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: 0.205s | 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]▶

>>12508638 #

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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1. petra ◴[15 Sep 16 19:01 UTC] No.12508830[source]▶

>>12508735 #

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.

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