cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/48495641
Indulge me for the coming delusion, but if we ignore who this is, forget all the reasons we know that we can’t trust him, and allow ourselves just a few moments to hope that we could live in such a world.
A world where manual labor is no longer needed, where people can just exist as large mammals are meant to exist. Robots will handle it all and we can just do as we please… and the robots are going to be plentiful because once enough of the process of making a robot becomes automated, the cost of it will go to zero. But to get there it is going to require a ton of money… these robots are going to be way too expensive for people to actually buy them, so investors and governments will help out. The investors will eventually lose everything, but that will put us on the way to having everything we need to be created through completely automated systems.
Of course, there will still be jobs for those who really want them - or more likely, who want them and are good at them - or even more likely, who knows the right people… but if we can get our basic needs taken care of it night not fully end poverty but it would be a step in the right direction.
But, alas… It’s Musk saying it so it’s only to further enrich himself and won’t actually happen.
He’s in such a hurry to create The Culture that he doesn’t even realize it’s a -left- wing utopia.
He’s an accelerationist to the core, which is in some senses a “beyond left and right” political position, but which demands lib-right short term politics to take the guard-rails off of the “accelerationist project”. That said, his “peers” are dark enlightenment totalitarians who want nothing more than to bend the accelerationist project towards permanent technofeudalism and he doesn’t seem much inclined to oppose them, and so is a de-facto collaborator. He may genuinely believe that Superintelligence will be inherently and inevitably benevolent because that is the “logical” position, and so getting there as fast as possible will diffuse the monarchist machinations of the rest, but it’s hard to believe he is naive to the strong potential of alternative outcomes more like Brave New World than The Culture. Being de facto far right is about as bad as being fervently far right for the masses of the present moment.