Maybe solving the 'sci-fi' problems will make today's problems irrelevant. I feel that's what they all are counting on.
Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#12If 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-ter…
> 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
There's nothing special about doing it in a systematic and deliberate way. According to legend, the Yellow Emperor taught the Chinese to practice agriculture. In terms of contribution to human life, this would dwarf anything Bill Gates could ever accomplish.
In reality, of course, agriculture arose in an unorganized way, but does that make it less significant?
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#13Bezos 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 o…
Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by the elite and/or powerful.
We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle' greed so that you still motivate productive work without allowing those with disproportionate power to game the system in their favor. Technology can help us solve this.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#14Bezos 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…
Another benefit of prioritizing future humans is that they're the people on the other side of the Cryo door in a thousand years.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by the elite and/or powerful. We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle' greed so…
You should start with breeding a new kind of humans, ones that would be compatible with socialism.
Of course alternatively, you could just kill a vast majority of them; that's the approach most people attempting to implement socialism end up taking (viz. anything from Soviet Russia to Khmer Rouge). Alas, every time in the output you get lots of mass graves, but no workable socialism.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#16Bezos 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…
Conversely, why should I care about the trillions of people here after I die? Why should I care if humanity dies in it's birthplace or spreads across the universe like a virus?
To me, a future with a trillion happy people is not better than a future with a million happy people just because there are more happy people. Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by the elite and/or powerful. We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle' greed so…
I think that the idea of technology saving us from our inherent natural tendencies is nice to think about but ultimately naive.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-ter…
> 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 There's nothing special about doing it in a systematic and deliberate way. According to legend, the Yellow Emperor taught the Chinese to practice agriculture. In terms of contribution to human life, this would dwarf anything Bill Gates could ever accomplish. In reality, of course, agri…
Reminds me of Haber-Bosch, credited for saving billions of lives via synthetic fertilizer.
http://www.scienceheroes.com/
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#19This 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.…
Is it horribly irrational to simply assume that the philanthropic gestures of the very wealthy are just targeted to achieve their own personal utility maximization? I think that it is normal to just assume self interest even in the case of philanthropy and this of course limits the type of philanthropy to that which has over-unity personal cost benefit ratio.
Re: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'
#20Bezos 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…
Conversely, why should I care about the trillions of people here after I die? Why should I care if humanity dies in it's birthplace or spreads across the universe like a virus? To me, a future with a trillion happy people is not better than a future with a million happy people just because there are more happy people. Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading.
>Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading.
This is probably not true, given that you seem to value your own life. (It also runs afoul of failing to meaningfully designate what makes value 'inherent' or not, or why this is a feature of value you should care about in the first place.)
But the main flaw in your philosophical argument is that it presumes a particular form of 'self-identity' that just happens to exclude future people. But you are not special. A great number of things that are true of you are true of others, and if you can value your own life, you can value others'.
Which means, circumstantially, that any benefit you find for yourself is practically destined to be a benefit for someone else, and more importantly, vice versa. Whatever you want out of your own life is best achieved by figuring out how to create it in arbitrary life, or at least, as generally as possible. At the very least, you have a rational argument that you can distribute needed workload better.
EDIT: You might be thinking "if I'm dead, who cares", but this is just another identity problem. There could very well be a future person who is born with your exact brain, and you've got no reason to think such a person isn't also you. In reality, most of us are mostly like you.