Comment by Terr_
1 day ago
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
Wait is that why they didn't put legs on anyone?
Wow, now you say it, that finally makes sense. Especially given it looked stupid and all the other VR chat solutions could already do legs.
I always assumed they were copying the Wii Miis
It also gave us Mechanical Turk and microdrones!
Some of it might come from True Names by Vernor Vinge too, where the cheapest place to buy bulk compute is giant satellites orbiting on geosync orbit. This became possible because they were developed early on for communications, then obsoleted by Starlink-like LEO constellations, so they have a ton of spare undesirable high-latency capacity to sell. In this fictional world, ground-based fiber optic networks never happened, at least not at the kind of scale they did in the real world.
But because that's fiction, Vinge can just handwave away all the hard engineering problems for sci-fi flavor.
This idea came from musk wanting to fold his X and xAI investments in with his (likely successful) spaceX IPO.
Yup, likewise Starlink - while space internet is an interesting and viable concept (whether it'll earn itself back is another question, I'm not convinced), the real motivation behind it was to create demand for many SpaceX launches. There have been 352 Starlink launches [0] so far, out of 596 total [1]. If it wasn't for Starlink, SpaceX would only have been operating at 1/3 to 1/2 of what it does today, cutting into their "economics of scale". And they'll need demand to make Starship viable, the possible moon missions aren't enough to fund or justify the whole project. Hence also the ideas of colonising Mars, which - if someone is willing to pay for it - would create a large and steady demand for launches / flights.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
Yeah, if he gets more SpaceX shares in exchange for the xAI garbage shares then he wins, because the SpaceX shares will sell well.
He can also hide his garbage shares behind a too big to fail, essential for national security, business.
Also he can launder government funding for his AI company now
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” ― William Gibson, Count Zero
I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.
> I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort.
The ISS is the single most expensive thing built by humankind ($100b+). What makes you think that building a "space casino" or "space resort" is commercially viable?
I wouldn’t credit science fiction for much of this.
It appears to have come out of a crack pipe.
Can you smoke ketamine?
> Can you smoke ketamine?
Apparently [1]. But "when ketamine is heated, its chemical structure degrades, reducing its potency."
[1] https://innervoyagerecovery.com/can-you-smoke-ketamine/
(Going to go ahead and VPN to my home connection from this airport Wi-fi.)
In space, ketamine smokes you.
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.
That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.
[checks today's bitcoin price]
Oh.
Is it below the level where mining and blockchain updates become uneconomic yet?
I'd say they're basically floating on the success of previous sci-fi ideas that they made a reality; reusable rockets at a fraction of the price of NASA or ESA launches for example, or self-driving electric cars (the electric part was a success, the self-driving, not so much).
Your dad can’t tell the difference.
If they get 3/10 things right, and 60 Minutes highlights those in the next interview, they’re set!
> above any earthly government
Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.
https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba...
https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series...
https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha...
> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
If Musk was in the Culture universe, he'd be Veppers
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1008121639337320454
> [I recommend] all of them, especially Surface Detail
I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe technology. I think basically no one cares about space data centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the technosphere.
The harsh reality of economics and demand is hitting them. For years, Musk's ideas were funded by an overvalued Tesla stock and stupendous amounts of investor money, and currently it's being double down on with the amount of money being poured into AI and its necessary hardware.
But the demand / economic viability just isn't there. VR is cool but it's not mainstream. "Metaverse" exists and some companies are making good money off of it (Roblox, Fortnite, MMOs, etc), but nobody wanted Facebook's multi-billion-dollar-invested version of it because they just don't get it. I really hope all this nonsense collapses sooner rather than later and we go back to realistic and viable spending.
Large investments don't translate to results.
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well, don't forget, freeside's initial moneymaker was a datahaven for less-reputable banks!
A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.
Write some books with good ideas then so future human-robots will be inspired to make your dreams into reality.
Unfortunately, these guys are only excited about building the Torment Nexus.
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Stole Grok from Heinlein. At least it’s a good heuristic for people-I-don’t-have-to-take-seriously.
More likely, stole grok from nerds who learned grok from Heinlein.
Heinlein's sci fi didn't age well, because it was written for juveniles and then later his social ideas overtook his sci fi ones.
He had the same blind spots that Ayn Rand did, but perhaps better informed of the fascist-adjacent US culture.
One of the good sci fi/social ideas he had was about what it meant to "grok" something. groklaw.net of happy memory was exactly what that verb was supposed to mean, dive into something until you understand it at a molecular level.
The fact that Musk et al have stolen terms like "grok" and even "cyberspace" as if they own them is something I loathe.