The future is going to be so great, I just can’t wait. I mean, whirring effortlessly in flying robot cars from home to the country club (never work, the robots do the work) sounds great, doesn’t it? Living essentially for free on a surplus of energy and resources? And oh yeah it’s all on Mars? Gosh it’s going to be great.
I mean, we could live in a worry-free state of bliss, for chrissake. Did you know that on Mars gravity is, like, a third of what it is on Earth? We’ll be able to jump really high. It’s going to be sweet (although we may have to change spec on basketball courts). It’s the true leaders that will get us there.
Because like it or not, the leaders of the free world are no longer in government, they’re in technology. Our (humanity’s) largest economies are led, now, by retrograde nationalists who are making calls out of a playbook from 1936. Somehow we have plowed through a second industrial revolution, one where the internet has fundamentally, irrevocably, changed what it means to work, and yet our governments cling to environmental, immigration, energy, and diplomatic policy that assumes the means of production and labor are unchanged from when we first deployed the steam engine.
The void left by our elected leadership to tackle the problems of global warming, historic human migration, and energy production (/storage!?) has been filled by a cast of megalomaniacal iconoclasts at the helms of companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. These companies were founded at a time when “don’t be evil” was good enough for a code of conduct, but embraced a business model of disrupting the status quo in pursuit of profit and information hegemony.
Of course outside-the-box thinking has done a lot of good, but it comes in a mixed bag. On the one hand, the “legal” system of taxi medallions and livery service is really just the mafia and was probably due for some competition; then of course on the other hand we have basically everything about Uber. Is there no middle ground? Wildly radical thinking can solve a lot of problems, but there’s not always a reason to throw away everything that we have right now to start over.
For an extreme example, let’s look at Elon Musk’s premise that we should just give up on earth and move to Mars. Sure, it sounds like maybe it’s a decent plan for if we totally screw the pooch and need a mulligan on our first planet, but isn’t that maybe a bit too far? And shouldn’t any technology that renders Mars inhabitable also render an uninhabitable Earth inhabitable without the trouble of leaving orbit and travelling 140 million miles?
And also, isn’t it just a little bit creepy? Is the whole “settle Mars” thing really just a eugenics wet dream for billionaires and their harems? A vaguely biblical nod to paradise filled with virgins? The logical extreme of Silicon Valley’s new infatuation with prepping for the apocalypse?
In the more immediate, more tangible sense, we have the same players dabbling in transportation. No one likes sitting in traffic, and there’s no secret that snarled city streets are an increasing reality for Americans even outside of Los Angeles, New York, Houston. Even in sleepy Missoula, Montana “rush hour” has become a thing you need to think about before heading across town. We have rightly identified travel and infrastructure shortcomings as a central hurdle to improved quality of life, efficiency, and, well, the sustainability of our ecosystem.
Fortunately, we have the benefit of leaders like Elon Musk, with the vision and resources to solve the Great Transportation Problem. First we all buy new electric cars, then we have them drive themselves, then we bore giant tunnels underground so everyone can ride on a hyperloop sleds from place to place at 500mph.
I guess Occam’s Razor is a bit dull.
What if we just rode bikes when we’re not going that far? What if we just threw a few million bucks to utilize the vast rail network that currently exists? Sure, it’s not as flashy as self-driving hovering bullet cars, I get that. But if Donald Trump had invested his inheritance in index funds instead of plastering his name in rhinestones all over the place, he would have been three times richer than he is today. SAD!
Radical shifts in thinking by the wealthiest people on earth are essential to correcting our obviously unsustainable status quo. But that starts with radically shifting who we think those people are. The American middle class is shrinking, but we are still far and away the richest people on the planet. 56% of Americans live on more than $50 per day, compared with 7% of the global population. We are the wealthiest people on earth, and fundamental changes are up to us.
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“Rich people aren’t spending their time and effort like I would make them! How dare they!”
Well said, comrade.
I mean, rich people can spend their money however they want. I just wish this particular rich guy wouldn’t waste everyone’s time pretending to fix problems that he is clearly not fixing. And I would double prefer that if he’s going to spend all his money not fixing problems that he would at least not leverage public money to not fix problems. We can agree on that, right?
I think Elon Musk is an idiot. Really. Lots and lots of waste on lies and stupid stuff. But who really cares. The guy can’t keep a wife so he’s a huge failure as a real human being.