←back to thread

Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

(www.ycombinator.com)
1106 points sama | 4 comments | 15 Sep 16 18:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.83s | source
Show context
astazangasta[dead post] ◴[15 Sep 16 18:40 UTC] No.12508638[source]▶
Of course Elon Musk thinks that AI and brain interfaces are the most important things to work on, that's all that is holding back his raging space boner. Meanwhile, a large part of the world is still using Iron Age technology to get by with the bulk of their lives.

The most important work of "How to Build the Future" is political work - reforming our property relations, for example, so that we aren't organizing our economic lives around feudal holdovers like land titles. Who gives a shit if Elon Musk can connect his brain to the Internet and live forever as a sentient AI, while the rest of humanity drinks ditch water and lives small, dull lives?

JoshTriplett ◴[15 Sep 16 18:51 UTC] No.12508735[source]▶
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.

replies(5): >>12508757 #>>12508765 #>>12508784 #>>12508816 #>>12508830 #
1. astazangasta ◴[15 Sep 16 18:57 UTC] No.12508784[source]▶
> 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?

replies(2): >>12508841 #>>12508851 #
2. chc ◴[15 Sep 16 19:02 UTC] No.12508841[source]▶
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?
replies(1): >>12508904 #
3. drakonandor ◴[15 Sep 16 19:04 UTC] No.12508851[source]▶
Because their own leaders/people don't want them to.
4. astazangasta ◴[15 Sep 16 19:10 UTC] No.12508904[source]▶
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.