Charlie Stross: Scientific American op-ed: Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook (by me): www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech...

Scientific American op-ed: Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook (by me): www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech...

Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Realwww.scientificamerican.com Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook

This is the exact message I derived from Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk.

I haven't read that bio because life's too short, but FWIW that op-ed is a cut-down version of this talk I gave last month and I was bending over backwards not to hurl monkey-shit abuse at Those Guys because I was trying to sugar-coat it for the clueless: www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...

We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus - Charlie's Diarywww.antipope.org

Alternate Universe where they all read Weird Tales instead of Analog

Talk about dude bros missing the point on what they read Also reminds me of “this is what bladerunner would drive “

Dude bros being the billionaires tbc

Great piece! We’d be in a much better place if the scifi they read was Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia Butler. (Monika Bielskyte does an incredible counter argument to TESCREAL: videos.theconference.se/monika-biels...)

Monika Bielskyte - Protopia vs TESCREAL Visions of Tech...videos.theconference.se In what kind of future would you like to live? Blade Runner or Black Panther?For too long, our futures have been determined by immature science fiction...

Fun fact: if I remember correctly, Bill Gates was heavily inspired by Robert Heinlein's Revolt In 2100.

He outright says he and Paul Allen bonded over Heinlein www.gatesnotes.com/Stranger-in-...

You know, I came here to say, I hope they're not channeling Robert Heinlein!

I wish they'd read _all_ of Heinlein twice.

Should've read Spider Robinson instead

Problem with that is that Spider Robinson also saw Heinlein as a role model for quite some time.

Having a hero who ends up having been a lousy person is a common human condition.

Yeah. It happens way too often to too many of us. I fear for anyone who considers me a role model.

I don't think Zuck read about rebooting Second Life in Snow Crash.

By the time I finally read Snow Crash, I realized that Stephenson’s Metaverse was actually more Second Life than World Wide Web. Makes sense because the Metaverse and Second Life are both operate metaphorically.

Have you read Gernsback's short-lived journal, Technocracy Review? (I have a copy of vol. 1, no.1 on my desk but am flu-bound so can't fetch it ...). Also www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-singul...

The Singularity is Nigh! [Republished from The Economist]www.programmablemutter.com The cult-like battles between e/acc and doomers

I've been discussing your article on a Discord server and wanted to clarify something. Some members think it suggests no one shouldn't use Science Fiction for inspiration, but especially billionaires. I didn't interpret it that way. What's your take?"

It's a massively truncated version of this piece: www.antipope.org/charlie/blog... Also, "science fiction" is not one single thing—it's a huge and diverse field. The billionaires are cherry-picking the bits they like. You don't have to like the same bits.

We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus - Charlie's Diarywww.antipope.org

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

These goddamn Torment Nexus motherfuckers

Agree. No rational person would think colonies on the Moon or Mars could be self-sustaining.

*No off-world colony within the foreseeable future can be self-sustaining; civilization has huge externalities—who's going to staff the nurseries and nursing homes? Who's going to educate the next life support technicians? I estimate 500M workers needed to keep 21st C. civ going here on Earth.

My point is, "self-sustaining" is an unattainable goal and Musk's "city of 2M people on Mars" falls ludicrously short of what it would really take. A viable trading colony world (trading what?) might be feasible with far fewer people and some key imports. Not every world needs an ASML or TMSC!

Would trading not also be very hard due to the orbital mechanics, with ships only reliably launchable every 2 years.

Two million people would be more than enough to serve a city of five million or more robot overlords.

Or one dimwitted billionaire, perhaps?

It's a very strange mindset that thinks it's a better idea to try to make Mars habitable rather than put effort into making sure Earth remains so...

Why are you assuming that off-world colonies would value human life as much as we do in 21st century earth? We didn't have nursing homes and nurseries when we did things like colonizing the American west. We just let the infirm die. Two hundred years later, we got Los Angeles.

I think a number of the off-world utopians have bought into the idea that everything is an energy problem and if you have enough cheap energy then you can do what you like.

Everything is a psychological problem. If Musk or anybody else manages to set up a colony on Mars or elsewhere, this will become readily apparent.

What happens when your iPhone breaks on a generation ship ?

THANK YOU read the talk and loved it; glad it's getting out there on another platform

Stick another head on Trump's shoulders and he could be Zaphod Beeblebrox. Thinks he's cool. Doesn't follow any rules. On the run from the authorities. Really screwed up the job once elected. We're a hyperspace bypass away from being in a Douglas Adams novel.

If they were trying to make your Laundry Files real, I’d really start worrying. Then again Musk is a Hail Cthulhu away from opening a portal to the Elder Dimension.

We need AI to hurry up and overtake humanity because I’m tired of existing.

I wonder what a hypothetical SV billionaire who was a fan of Phil Dick would produce?

www.latestly.com/socially/soc...

Elon Musk Posts NFSW Tweet on Penis and Ball Sac, Puzzling Sexual Innuendo Meme Leaves Netizens Conf...www.latestly.com Musk is in the news again, but this time because he shared a confusing sexual innuendo meme. Musk recently shared a meme with a picture of French author Honore de Balzac on Twitter. 👍 Elon Musk Po...

something like this, I'd imagine

Is this reworked from something else you wrote recently? I know the publication date says today but had an extremely strong feeling I've read this argument from you somehwere else in the last few weeks and I'd like to know if I'm going mad or not.

scratch that, I found my answer on your blog. Not crazy, phew!

Imagine the poor sods in a decade or so trying to make yours come true. (Not to mention people who have to live on that planet.)

He didn’t even grow up with John blade runner what a poser

Excellent piece, bonus points for summarizing with the Torment Nexus quote.

I was musing on this only today: that Musk and co are not obvious geniuses, but instead simply share the same hobbies, interests and obsessions as any other geek. To paraphrase Fitzgerald, they’re the same as us, they just have more money.

But the Torment Nexus will get my wife to take me back!

It was successful for apple says the venture capitalist it will work for you or we pulled the plug.

And of course, we already have oligarchs seeking out those cliffs we're jointly worried about.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh5Q...

If they could just stick with Star Trek next generation and newer Sci fi, we would be doing pretty well