"Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Making Sci-Fi Real"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

by tontonius • 3 years ago

46 90 3 years ago

scientificamerican.com

ganzuul2• 3 years ago

Making plans for the future is incredibly hard. People are not naturally cooperative so actually affecting positive change is always met with illogical resistance. This creates an environment which punishes any attempt to rationally discuss plans which are actually going ahead. The Saudi line city makes the dynamic obvious to anyone, without taking a stand on the merits of the project.

It's the strawman and steelman argument on a societal scale.

We also have a lot of skeletons in the closet. In some cases the tech is just exposing an underlying problem and not introducing anything new. Good tech also enables society do something about its foundation of sand.

nmca• 3 years ago

people are not naturally cooperative

Not perfectly cooperative, sure, but shockingly cooperative. Just recently I was sat in a commercial airline for 9 hours and struck by how much harder it would be to transport several hundred consciousness chimpanzees.

kelseyfrog2• 3 years ago

People are naturally cooperative. Just observe any disaster to see it. People come out of the woodworks to help each other.

They myth that when things break down, people revert to some ultra-survivalist hyper-individual bloodline protecting supersoldier has to die.

What happens is that society reverts to pre modern relationship templates where who you know and interpersonal skills reign supreme. Our modern society enables this myth and makes us more like it in our everyday lives than our natural cooperative base state.

ganzuul2• 3 years ago

I understand the concern. I meant that in the context of making plans people tend to diverge.

You are right in that in solving present problems people do converge.

It would be nice if people could follow plans to avoid having problems in the first place.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc2• 3 years ago

We need stories to be able to imagine and build the future.

I empathise with the author but he doesn’t really offer an alternative

smokel• 3 years ago

After the rain comes sun. After the sun comes rain again.

(Underwater Love, Smoke City, 1995)

BLKNSLVR• 3 years ago

With a particularly memorable film clip which was the first time I remember seeing the equivalent of what the Wachowski's later called Bullet Time.

And the film clip doesn't seem to be on YT...

Edit: can't find the full music video, but there's a clip just showing the "bullet time" bits:

https://youtu.be/ZWXafUHFQu4?si=KL7-ICpWKvUyXczb

krapp4• 3 years ago

The problem isn't imagining and building the future, it's the particular political narrative out of which the tech class is trying to build the future.

The problem is the future is being created by sociopathic, crony capitalist neo-reactionary cultists who want to rule over a broken world as its brutal philosopher kings, and consign everyone else into the mouth of Moloch. These are the people for whom the meme "Please don't create the Torment Nexus" was made. These people are the reason Ted Kaczynski is so popular amongst the tech underclass.

I don't know what the alternative is, but we should be concerned.

tnecniv• 3 years ago

…is Ted Kaczynski popular among tech workers? Even the hardcore socialists I know aren’t really fans beyond acknowledging he had a good point or two.

jcgrillo• 3 years ago

Unions and taxes are the alternative. Nobody should be a billionaire. If there wasn't such a concentration of wealth among a few, detached sociopaths we wouldn't have to worry about their pseudo-religious delusions.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc2• 3 years ago

Well sure but why blame it on sci-fi? Sounds to me like those people would create the torment nexus with or without sci-fi. It’s not like it’s super hard to come up with the concept of e.g. colonising Mars.

dist-epoch• 3 years ago

Communism is the alternative.

Always has been.

gjsman-10002• 3 years ago

Capitalism is bad; Communism… how do we describe excruciatingly bad?

We’ve tried it, it’s never worked, and because it relies on a fundamental denial of basic human freedoms, it will literally never work. The only question is how much misery it causes in the latest attempt.

marginalia_nu7• 3 years ago

The notion that we'd be able to design a society from the ground up in the manner dictated by Communism is fundamentally science fiction as well. This isn't unique to Communism, overall I think the degree a society can be controlled by anyone in power is significantly overstated. It's quite a parallel to the project of terraforming Mars. Nobody is doubting we might affect a change with policy or violence, but what's missing a degree of control in the magnitude and direction of that change.

swayvil7• 3 years ago

Nature is capitalistic. Big fish eat little fish.

A communist system would have to be a layer over a capitalist one. It would be maintained by a foundation of billionaire dictators.

But, assuming a system controlled by billionaire dictators, we probably don't need any "ism". Just dictate. Ideally to everybody's benefit.

swayvil7• 3 years ago

We could reserve the scifi for an esoteric inner circle of enlightened thinkers. People better able to handle the fire of scifi without munging things up.

The exoteric hoi polloi get pablum and propaganda. (They can't appreciate good scifi anyway). Give them moral fables wrapped in cowboys with laser-guns.

kelseyfrog2• 3 years ago

I'd watch this movie. Thank you

JieJie• 3 years ago

Maybe OP can burn any science fiction books they find in billionaires houses?

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

"Science fiction, therefore, does not develop in accordance with the scientific method."

The author provides an alternative, but perhaps readers might miss it.

Science fiction is fiction not science.

The alternative to science fiction is the scientific method and the elucidation of scientific fact.

But these individuals are outcasts, dropouts, social failures.

Not interested in education generally.

Not interested in conventional occupations.

They believe they know enough yet they barely know anything.

Understanding computers is a far cry from understanding life.

It's arguable, due to the time committment required, the more one understands computers the less one probably understands "the real world".

Are these individuals interested in scientific fact, or are they more interested in fantasy and belief.

Like Elisabeth Holmes.

Charles Stross, the author of this op-ed, makes his living writing science fiction and fantasy.

"Stick to what you know." Unlike "tech billionaires", Stross knows what he is talking about.

bhaak• 3 years ago

It's curious that so many tech billionaires are the type that don't recognize that Starship Troopers is supposed to be a satirical depiction of a dystopia and that's why they poorly choose which SF to make real.

percentcer• 3 years ago

Actual title is "Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real"

hef198982• 3 years ago

Which makes more sense. But just why do I have certain visuals and a certain person in mind reading it?

dang• 3 years ago

The submitter needed to shorten the title to fit HN's 80 char limit.

baz00• 3 years ago

I don't mind if they make sci-fi real, but can they please fuck off with the dystopian ultra-capitalist cyberpunk sci-fi.

defrost• 3 years ago

Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the SciFi They Grew Up on Real

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38712101

rcbdev• 3 years ago

I once came across the take that the shift in popular sci-fi from utopian to dystopian lead to a generation of wealth that has been shaped by these stories.

The logic is that if you have lots of popular fiction describing the future a certain way, these ideas will influence the future to become that way to an extent.

marginalia_nu7• 3 years ago

I think it's a bit understated just how much popular culture shapes our view of the world, not only of what's true, but also of history, what might come true, inevitable patterns in history, and so on.

But then, many alive today have probably seen more of the world through a screen than outside of one, so it perhaps shouldn't be surprising.

Dunno, maybe Plato was onto something when he wanted to ban fiction in his republic...

Arainach2• 3 years ago

It's not clear to me that that's the order of causality.

It's easier to be optimistic and to write optimistic when your society has high marginal tax rates and visibly uses those rates to combat poverty, fund research, and subsidize college (and when you're part of the demographic receiving most of those benefits).

When you see societal protections being stripped away and privatized, the suffering that was caused by that, and the callous nature of your fellow citizens who "got theirs" and continue to vote for politicians who attack and tear down the systems that enabled such growth and optimism, you're more likely to write stories shaped by that world view.

Dystopian fiction has a long history, but from stories I've read it feels like the inflection point was, as with so many things, the Vietnam war, which for many people shattered the myth of technological infallability.

drewcoo2• 3 years ago

from stories I've read it feels like the inflection point was, as with so many things, the Vietnam war

There's not just one inflection point where things get dark. There are many. Vonnegut might be associated with the Vietnam generation, but I think living though the WWII firebombing of Dresden as a POW probably had a bigger impact on him, for example.

Der_Einzige• 3 years ago

Yup! LLMs are literally the most “life imitates art technology” situation of all time! By writing a bunch of shit about how an AI is supposed to behave, lo and behold, the AI acts stereotypically.

That’s why people need to STFU about Rokos basilisk.

drewcoo2• 3 years ago

the shift in popular sci-fi from utopian to dystopian

As a kid I used to want things to like Star Trek.

I now have a smart phone instead of a communicator, touch screen tablets, a universal translator, my house responds when I call it "computer," and I've seen those expensive in-wall coffee/tea makers . . .

But that wasn't what I really wanted. I wanted the future where people didn't have to worry about money, where the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy wasn't a concern for anyone, and where people were enabled to learn and produce and contribute as they truly desired, so they did.

Gene Roddenberry died. Everything Star Trek turned dark and twisted. And I realized that I didn't get my dream so much as a pile of consumer goods, most of them trying to advertise at me, surveil me, or both.

I think I'm not the only one with this experience.

vcg3rd• 3 years ago

"In the beginning was the Word," everything else is plagiarism. Humans are not original--even our mythological creatures are amalgamations--because we can't create without a frame-of-reference which exists prior (creation) to us and is collectively shaped (society, culture, education, mentors, etc.)

Humans, not capable of true originality, are either innovative or derivative. For all the talk of these tech billionaires as geniuses I only see derivatives with tons of money behind it.

They lack both a healthy, wise, and deep-rooted frame-of-reference and the ability to imaginatively innovate within it.

aatd862• 3 years ago

Seen iRobot once... tries to make self-driving cars and underground tunnels :o)

I still want to see what is on the other end of the galaxy though. Requires more lifespan and faster than light/instantaneous data transmission. So some entangled particles stored in space relay expansions?

beretguy• 3 years ago

So some entangled particles stored in space relay expansions?

Entangled particles aren’t going to help us. (Wish i could find that video that explains why…)

krapp4• 3 years ago

I don't know about the video but here are a couple of other sources explainingwhy quantum entanglement doesn't allow FTL communication[0,1].

[0]https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/512504/in-layman...

[1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-quantum-entan...

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Or (and I think this is the problem) it requires us thinking about how to enable it for a generation so far in the future we don’t directly identify with them. We like to not care about anything unless we get to benefit from it.

Funny how we think about needing to live longer or travel faster than light.

snitch182• 3 years ago

Its paywalled

cstross• 3 years ago

Here's my original talk: four times the length, much more detail, and not paywalled! https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...

stranded22• 3 years ago

Yup - I feel this.

They were warnings - but tech bros with no imagination and lots of money think it was a prediction.

nvm0n22• 3 years ago

If the people inspired by sci-fi have a "dangerous political outlook" then what does that say about the people who write it, like the author Charles Stross?

Stross greatly over-estimates how much influence sci-fi has. I've been in the tech world my whole career and have encountered plenty of sci-fi references in that time. It never went beyond cute codenames for projects. In particular, I've never encountered a project that could be traced back to someone saying, "hey that sci-fi story had this cool thing in it, how do we make that?". It just doesn't happen.

The boring reality is that new tech or even long term research visions tend to be extrapolations of what already works, occasionally disrupted by an accidental breakthrough. ChatGPT didn't get invented because researchers watched Star Trek and then sat in a brainstorming session wondering how to make it. It came out of a decade long research programme in which many different directions were explored to see what could be done with GPU powered neural nets. When we finally did get AI that talks like Cmdr Data, it was almost accidental and the next year was spent figuring out what exactly had been built.

Similarly, the idea that colonizing Mars or living in space wouldn't have occurred to anyone except for sci-fi is just daft. These ideas are extremely obvious. Musk isn't inspired by sci-fi; he's explained many times that what drives him is the idea that humanity should be multi-planetary as a risk reduction measure. Peter Thiel wants to extend life because living forever has been a dream since before the start of writing. Why should we give sci-fi authors any credit for these common visions?

Avicebron• 3 years ago

I think it's pretty well understood that few things happen in a vacuum and while you're probably right that it's rare for people to sit down and say to each other "alright, let's make star trek" people certainly gravitate to things that interest them and I imagine that certain genres of fiction have embedded themselves deep within the psyche of a lot of people in tech.

Related tangent, the first time I met a meme IRL was when I first sat down with the CTO of a pretty well funded "startup" in the valley and as he was trying sell me on working there, regaling me with the story of him and his cofounders (good 30 years my senior) hustle and grind in the Stanford library before they started while I looked at his model of the Enterprise on his desk...

nvm0n22• 3 years ago

I mean sure I thought it was well understood too, but the article opens with:

"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."

So the author seems to think that tech billionaires do actually sit down and ask how to make Star Trek real.

People being generically inspired by science and technology can happen in many ways. Like, is Musk primarily inspired by sci fi, making money, a love of business, a love of engineering, politics .... you can't really separate out the different factors like Stross wants to do.

anonzzzies• 3 years ago

Seems billionaires are obsessed with both sci-fi and the middle ages, they want to fly to mars and also they want to have a wild-west era free lawless everything for them with no to little rights for others and having them as slaves.

hef198982• 3 years ago

Thech billionaires seem to either want tech feudalism, where obviously they are the feudal lords, or go straight to oligarchy. Feudalism has the added benefit of higher, perceived legitamicy of the rulong class, and the resulting stability makes the rulers' lives so much easier.

swayvil7• 3 years ago

The best government is a kind dictator.

The best dictator is an immortal, brainlinked hivemind.

Therefore scifi inspired tech will save us.

coliveira4• 3 years ago

This is another evidence that democracy is not possible with the existence of tech billionaires. These robber barons will continue to exercise power to mold the world into their own desires, it doesn't matter what the people really want. Democracy, a concept that the West pays lip service to, cannot survive in a world dominated by multi billionaires. They need to be completely destroyed (as billionaires not as people) for democracy to survive - a concept that Americans from 100 years ago understood.

colechristensen2• 3 years ago

Or we just need a functional Congress that understands modern issues and can actually debate and pass legislation regulating industry.

swayvil7• 3 years ago

If only people would stop acting in their own benefit and increasing in power thereby.

coliveira4• 3 years ago

It is not an "or". We need to do that (destroy multibillionaires) to have a functional congress that represents people.

cpr• 3 years ago

This article ignores the fact that three-letter-agencies are behind many of these tech moguls' "successes", and they're in fact being used for total surveillance by the intel community.

I.e., while the tech moguls may dream these SF visions, they're really just a front for dark forces.

valval• 3 years ago

Source?

swayvil7• 3 years ago

Powerful people with poor taste is our primary problem. Lots of power but lacking the perception to use it properly.

These wealthy unperceptive persons are perfect candidates for VR heaven. Being unperceptive they see no problem with that.

Then, safely sequestered in their trillion-dollar VR coffins like a crazy uncle locked in a cellar, us poor people will be free to get some work done.

unusualmonkey• 3 years ago

So many words... so little actually said.

Sci-fi is inspirational, especially for people who use STEM to change the world. However, contrary to this opinion, this isn't inherently negative or bad.

morninglight• 3 years ago

Scientific American needs to look in a mirror.

There was a time when they gave meaningful direction to young readers.

Albert G. Ingalls, "The Back Yard Astronomer." Martin Gardner, "Mathematical Games" C. L. Stong. "The Amateur Scientist"

After Stongs death, SciAm displayed a halfhearted attempt to keep a few back pages, but around 2000 they dumped the whole idea of citizen science.

Despite the launch of a nationwide "Maker Movement" SciAm's new management couldn't understand why anyone would care. Today, the publication has made itself irrelevant.

This generation has found a new outlet for DIY science and it is called YouTube. Maybe you should check it out. You might learn something.

indigo0086• 3 years ago

Peak FUD. Tech writers need to actually make something, even scifi, instead of baiting their readership into being unprincipled pseudo-luddites.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

Take away endless supply of free money, unplug their computers from the network and these folks are all but useless.

"Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Making Sci-Fi Real"

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