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Comment by ed_elliott_asc

7 months ago

Imagine if any one of these tech companies decided the future was in solving problems for humanity rather than how to serve adverts in a future where content was autogenerated.

The money and resources they have available is astronomical.

Instead they spend it on future proofing their profits.

What a sad world we have built.

16 comments

ed_elliott_asc

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midnightclubbed  7 months ago

For a few years it seemed like Tesla and SpaceX were those companies - reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, boosting clean transportation and solar, pushing forward space exploration.

But the promises turned into stock boosting lies; the environmental good into vote buying for climate change deniers, and space exploration into low earth cell-towers.

  • theshackleford  7 months ago

    > For a few years it seemed like Tesla

    Those years were a long time ago for me. I’ve been arguing musk is a snake oil salesman since at least 2014. I lost friends over it at the time, people who were very heavily invested into musk, both financially and for some reason, emotionally.

    • anon191928  7 months ago

      how is he snake oil s. since that time, he with his several teams, actually made electric cars a market wide reality, cheap orbit rockets and with starlink internet almost everywhere possible on earth? snake oil would be over without actually changing the history.

      6 replies →

makeitdouble  7 months ago

At the same time, asking them to solve social problems with money and technology and dubious morality doesn't look like the way forward either.

Very aptly, the Manhattan Project or Space Race weren't aimed at the improvement of mankind per se. Motivation was a lot more specific and down to earth.

  • BrenBarn  7 months ago

    > At the same time, asking them to solve social problems with money and technology and dubious morality doesn't look like the way forward either.

    Well, no, the way forward is to just take away all that money and just spread it around.

jodrellblank  7 months ago

"In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people.

We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

"Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990. In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm