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

[hunter]

Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook

BY CHARLES STROSS

Science fiction (SF) influences everything in this day and age, from the design of everyday artifacts to how we—including the current crop of 50-something Silicon Valley billionaires—work. And that’s a bad thing: it leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for instruction manuals.

Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.

These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the past century’s science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with dangerous assumptions.

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

It's my personal opinion that all billionaires ought to be taxed out of existence.

[brush]

1. Good observations. Clearly some of these guys have too much money...

money they could use to help make everyday American's live better instead of indulging their teen fantasies that will never happen.

[SunSeeker]

2. These socially awkward weirdos, who never had a normal life, are totally detached from reality.

And are the worst form of narcissists. They only care about the stupid fantasies they read in their teens that got them through their miserable pubescence. Rather than try to make the world a better place, they waste their billions trying to live out their inane juvenile fantasies.

[Warpy]

3. I certainly agree with your last sentence

Plutocracy and democracy are utterly incompatible with each other, one of them has got to go.

Democracy needs to start protecting itself from right wing coups which invariably originate with plutocrats.

[mopinko]

4. i've thought about this a lot lately.

when i look around at the number of ppl who live in an alternate universe these days, i think about sci-fi.
we’ve imagined so many societies that dont work like this 1, for better or worse. and once enough ppl imagine something, it can happen. or ppl can believe it is happening.

i blame phillip k dick for all this mess. lol

[Igel]

5. They're just disconnected enough to think they've come up with a road to Utopia.

Lots have, and not all have been rich.

Gillette of razor fame had his own strange Utopian quasi-socialist/quasi-fascist view

: Now that's only the first half of Gillette's story. Howard Mansfield tells the rest, and it gets very interesting. The year before he cooked up the safety razor, Gillette published a book on another idea entirely. It was terrifying and idealistic.

His Utopian socialistic world would be based on universal cooperation. All production would be done efficiently by one great company with all people as shareholders. "Selfishness would be unknown, and war would be a barbarism of the past," he wrote.

He imagined all 60 million Americans living in one great Metropolis. It'd be powered by the Niagara River. It'd have a hundred million rooms and be served by vast common dining halls.

Before WW-I he tried to set up his World Corporation -- this time in the Arizona Territory. He asked Teddy Roosevelt to be its president. When that failed, he turned to social reformer and writer Upton Sinclair. Sinclair arranged a disastrous meeting between Gillette and Henry Ford. The two millionaires talked past each other. Finally, they simply shouted in anger.

Sinclair also helped Gillette with his most cogent statement -- a book called The People's Corporation. Even that was naive at best. Stuart Chase said that his sincerity was deep and compelling. "... but his solution is quite untouched by the realities which guard the road to Utopia."

Hitler had his version, Lenin-Stalin had their versions, as did Mao and Chavez and Peron and the Roosevelts had theirs and many of my green students have theirs. And they all show the same habits: You know what's best, wonder why people work against their own interests instead of eagerly doing as told; you try educating them to make them "right thinking" and they just don't listen up, so finally you have to become more and more coercive in the name of True Liberty and the Common Good and reaching that "more perfect union" but they just don't understand it's all for *their* own good, not the coercer's ego or messiah complex or theology.

All utopian thought is probably derivative of Xian millennial thought. Greeks, Romans, Buddhists, Confucianists, Taoists had no utopia in the future or to be created--or they placed it in the afterlife; early Xianity had the Kingdom coming to Earth (even if the Catholics fairly quickly abstracted that away, it's a recurring heresy, in their view--with the Catholics being amillennialist, utopian Xians being post-millennialist, and most evangelicals being pre-millennialist).

Fortunately, most of the time--like with Gillette--the idjits don't have enough oomph to do much more than mess around on the fringes and fritter away their own fortune (thus solving the "tax them out of existence" issue--the "fool and his money" solution) or they just fritter away their time with dreams of grandeur. It's when they get power that bad things happen, sometimes truly horrendous this, and that's why I dislike intensely centralized power; it's easier for an idjit or The Party to hop in the locomotive and grab the controls if they're all in one place or a small number of places. Spread the controls out over 3 levels and 3 branches in 50 states and make it so the populace is educated and free thinking (not 'right thinking') and you have a much harder time gaining power. Then again, it's like having 10,000 cats that aren't all amicable with each other on a basketball court and you're trying to get them to learn the " target="_blank">Meow Mix song from the '70s.