Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

I don't know why you are being downvoted. You put forward a valid point. Perhaps the fanboys here could understand the desperation most of the world still lives in, even today!!!

A UFAI would be an extinction level event for our species. That involves studying decision theory, which will improve our ability to make the right choices.

Cheaper access to space would make lives easier for humans on Earth, give us better internet through the use LEO satellites. We would be able to mine space rocks and bring it back to Earth, reducing some material scarcity on Earth. Same for space manufacturing.

The delta from "people die" to "people no longer die" is a massive technological problem. By comparison, once we have that technology, making it available to everyone is many orders of magnitude easier, and much easier to get funding for. Do you really believe, given a cure for mortality, that we couldn't get it to the rest of the world in much less time than it took to develop in the first place?

And with that in place, thousands of other smaller problems evaporate along with it.

I don't have the exact numbers but If I'm not mistaken its said that we need less money to end hunger in the world than what we probably spent trying to get out of earth. So, it seems to me that your point is not really valid because we already have the tech/knowledge/means to end hunger and we didn't so it makes a lot of sense to me to focus some more on political reforms.

Much more likely than a hotfix for death is a world where there are very, very expensive treatments that allow wealthy people to extend their lives by some significant amount.

That's not going to be a fun world to live in, especially if the treatments requires biological raw materials that the destitute can sell.

I suppose it is easy to rage or blame all of mankind's ills on Elon Musk. Perhaps some day, his quest to challenge the status quo or leave Planet Earth and spread humanity throughout the Solar system might benefit us all.

Gods Speed Elon.....

> Do you really believe, given a cure for mortality, that we couldn't get it to the rest of the world in much less time than it took to develop in the first place?

Why doesn't everyone have potable drinking water or electricity yet?

I agree with your sentiment but I think the extremely aggressive tone of your post ruined any chance you had of swaying potential anarcho-sympathizers.

Well, we developed an easy way to make insulin, and have been failing at getting it to the rest of the world due to lack of political will or economic pressure. I seriously see no reason why wealthy people who develop immortality will want or be able to share it with the poor. That, and the idea of "once we solve the hard problem, the easier problems become easier" is a terrible logical muddle that can be used to justify literally anything.

He might have a valid point but the point is off-topic.

Here the context is technology, not politics or economic policies.

We have certainly attempted to end hunger and done a pretty good job, however, certain parties and our own reluctance to meddle prevent us from fully accomplishing our goals.. e.g. we know for a fact that very little of the aid going to NK or Palestine gets to where it should, and instead lines their leaders' pockets, but we haven't done anything meaningful about it yet.

And I'm not saying we should do something drastic, Iraq certainly taught us that - however, we certainly don't deserve the blame for any of the aforementioned examples when we are trying our best but prevented by local warmongers (e.g. Africa) and such.

If everyone refused to better yourself because someone else has it worse, nothing would ever get better.

Sure it would be easy to manufacture a billion doses of anti-death pill. But how will you guarratee high-quality life for billions of immortals and their descendents ?

It's a really hard problem, it could cause a lot of large scale problems(where usually the poor/weak will suffer).

And i wouldn't be surprised if you asked most poor/regular people if they see this as an important problem for them, the answer would be no.

It's a lot easier to go from "expensive treatment" to "inexpensive treatment" (and/or supporting funding) than to go from "no known solution" to "treatment" (however expensive).

Asking people for funding for a cure for mortality is hard, not least of which convincing them of the problem, and then convincing them that a solution is not only feasible but realistic. Asking people to help make an existing cure available to everyone is much easier, because you've already overcome the fundamental disbelief in the problem and the possibility of a solution.

How is that relevant? Are you trying to say that potable water and electricity are mistakes because we haven't gotten them to everybody yet?

Because their own leaders/people don't want them to.

Historically, expensive treatments for the rich have become universal treatments for everyone over time.

What makes you believe that life extension will be any different? Or, if you disagree that expensive treatments generally stay expensive, what are your examples?

I agree we could have a temporary awkward period in the middle, say 20 years, where it's not cheap yet. But on the scale of history that's a short period of time...I'll admit that's cold comfort to those who die in the meantime.

(See: antibiotics, insulin, appendectomies, lasik, ...)

Is he in any way preventing you from dedicating your time and effort to the things you consider important?

No, I'm saying that "the future" arriving is more a function of political will than it is of technological development. It's a mistake to imagine that we can merely build magic technologies and humanity will benefit; if we don't make the effort to organize to share what we make, "the future" will be a set of circumstances enjoyed by a narrow subset of humanity.

I'm not talking about a cure for death, but something that is the life extension analogue to plastic surgery.

Ah yes, the tried and true "You haven't solved MY pet problem, therefore you shouldn't be working on anything else" argument.

And people wonder why we rarely get anything done...

Not really. Many discussions here are about politics and economic policies, which btw are important forces for some enterpreneurs to be aware of.

Ending world hunger would cost a lot more than time spent trying to get out of Earth, because in order to end world hunger, you'd have to reform political systems that are impeding the abolishment of world hunger. For example, there is no way world hunger can be ended without massive regime change in North Korea, and any such change would be monumentally expensive, even if done peacefully.

Solving the first 80% of world hunger was cheap, solving the last 20% is expensive.

Haha, yes, technology has nothing to do with politics or economics, of course.

IMHO there are plenty of evil corporations and CEOs to abhor. That Musk's drives, priorities, and business practices appear mostly admirable seems to me to be one of the least controversial viewpoints imaginable.

My counterexample is a facelift.

> That involves studying decision theory, which will improve our ability to make the right choices.

I'm circumspect about studying decision theory from an AI perspective will be very helpful in learning how to modulate our own decision processes. Most of it is focused on finding ways to keep AIs from doing weird things that humans already don't do anyway.

So how would someone like Elon Musk contribute to a political solution to world problems? It sounds like a suboptimal field for someone with his set of talents to work on, and perhaps better suited to someone who has a less engineering and more politically oriented skillset.

It's something that's not widely needed or desired, therefore a luxury product. Market forces can be funny like that.

My counter-counter example would be dentistry, or various forms of surgery in general. Especially the latter is expensive as hell, but most of the world managed to create systems that give access to it to pretty much everyone. Even the US somewhat manages that.

A facelift isn't all that useful in the grand scheme of things, even to the wealthy, and it requires a significant quantity of very highly skilled manual labor, which keeps the price high. Neither of the above would be true of a treatment that delays or reverses aging.

Focus. Some people want to focus on the tech side. If you want to focus on politics side, go ahead and do it.

I understand the technology focus though, policy is probably the worst possible use of your time if you want to help, and it carries a great risk of turning you into an evil person.

Try "surgery" instead of "plastic surgery". Plastic surgery is a luxury product with little demand, but the life-saving kind of surgery is just as expensive (or even more) in labour and resources, but because there's a demand and a moral urgency, societies figured out how to finance it for ordinary people.

I'm not saying this is the correct amount, but UN [1] says 30 billion/year would be enough to do it. However, I believe that they are taking into account only the financial needs and not the political effort necessary to do it, mainly to prevent people from diverting that money from going into the right place.

I wasn't going to get into this subject to prevent a long debate, but I'm always amazed on how these things go. We have all the money in the world to fix it for good, but for some unknown reason we just can't do it.

There was a time that I thought that if someone as powerful and "rich" as Musk ran for president for some big and important country (like the US) they could fix everything.

But for some reason that is unknown to me this will never happen. And when something close to it (in the power and money sense), like Trump running for president, does happen we know that we are not going to get this "magic fix".

It seems that at the moment that the possible fixer gets to a position where he can fix things, he no longer wants do it.

Another stupid idea, or parallel, is Pablo Escobar. At some point in his life the guy spent 2k+/day just for money rubbers. At first he wanted to be good and do good for Colombian people, but when he got to a position where he could do it, he no longer wanted to do that.

I guess we will never fix anything and the world will be as screwed as it is today. Or worse.

[1] http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

> There was a time that I thought that if someone as powerful and "rich" as Musk ran for president for some big and important country (like the US) they could fix everything.

> But for some reason that is unknown to me this will never happen. And when something close to it (in the power and money sense), like Trump running for president, does happen we know that we are not going to get this "magic fix".

I don't understand why do people still care about presidents? They can't do crap. Even the decisions they sign off are not really made by them. You don't even get to be a candidate if you aren't already up to ears in the usual political mud of deals and backstabbing. Democracies we know, as they mature, become very efficient at filtering out people who are too dangerous to status quo as they go up.

That's why if Elon even run for the office, I'd know it's the end of the good he can do for anyone.

Replace "President" with "leader", "chieftain", "captain", "boss", "guide" or any other word such as this and we still get to the same place: nowhere.

My point was that if someone with enough pull (pull being money, power or anything else that "drives" the world) wanted to make it good, they could. But it seems that they can't. It's simply not possible.

What matters is the collective and although there are companies with the size of small countries we still can't fix even small countries like we can in a company.

I guess that at the end we are doomed to coexist with poverty, hunger, illnesses and all of the bad things that could be easily destroyed if we really wanted to, but looks like that despite the fact that we all say we want to get rid of these things we really don't want to.

How do facelifts extend life? I thought they were purely cosmetic.

Yes, I agree. There are not many like him. I only wish him great success.

> Replace "President" with "leader", "chieftain", "captain", "boss", "guide" or any other word such as this and we still get to the same place: nowhere.

Yes and no. Captains (of ships) can be very effective. So can many leaders, and CEOs of companies that didn't go public or take too much VC money. It gets easier when people are expected to listen to you and you don't have to worry about reelection.

> I guess that at the end we are doomed to coexist with poverty, hunger, illnesses and all of the bad things that could be easily destroyed if we really wanted to, but looks like that despite the fact that we all say we want to get rid of these things we really don't want to.

As humans we really suck at coordinating ourselves together. It's a large an interesting topic. That's why I think technological solutions are so alluring. As undemocratic as it is, you can get much more done if you sidestep the need to first get everyone on board. So I guess we will be doomed to coexist with relative poverty as long as there's anything - status, power, wealth - people want to have more of than their neighbours. But absolute poverty? People going hungry? This, I believe, can be solved, and with enough technology can be solved without asking everyone for opinion. If food gets dirt cheap everywhere (and I mean "dirt cheap", not "pretty cheap thanks to economies of scale but not cheap enough for those actually making that food"), even the poorest person on Earth will have access to it, because there'll be zero reason for everyone to expend energy on preventing that access.

There is no "tech side" or "politics side", it's all the same fucking side. You can't create the Internet without vast political consequence. You can't indefinitely extend life without the same. Every human action is steeped in political and social consequence.

I'm not super familiar with facelift costs over time, but a quick google gives me this link: http://www.drhodgkinson.com.au/news-resource/different-types...

Quoth the article: "Facelifts have come a long way in the last 20 years, not only in terms of technique, but also in terms of accessibility to both women and men. In the 1970s and even into the 1980s, the facelift was a luxury reserved for the rich and famous."

This leads me to believe facelifts have greatly declined in cost over the past 30 years. The number of such surgeries has greatly increased as well ("Since 2000, overall procedures have risen 115 percent, but the types of procedures patients are choosing are changing." -- http://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/2016/new-statistics-refle... )

Do you have any other examples? Because the one you gave doesn't appear to support the argument that prices will remain high for long periods of time. Especially given that facelifts are a cosmetic surgery and thus there's relatively little drive to give them to everyone.

You can't create tech without political consequence, no. But there are "sides" in a sense that tech can be driving changes in policy. So you can use tech to make political changes without getting directly involved in all the mess the politics is.

Apologies. What I mean is the interview's context is technology (what you would expect from YC and Elon Musk).

Hence, his answer to the questions would naturally be about technology rather than other important aspects of human civilization.

If I'm interpreting properly: that's the point.

I interpreted the main claim to be "expensive life extending procedures..." I think if you drop the "life extending," then bringing up facelifts makes sense. Otherwise... it doesn't really seem to fit into the debate in a meaningful way.