persistent presence elsewhere.

If Musk truly believed in making humanity a multi-planetary species to ensure the survival of our species, his main focus would be terraforming Earth, not Mars. Instead he sells visions of a future that only considers the extremely wealthy, with point-to-point rocket shuttles and hermetically sealed self-driving underground robotaxis. Just like Bezos uses his dildo rocket[1] for a girlboss publicity stunt after getting visibly upset when William Shatner had a genuine moment of realizing the fragile beauty of Earth and humanity[2] because Bezos' vision is to send all the unsightly refuse, industry and laborers into space so the rich and beautiful can have Earth to themselves[3].

But people like Musk aren't actually interested in making a multi-planetary species a reality. It's just a sexy mission statement that justifies their business ventures. He may actually believe in it but if he thinks that's what he's doing, he's not nearly as smart as people claim he is.

[0]: The Hyperloop concept was infamously pushed by Musk to sabotage the public infrastructure proposal of a highspeed rail network but this isn't the only example. A lot of his mass transit concepts boil down to "busses but smaller" or "trains/trams/metros but on wheels". When he first pitched the idea of FSD allowing Tesla owners to let their cars "work for them" as robotaxis, he also floated the idea that this could be used to pay for the cost of the car, which would allow Tesla to run a form of car sharing that offloads the actual risks and maintenance costs to the "owners" of the cars. Tesla's early vision also explicitly included the goal of making EVs affordable to the general public, which Musk no longer seems to be interested in.

[1]: Blue Origin's rockets have rightfully been criticized for being excessively phallic. While rockets necessarily have a phallic tendency, Bezos' rockets stand out for looking specifically dildo-like even by rocket standards. Given that there is no technical necessity for making it look this much like a dick and that the design hasn't been modified to make it any less dildo-like, the appearance can be considered deliberate even if we grant the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn't originally intended to be so blatantly phallic - at some point everyone in charge agreed that the rocket should continue to look the way it does now.

[2]: There's a widely circulated video clip of Shatner having a moment and being interrupted by Bezos fetching and spraying a champagne bottle. Shatner stated that he went on the trip expecting to be overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of space because he had always been fascinated by it but that the experience had fundamentally changed his outlook by showing him the contrast of the vast emptiness of space and the vulnerability of Earth containing all that ever has and and ever will matter to him - an experience he apparently shares with many others who got to see Earth from space. Of course this isn't why Bezos took him on the ride and isn't a message Bezos cares for - the vapid girlboss soundbites by the more recent ride carrying female influencers is a much better match for his intented PR, especially the insistence on referring to the space tourists as "astronauts".

[3]: Although Bezos hasn't been in the news much over his visions (probably because when Musk did so he had a more receptive audience because there was a general pop culture of space optimism which largely seems to be gone now) he has floated the ideas of launching Earth's waste into space (presumably especially radioactive waste, which might be a bad idea if there's a chance of rocket malfunction) and of moving dirty industry into space to reduce pollution on Earth - the latter included the idea of creating habitats for the laborers, which had certain undertones.

can we invent our way to eliminating billionaires? because that's the common denominator in every problem they claim to be the savior of

We already invented that. It was called the 20th century. Tried wealth caps, nationalizations, revolutions - you name it. Usually ended with gulags, breadlines, or both.

Billionaires are a symptom, not the disease. You don’t cure a fever by smashing thermometers. If we want fewer billionaires, we need systems that don’t reward monopoly power ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I would like to mention Bill Gates as a tech bro who has been doing "good works". Like fighting malaria, funding vaccine development (yes), Na reactors, and so forth. He was the nasty tech bro in the 90's and early 00's but evolved into a good tech bro.

I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.

"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth."

The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.

That is a much darker tone that I’ve ever thought of that passage in.

On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admission that his political project had failed.

> I believe Jesus also believed this

Jesus predicted his death several times, most explicitly in Matthew 20:17–19.

> Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death, and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He will rise again.”

- Matthew 20:17–19

It is known that the specifics of the story were modified.

The current text is kind of frozen by its own similarities to itself.

The use of extracted quotes is probably a mistake. You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information, very faint, very difficult to do with translated versions.

Luke 17:20-37 also seems to support the idea that Jesus was trying to tell people the kingdom was spiritual, not physical. The kingdom as a concept wasn't some novel idea, either. Jesus was claiming he was the fulfillment of the messianic prophecy in Judaism. He was reinterpreting the prophecy, though, as a spiritual rather than literal liberation.

Tangential, but you can interpret the anti-christ in christian belief to bring the alleged kingdom, as a sort of anti-fulfillment of the prophecy.

All of these declared disputes in meaning, names and events is precisely what I am referring to.

One could argue that Jesus is the book itself anthropomorphized, edited so many times by so many sinners (crossed), that whatever salvation was contained within (a prophecy, a guide, a story) is not there anymore. It only serves to spare those who changed and betrayed it (to support churches and beliefs not originally present in it).

Thus, the book died. It is said that once it briefly was brought back to life. It is a reference from the New Testament to itself. Then it died again (once a living, thriving narrative of human history constantly being augmented, now unable to be that again, eternally locked in disputes and conflicted interpretations, thus, dead).

The "Kingdom of Heaven" was not a contemporary concept in first-century CE Judaism, to my knowledge.

Not that term, but a Messiah that will establish / lead a powerful Jewish nation was

Sure, but that was believed not only literally but very literally, as referring to the political liberation of the Jews from Roman rule.

> You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information

The same event is described in the book of Mark (10:32-34) and the book of Luke (18:31-34).

There are two other predictions that appear in all three books:

Matthew 16:21-23

Mark 8:31-33

Luke 9:21-22

Matthew 17:22-23

Mark 9:30-32

Luke 9:43-45

I mean a lot of other books, not just slightly different accounts.

> I mean a lot of other books

Such as?

You could start with Genesis.

Predicting a destructive event (flood), gathering survivors to a safe place (ark), a sacrifice (bird that does not come back) followed by a success (bird comes back revealing land is close).

It is predictive of the Bible itself. It's original version lost, only surviving pieces gathered, first testament interpretation sacrificed, new testament proven to be a fertile narrative. (sounds like a preface, doesn't it?)

It's a book of the story of the book itself. Quite a thing. Is there something about the book that is not the book itself? Well, there are coincidences such as the ones I mentioned throughout the text. A kind of ghost conceptual presence, untangible but present in the similarities between the books.

There you go. Three pieces book. Two testaments and a ghost.

But is there something else beyond it? Probably not. That's what the book says, it's not there anymore. It says right away, as someone took it right in the beginning.

I’m assuming you read The Passover Plot?

A lot of related books a while ago that I’ve mostly forgotten. I believe it was called “How Jesus Became Christian” which mainly talks about the influence of Paul.

Also reviewed by Cory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...

The phrase "grift behind AI doomerism" suggests that either the book author or the reviewer (or both) don't have a clue. AI will cause real and huge problems.

I think that depends on whether your definition of “doomerism” is the same as theirs.

But the main figures behind the Ai doomerism are nutjobs either applying bayesian math in a bad way or right wing extremist believing that black people are inferior for genetics reason (I know it's an overreach that doesn't represent all the population of Ai doomers, but the most important people in that sphere are represented by what I said).

Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific past in philosophy. Although i do agree that investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic context

Why is this downvoted? It’s clearly a reference to the zizians and MIRI and Bayesian nutjobs is an absolutely correct assessment.

Keep on telling yourself that.

Stuart Russell and Geoffrey Hinton have both expressed concerns that AI could lead to human extinction and neither are nutjobs

I wasn't explicitly referring to the more "sane" people expressing doubts regarding Ai.

Hinton at least says that other issues in Ai should be dealt with, rather than just being an Ai doomer who only fears Ai takeover he actually realizes that there are other current issues as well

At this point, how many times should we have been dead for eliezer?

Like almost all the other doomers, Eliezer never claimed to know which generation of AIs would undergo a sudden increase in capability resulting in our extinction or some other doom, not with any specificity beyond saying that it would probably happen some time in the next few decades unless the AI project is stopped.

Idk, a few years ago when chatgpt came out he was saying things like "if we're still alive in 3 years (...)" where chatgpt 3.5 was still a glorified transformer. And modern llms still are. It's the constant fear mongering that stings my nerves.

And well, I'm not surprised nobody knows which generation of Ai could undergo an increase causing our extinction, it's not even sure if there could exist such a thing, let alone know which generation

He has been saying for a couple of years that it is possible any day now, but in the same breath he has always added that it is more likely 10 or 20 or 30 years from now than it is today.

It is not a contradiction be confident of the outcome while remaining very uncertain of the timing.

If an AI is created and deployed that is clearly much "better at reality" than people are (and human organizations are, e.g., the FBI), that can discover new scientific laws and invent new technologies and be very persuasive, and we survive, then he will have been proved wrong.

Ok, I think I might get a heart attack sooner or later, it's a possibility, although not very high.

If I said so, you might ask me if I saw a doctor or something similar to make me suspect that, and that's my issue with him. He's a Sci fi writer that's scared of technology without a grasp of how it works, and that's OK. He can talk about what he fears, and that's OK. It still doesn't mean we should take him seriously just because.

My pet peeve is that when trying to make laws regarding Ai - at least in Europe - some considerations were done regarding how it worked, what it was (...), how it's being talked in academic literature. I had a lawyer in a course explaining that, and while not perfect you eventually settle on something that more or less is reasonable. With yudkowsky, you have a guy that is scared of nanotech and yada yada. Sure, he might be right. But if I had to act based on something, it would look much more the eu process to make laws and less the "Ai will totally kill us from now to 30 years trust me". Perhaps now I'm more clear

And don't get me started with the rationalist stuff that just assumes pain is linear and yada yada

Eliezer has written extensively on why he thinks AI research is going to kill us all. He has also done 3-hour-long interviews on the subject which are published on Youtube.

And perhaps YouTube is the appropriate place to talk about the probabilities he pulls out of thin air such as chatgpt 5 killing us with less than 50% chance, the badmath he showed to us a few years ago on reddit, and him proposing to trust bayes rather than the scientific method

At least he could learn to use some confidence intervals to make everything appear more serious /s

I'm very much in favor of research in Ai safety, maybe done with less scare and less threats of striking countries outside of the gpu limit agreement (and less bayes, God)

That's more or less what I was referring to, but I should have been more clear

Cars have killed millions of people. Add to that the consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization, and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous luxury when measured against recent history -- but they wouldn't have existed at all.

Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support and improve the lives of billions (if not trillions on a long enough time scale).

That's one vision of how things play out. But I do think it's possible that AI ends up killing every last person, in which case I think "everything good comes with tradeoffs" is a bit too much of an understatement.

Even if AI doesn't kill every last person, I think it will almost certainly increase the wealth gap. I agree that the tradeoffs will most likely not be worth it.

Ah, so if that's what you mean by AI downsides, then you might find this useful:

https://www.wikihow.com/Leave-a-Cult

I came to this conclusion on my own, so, no.

Yesterday I had someone here tell me timnit gebru didn't contribute to hard science

She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach

Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...

She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.

It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.

It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.

Oh, and I don't necessarily agree with all what she says, I don't want to know what happens when someone which 100% agrees with her enters the room

This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.

I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?

I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/

I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.

I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models.

What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more?

Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.

So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.

> What does "working on climate change" look like?

There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).

Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."

I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.

>I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.

But neither of those things is their goal. If they happen to build tech that makes your life better, it's because it makes them money (that, generally speaking, they try not to pay taxes on)

There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:

- electrify everything, including industrial processes

- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification

- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation

- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere

It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.

I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.

I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.

Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.

Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.

Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.

So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?

Nobody wants to be told that they have to install solar panels to save climate change.

Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.

There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.

Elon has done more to help stave of climate change than every climate activist and non profit org on this planet combined. He's a megalomaniacal douche who has undone all of that goodwill, but it doesn't change the fact that he did that against all odds.

Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.

"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.

While I more or less agree with your assessment, capitalism won't solve the problem of negative externalities like CO2 emissions unless private actors are provided incentives by public actors like governments. Tesla has done a lot to reduce CO2 emissions from personal vehicles, but they wouldn't be where they are today without loans from the DOE or tax credits on electric vehicles.

Because the author's worldview requires him to compel other people to do what he wants, and if they're not doing what he wants that's a problem.

Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society?

I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal.

With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.

The media has taken an orchestrated turn to the right. The people just fall in lockstep behind because that is what they’re used to doing.

The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.

Well it is the leading elites that matters. The public, as you said, does not really mean much.

We are just human resources.

> Everyone should die equally rather than some of us being able to live longer

We can back-test the mentality of this book:

- Longevity research is bad/wasteful > In 1900 and prior, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Thanks to modern medicine, this has doubled to 70 years. This is a tremendous gift to every human alive today.

- Going to Mars is bad/extravagant/fruitless > Going to the moon, exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras. In hindsight we take for granted how significant these are; e.g. I was born on a continent that my ancestors had never set foot on until a few hundred years prior.

What we want as a species is "portfolio" of pro-human bets. Some of this can be low-risk, low-reward social spending to alleviate here-and-now problems on Earth, but some of it can be high-risk, high-reward "moon-shots" (or "Mars-shots") which, if successful, unlock completely new/better modes of existence. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are both part of a balanced strategy.

> exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras.

Was this ever true?

Within a few decades of the European discovery of the Americas they had already subjugated both the Aztec and Inca empires and were able to extract vast amounts of wealth.

I agree with you though.

Columbus struggled to get funding for his first voyage, and many expeditions/colonies in the new world ended in disaster. In hindsight yes over the centuries it was all incredibly lucrative but doubt it felt that way for the first pioneers.

Maybe I misunderstand your comment as if we've run out of ambitious things besides those that border on science fiction. In that case, I think the market is those of us who think there are more tangible ambitious things right in front of our faces. And in front of those with the resources to make a difference ie, fighting starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, disease, genocide. Are these too boring?

No, they're not boring, but they're qualitatively different types of problems.

Going to Mars and living forever are primarily technical problems.

Starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, and genocide are primarily political problems.

The resources and skills used to solved the former set aren't broadly applicable to the latter set, though it is easy to find examples of people who are good at solving one of these sets of problems who assume that they'll be good at solving the other set as well.

I don't agree entirely. They are different types of problems but I think they all can benefit from people who are good at solving technical problems.

Going to Mars isn't a problem or a solution to a current problem. It's just a thing that hasn't been done. I think starvation and disease could use some help from technical people. And considering the damage done by technical people with regard to inequality and authoritarianism, I would hope technical people could also contribute towards fixing the issues. Inevitable mortality is arguably a problem because if solved, would generate a whole other level of problems.

But yeah, political solutions would be amazing and technology is not the answer to everything. At least, that's how I see it.

We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?

[deleted]. Not funny

Yes, that was the joke.

> fighting authoritarianism, inequality, genocide. Are these too boring?

Right, have the tech guys spent their money on politics - that seems to be working out well.

> fighting starvation

We have enough food in the world: we don't choose to share it or distribute it. Politics.

> fighting disease

Politicised within the US (measles, birdflu, NHI, health insurance), and similarly politicised within my own country (US social media is only partly to blame).

Bill Gates put a lot of money towards helping fight Malaria and other health issues: I would guess no other rich dudes wish to get similarly tarred.

The longevity people are very much into preventing disease, and they're going after the most significant root cause rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual conditions. Which somehow results in them being vilified.

What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?

IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.

I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.

> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.

While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".

For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.

I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.

It is more important. We spend > $2T per year fighting climate change. We spend > $10T per year on social welfare programs.

We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.

And both of these amounts seem to not be enough based on the resulting state of the world.

Given that world GDP is only $100T, it's impossible to spend significantly more. (where significant is defined as an order of magnitude).

As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.

So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.

Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.

> seem to not be enough

This is an impossible way to get to a useful conclusion. Provide stats if you're going to make a claim like "the world is bad"

Space exploration is merely a _technological_ problem. Solving poverty is a _political_ problem, one that is resistant to just throwing money at the problem.

Both problems are technological as well as financial problems, with politics involved in choice of precedence.

Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems. Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those problems all over again, as long as we don't go extinct.

It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"

Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?

There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.

There are large swathes of earth that are too inhospitable, like deserts. They're more accessible and easier to support life in than Mars, and yet no one lives there.

The deserts even have breathable air.

I will say the compelling thing about Mars is that you wouldn't be disrupting an ecosystem to terraform it.

That said, I'm definitely on the side of making Fresno a paradise before we try mars.

I know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but really? We're going this far with it? It doesn't even exist anymore?

But there are people living in the inhospitable deserts that have useful resources like oil. Or artificial resources like legalized gambling.

Antarctica is even more inhospitable than deserts, and there are people living there for research purposes.

I'm just making the basic point that we have a wealth of much more hospitable places to live on earth, and somehow they're not viable candidates as "backup plans" for humanity.

Going a little further, living in the ocean is easier than living on Mars. As far as I can tell there are no billionaire-funded submarine civilisation programs.

They're not viable candidates as backup plans for humanity because they have the same vulnerabilities to comet strikes, global nuclear war and pandemic as the rest of the Earth.

OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.

Earth after a global nuclear war or comet strike is still more hospitable than Mars.

It's hard to imagine anything that would make Mars a better place to live than simply staying on earth.

Yes it would be. But that doesn't matter if no humans make it through the apocalypse in the first place.

The moon would do the job at a lot cheaper price.

Nope. Because of aero braking, Mars takes less delta v to get to and land on than the moon does.

Now I'm wondering why the Apollo program went to the moon if doing Mars is so much cheaper.

Going is cheaper. Coming back is more expensive. And of course the 3-6 month travel time is a challenge.

There are approaches to solving hunger and housing, however extremist capitalism & avoidance of paying taxes by oligarchs and their corporations are standing in the way of it.

Of course, why use our limited resources to improve the lives of human beings on Earth? That lacks imagination.

Let's funnel those resources to some ridiculous endeavor to put some people in an arid bleak red wasteland instead.

> [Mars colonists] would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth, presumably via Musk’s company SpaceX

Any vessel taking water away from Earth should be shot down with extreme prejudice.

There is water ice on Mars and the Moon.

Solar energy electrolysis can turn water into rocket fuel.

In an emergency, you could burn that rocket fuel to get energy and water.

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