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.
We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.
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.
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"
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.
The deserts even have breathable air.
That said, I'm definitely on the side of making Fresno a paradise before we try mars.
Antarctica is even more inhospitable than deserts, and there are people living there for research purposes.
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.
OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.
Let's funnel those resources to some ridiculous endeavor to put some people in an arid bleak red wasteland instead.
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.
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."...
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.
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'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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 public is and has always been played like a fiddle.
We are just human resources.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These developments sure altered my humanity. By making it possible.
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).
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.
So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
Today the rich pray for the singularity and freeze their bodies. And want to colonize Mars I guess.
Vanitas.
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.
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.
> 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.
But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I suppose I should have said "a few humans [permanently settled] on mars, [able to return whenever they like]" in 100 years.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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
"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.
None of the bullshit coming out of Musk, for example, is real, it’s not even plausible, it’s just lies for dumb people.
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.
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.
I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.
The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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
Yes, it should be accessible and digestible, but should not be pushed.
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.
This does not seem to have stopped anyone bullshitting to the media about AI.
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:
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.
Huh? You think a bartender in the Bronx wouldn't walk while living there?
> 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.
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..
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.
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).
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!
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;
* 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 )
Perhaps better is to kindly refer everyone to a physics 101 text book.
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."
Any vessel taking water away from Earth should be shot down with extreme prejudice.
I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.
c0rtex•10h ago
cousin_it•10h ago
_vertigo•10h ago
amarcheschi•10h ago
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
foobiekr•3h ago
hollerith•3h ago
derektank•9m ago
lazzlazzlazz•10h ago
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).
mitthrowaway2•9h ago
gusmally•9h ago
amarcheschi•10h ago
She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach
elefanten•9h ago
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.
amarcheschi•9h ago