Sci-Fi of the Day
Out of context: Reply #414
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Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real
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
Science fiction (SF) influences everything in this day and age, from the design of everyday artifacts to how we—including the current crop of 50-something Silicon Valley billionaires—work. And that’s a bad thing: it leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for instruction manuals.
Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats. Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.
These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the past century’s science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with dangerous assumptions.
- Man Child Syndromeutopian
- Our future is being built by idiotsPhanLo
- We're idiots for letting others build our futureOBBTKN
- My dad never owned an emerald mine, so I'm stuck drawing pictures.
https://i.imgur.com/…PhanLo - Only one competitor wins and gets the spoils of victory. The wealthy 1% won!utopian
- until one of them makes an army of Kelly Lebrocks_niko
- @ Phan... My father was a mechanic, I draw flying machinesOBBTKN
- ^nice. To be fair, becoming an artist was an anomaly in my family, really wished I'd became a joiner like my dad.PhanLo
- We all do it. They just have bigger budgets.imbecile