Good story im The Atlantic about the tech billionaires who built our world having taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction.
I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.
As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get—maybe couldn’t get—was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires.
This tale goes well with my observation that these men are still snickering about the same jokes 13-year-old-boys would.
Ja, erwachsen, im Sinne von reflektiert, differenziert, empathisch, im Wissen um die eigene Beschränktheit und Vergänglichkeit und verstehend, dass wir uns gegenseitig brauchen, ist keiner von denen..
These ideas were common among technical interested boys, at least. Only, these ruthless entrepreneurs picked up solutions to existing problems (Paypal, for example, was the solution to sending paper checks accross the U.S.) and made their billions. That, over their ruthlessness they did not abandon their boyhood ideas is worth further elaboration.
Here in Germany, I also believed as a young boy that nuclear energy would be the solution to all our energy needs. But today, where is this AI-god that tells us how to once-and-for-all get rid of the inevitable nuclear waste?