Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real
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
All I want is for one of these super rich fucks to start obsessing about preserving Earth and building massive carbon capture plants that also generate clean drinking water from the air. Dump billions into pulse fusion reactors and build them into every carbon capture plant. Create a stable biodome...right here, on Earth. And use the entire planet for the experiment. Can someone please get on that?
You don't get super rich by thinking of others.
Good news: Sci-fi is about to become real
Bad news: it's a Jerry Pournelle novel
Elon Musk reading the tweet about the Torment Nexus and thinking "Okay but what if I did, just as a joke, wouldn't that be quirky haha?"
Tech billionaires: Fuck you, I'm rich! I do whatever I want. Don't like it? Be richer.
Tech billionaires: I'm going to live forever so I have to figure out how to get all the money in the world for myself by taking it away from everyone else. Me, me, me, I, myself, me, I, me, myself, me and not you
A lot of the sci-fi of the era was based off of the assumption that corporate power would rise to rival that of governments. That runaway capitalism would birth "high-tech low-life" as the state of society at large. Yes, the stars are aligning between the interests of the powerful in the present, and the future postulated in those stories; those stories were made on the basis of human nature and self-reflections on the contemporary. They are being proven right because they assumed plausible futures with likely outcomes. Want a solar punk world? We have to buck the trend and disrupt the trajectory we're on now. Will we have pivotal moment like that of Americana circa 1929, or slide further in a hellscape? I know what future I want but I don't know if we're going to get it.
Read Asimov's Robots series. !Stop at Asimov's Robots series! I want Daneel damn it! We could use a Demerzel but not the rest of Foundation or the Galactic authoritarian nonsense.
Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real
I used to work for Paul Allen, managed his social media messaging systems and was an internal consultant (integrating systems when Seahawks were purchased, etc) in the late 1990's...
Paul Allen was inspired by science fiction of Carl Sagan's "Contact", and build the Allen SETI array. It isn't all bad.
