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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

(www.ycombinator.com)
1106 points sama | 1 comments | 15 Sep 16 18:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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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.

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tucaz ◴[15 Sep 16 18:54 UTC] No.12508757[source]▶
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.
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1. drakonandor ◴[15 Sep 16 19:00 UTC] No.12508823[source]▶
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.