I was focusing on how to make my leftover chicken palatable for the five minutes Gary spent ranting about Elon Musk. According to Gary, Musk has a plan to build a robot-operated satellite factory on the moon.
That’s why I was a little distracted when he stopped ranting and I said, “Maybe Elon’s just talking. Maybe he’s trying to distract us because that old part of one of his spaceships fell into the moon today.”
And then the seven-year-old version me who lives in my head said, “You live in science fiction but you sound bored about it!”
One response to “Modern day quote”
It’s a solid formula: have a grotesque, malicious, pro-Nazi, xenophobic-riot-encouraging CEO (who refuses to turn off the CSAM machine he built) as Public Representative of Cool Stuff (who also does stuff like Regularly Fake Technology by having his “robot-controlled” samples be human-controlled instead and then wave it off as “it’ll be robot controlled by next year” which it then isn’t, such that you can never 100% believe that it has in fact accomplished the cool thing it accomplished): then you end up being less interested in the potential Cool Stuff.
(Zuckerberg: also not someone you can either look up to or trust to use technology for the good of humans rather than predators of either the sexual or financial sort; Bezos: ditto; Altman and Thiel: yikes. It’s basically all supervillains. So, look, if more of the science fiction was straight-up cool instead of an endless string of discoveries which end up being “even if it looks cool at first, odds are good it’s hard-core dystopian in its goals and methods,” then a lot of the new stuff would be a lot more exciting?)
(it is AMAZING that LLMs can now generate outputs that conform to English sentence structure *and yet* they ruined it by making it a plagiarism machine that uses a ton of water and energy to give people results that are frequently confidently inaccurate *and* that cause brain attrition and a reduction in empathy for human beings. It would be SO SO COOL if it were not society-destroying and likely economy-crashing but it is really hard to get excited about something that’s already making it hard to interact with some relatives who don’t understand that *ChatGPT makes stuff up* [and also that’s wrecking customer service at a bunch of places; I had to argue with a chatbot and then with an employee who was copying/pasting stuff out of an AI entity before the human actually checked with another human and said “oh. Yes, you’re right.”] and that is using up water in areas that are already in high drought and that has strong odds of taking down our retirement fund before we hit 60. I would be SO EXCITED about this… if the downsides weren’t like this!)