Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real
I used to work for Paul Allen, managed his social media messaging systems and was an internal consultant (integrating systems when Seahawks were purchased, etc) in the late 1990’s…
Paul Allen was inspired by science fiction of Carl Sagan’s “Contact”, and build the Allen SETI array. It isn’t all bad.
I have very little belief that any of the major tech billionaires were Sci-fi “readers”. All were brought up rich and maintained their wealth by failing upwards in an industry that basically threw money at aristocratic families and their offspring. All the sci-fi from prolific figures specifically target those groups as the reason for societies hardships. Herbert, Asimov, Heinlein, etc. all have major works which denounce the inherent vileness of those classes that rule from privileged positions without merit. If they did read any of those most influential books of the genre they definitely took the wrong messages from them. More likely than not, they probably only paid attention to the hypothetical technology in those universes to copy to theur model for “their” ideas, rather than paying any attention to the moral messages usually described about the use of the technology… Which usually ends up fucking the people who use it. Musk driving for human computer integration chips with reckless abandon tells me he has not read any sci-fi which would help him understand the possible hiccups he’s going to run into. I also doubt his endeavour is anything more than a stunt which conflates the use cases of the technology which is probably just revamped HCI technology that already exists to transmit motor cortex impulses to areas of the body that have been damaged due to injury. (I work in neuromodulation research) Even if they read the best scifi now, they would probably take away the wrong messages from them, the lens that you bring to a reading changes how you view it. As a billionaire, they just lack the ability to ground themselves enough to understand the social cautionary messages.
Tech billionaires: I’m going to live forever so I have to figure out how to get all the money in the world for myself by taking it away from everyone else. Me, me, me, I, myself, me, I, me, myself, me and not you
A lot of the sci-fi of the era was based off of the assumption that corporate power would rise to rival that of governments. That runaway capitalism would birth “high-tech low-life” as the state of society at large. Yes, the stars are aligning between the interests of the powerful in the present, and the future postulated in those stories; those stories were made on the basis of human nature and self-reflections on the contemporary. They are being proven right because they assumed plausible futures with likely outcomes. Want a solar punk world? We have to buck the trend and disrupt the trajectory we’re on now. Will we have pivotal moment like that of Americana circa 1929, or slide further in a hellscape? I know what future I want but I don’t know if we’re going to get it.
All I want is for one of these super rich fucks to start obsessing about preserving Earth and building massive carbon capture plants that also generate clean drinking water from the air. Dump billions into pulse fusion reactors and build them into every carbon capture plant. Create a stable biodome...right here, on Earth. And use the entire planet for the experiment. Can someone please get on that?
Read Asimov’s Robots series. !Stop at Asimov’s Robots series! I want Daneel damn it! We could use a Demerzel but not the rest of Foundation or the Galactic authoritarian nonsense.
