Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

Question/Answer I found interesting:

Sama> How should someone figure out how they should be useful?

Elon> Whatever this thing is you are trying to create.. What would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect?

What about all the people working in marketing, software patent lawyers, drug dealers? You want them to quit their jobs?

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Let me make my point in a less obtuse way. Most people make decisions about their careers based on opportunity and maximising profit. No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place. This would all be fine as long as the capitalist market rewarded choices that make the world a better place. Obviously it does not and it's not the fault of a footballer that we as a civilisation choose to channel our available resources their way and not towards frivolous play like space exploration.

If anyone ever figures out a way to make the free market choose the greater good they will win all the Nobel prizes forever (we won't need Nobel prizes after that).

'Tis an interesting point.

> Drug dealers

Perhaps drug dealers (and their suppliers) can implement testing, QA and proper labeling.

I'm not totally sure about software patent lawyers. But, deep down, my gut says that if software patent law wasn't to crappy, perhaps the occupation would be perceived in a better light. Maybe they could push for reform from the inside?

On the whole, I think every industry can do some introspection on how they can affect more people for the betterment of society. It would do us all some good.

Let me make my point in a less obtuse way. Most people make decisions about their careers based on opportunity and maximising profit. No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place. This would all be fine as long as the capitalist market rewarded choices that make the world a better place. Obviously it does not and it's not the fault of a footballer that we as a civilisation choose to channel our available resources their way and not towards frivolous play like space exploration.

If anyone ever figures out a way to make the free market choose the greater good they will win all the Nobel prizes forever (we won't need Nobel prizes after that).

Free markets are the problem, not the solution. You're not going to get much strategic planetary intelligence out of a system designed to maximise short-term profit. The absolute best you can hope for is the occasional individual like Musk who takes a longer view.

Politics - which includes economics - is a much bigger challenge than AI.

We've completely transformed our understanding of science and technology, but our political and economic thinking would be recognisable to a Roman senator and a medieval banker.

Politics and economics are still waiting for a Copernican revolution. Our survival prospects as a species are limited until that revolution happens.

Hmm that doesn't seem to make sense. Free markets (which include the vast majority of countries on the planet) enable people to create wealth. Maybe some sort of mix of a planet-wide initiative and the normal free markets we have would make sense. Calling free markets "the problem" doesn't really do anything for anybody.

Free markets are an optimal pachinko machine for distributing capital, that needs no oversight or central direction.

It doesn't generate its own pachinko balls, that's utterly orthogonal. Free market capitalism is what you DO with a population that has disposable income. You can't feed the bottom of it into the top, it doesn't even work that way.

It's not even optimal for reaching the highest developments of ideas and inventions, because local maximums will starve out the newer ideas that need to grow and become competitive. It does nothing about network effects and tends towards monopoly.

But it's a fantastic distribution mechanism for the wealth of existing populations: no overseer required! Within some known limitations it works very nicely.

NO wealth is ever created.