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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

(www.ycombinator.com)
1106 points sama | 3 comments | 15 Sep 16 18:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.611s | 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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idlewords ◴[15 Sep 16 18:55 UTC] No.12508765[source]▶
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.

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1. JoshTriplett ◴[15 Sep 16 19:01 UTC] No.12508833[source]▶
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.

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2. idlewords ◴[15 Sep 16 19:11 UTC] No.12508913[source]▶
I'm not talking about a cure for death, but something that is the life extension analogue to plastic surgery.
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3. TeMPOraL ◴[15 Sep 16 19:41 UTC] No.12509167[source]▶
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.