Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
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Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#2This is one of the laziest articles I've read. Let me boil down the author's entire argument into one sentence: "These tech billionaires want to help millions of people, not just the person next door. How heartless!"
There are many valid critiques that could have been made. For example: "Zuckerberg claims that all lives have equal value, and hence, we should prioritize the countless future humans over existing ones. However, human quality of life has been growing exponentially across generations. Extreme poverty has been decimated over the past generation, and can realistically be eliminated completely in the next few decades. Similarly for medical progress. Hence, it is those suffering in the present, who will suffer the most, and need the most help."
Or with regard to Blue-Origin or OpenAI: "Bezos and Musk think that by pouring billions of dollars of resources into sci-fi projects like AI and Space exploration, we can best help humanity. However, these projects are nothing more than vaporware. We have no idea how or when truly intelligent AI will be built, and worrying about super-evil AI, is like worrying about dinosaur attacks. With regard to space exploration, humanity's problems today have little to do with physical resources, and everything to do with disease and human development. Building space rockets isn't going to bring humanity forward any more than building ferraris. That Bezos and Musk are spending billions on such hobby-projects, shows how out of touch they are with the suffering of the world's poor."
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the above arguments, but I can at least respect them. Unfortunately, the author doesn't present any such argument whatsoever. "These billionaires have big ideas on how to change the world, and how to best help billions of people. How heartless! Clearly they have no respect for us as individuals." /s
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#3Bezos is right. Most people don't think about the long game.
What can we do today to more quickly increase our tech tree 25, 50, 100, 200 years into the future? If we spent more of our GDP 50 years ago on R&D, our knowledge would be much greater than today. Solar energy, electric vehicles, etc would already be mainstream, for example. Our ability to treat cancer(s), alzheimer's, heart disease would be 20 years more advanced.
"Jeff Bezos, too, is thinking at the species-existence level. “The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” he says. “And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in.” That’s why Bezos is spending a billion dollars a year on Blue Origin, his space travel company—and that’s why, controversially, he thinks that Blue Origin is really the only way to spend such enormous resources. If something you did today could materially improve the lives of trillions of humans in the future, then that benefit would have to outweigh anything you did for mere millions of humans in the present."
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#4If we're going to squint at charities, there's a lot more squinting to be done one or two rungs down the ladder from Gates and Bezos. Of course, that would involve uncomfortable observations about people who care about what is said about them and have the resources to spread their displeasure, so we don't see that journalism.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#5If it's unethical for billionaire tech founders to focus on the needs of future generations, what moral grounding does, say, environmentalism have?
By this logic, would it not be fair to say that every dollar invested in green solutions comes at the expense of other worthy societal projects that could meaningfully change the status quo?
Those efforts are largely seen as virtuous. Seems to me the only difference here is the origin of the money: tech.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#6The part of this philosophy that I disagree with is that I believe solving the problems of today will put us in a much better position to solve tomorrow’s problems.
With that in mind I feel that completely discounting people alive today in favor of a theoretical future is both cruel and short sighted.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#7If it's unethical for billionaire tech founders to focus on the needs of future generations, what moral grounding does, say, environmentalism have? By this logic, would it not be fair to say that every dollar invested in green solutions comes at the expense of other worthy societal projects that could meaningfully change the status quo? Those efforts are largely seen as virtuous. Seems to me the only difference here…
I agree. And reading through the article, I didn't really see any argument made against why what Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos are doing is unethical.
When all is said and done, Bill Gates will go down as the person who saved more human lives in a systematic and deliberate way than any other human in history. We need people like him. We also need people like Jeff Bezos, who seems to naturally operate on a super long-term thinking mental model. I've said it before on here: Thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of people populating multiple star systems in this galaxy. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people like Bezos and Musk, and the steps they are taking today to address space travel and AI.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#8> In the eyes of Bezos and Zuckerberg, it’s equally bad to concentrate on the suffering of the living, if doing so means ignoring the needs of the untold billions of people who are not yet born.
> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.
How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of individuals not yet born; I would say that it's heartless to consider the needs of those billions presently alive to the exclusion of those not-yet-living. Self-serving, even.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#9> In the eyes of Bezos and Zuckerberg, it’s equally bad to concentrate on the suffering of the living, if doing so means ignoring the needs of the untold billions of people who are not yet born. > To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless. How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of individuals not yet born; I would say that it's heartless to consider the needs of t…
>> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.
> How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of individuals not yet born
Are they really considering the needs of unborn individuals, or just ignoring the needs of actual living individuals to focus on sci-fi tech stuff that excites them?
By focusing too much on the speculative sci-fi needs of future generations, you may condemn those generations to suffer through the same hard problems we have now that were left unsolved so some tech billionaires could focus on sexy stuff.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#10Bezos is right. Most people don't think about the long game. What can we do today to more quickly increase our tech tree 25, 50, 100, 200 years into the future? If we spent more of our GDP 50 years ago on R&D, our knowledge would be much greater than today. Solar energy, electric vehicles, etc would already be mainstream, for example. Our ability to treat cancer(s), alzheimer's, heart disease would be 20 years more a…
With a trillion humans, a lot more of the energy available to perform work would be human effort. The humans providing low-level effort will be desperately poor, because that low-level effort isn't worth much.
The Black Death did wonders for the peasant class of Europe by killing a third of them. Those who didn't die were much richer than peasants had been previously. (Nobles were poorer, because most of the wealth of nobles was the peasants who worked their land. Losing a third of your wealth isn't so great; losing a third of your competition is.)
If you want humans to have unlimited resources and unlimited power, you should focus on driving numbers down, not up.
In a different but related analogy, Seeing like a State likes to emphasize how intensive agriculture by peasants who are intimately familiar with the local land, weather, crops, and pests is more productive (in terms of food produced per acre) than modern industrial agriculture. The difference is that the local peasant devotes all his time to cultivating a man-sized area of land. The extra productivity goes to him, and he eats it, but he's very poor. One man using inefficient machines to cultivate 20 fields at 80% efficiency is a lot richer than any of the 60 men cultivating a third of a field each at 100% efficiency, and the society around that one man is richer too because, unlike the 60 peasants, he produces a lot of surplus to trade with them.