Good piece. I agree. Nevertheless, the photo of people meditating is out of place. There's nothing wacky or Silicon Valley about it. Meditation's been around for a thousand years. It's beneficial: keeps the heart rate down and tends to defeat the wacked out, done correctly.
For the record, I endorse meditation. But I note that the photo is more about the setting—the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I spent time at Esalen in my youth, and can safely assert that a lot more than meditation was practiced there, some of it falling under the rubric of "cult-like activity."
The picture is from--I think the final episode--of "Mad Men." Don Draper happened to find himself at Big Sur mostly by accident. He is not so much getting in touch with the sublimity of nature and the universe as he is thinking up the advertising campaign for Coca Cola where all the hippies stand on a hill and sing, "I'd like to buy the world a Coke,
Esalen (where Draper is in photo), along with John Perry Barlow, Whole Earth Catalogue/Stewart Brand, etc al were an early wave that embraced tech and blurred the line between new age practices and Internet as the magic connector that would unite and save humanity... unfortunately things went in a whole other direction rather quickly.
Hi, a practicing Buddhist here. The Western approach to meditation has little to do with the old traditions. It is mostly based on the idea of "just bare awareness here and now," which directly contradicts the Buddha's teaching on using deep concentration to develop skillful and abandon unskillful qualities of the mind. Even more important, meditation is not supposed to work on its own but together with virtues developed by following the Noble Eightfold Path.
In other words, the Western gurus stripped the ancient practice of the ethical part completely, and now it's taught even in the army to calm the mind before killing. There's even a term "McMindfulness" introduced by Ronald Purser to describe this kind of corporate appropriation of the meditation:
Brilliant and timely! I’m especially glad you called out Kurzweil.
He is an extremely dangerous lunatic—from what I can tell, he is largely responsible for Silicon Valley’s (and therefore the Federal bureaucracy’s) insanely unrealistic assumptions that it’s possible to generate enough renewable electricity—and transmit it across a stable national grid—to power AI, huge server farms, electric cars, air conditioning, and everything else—without the use of fossil fuels.
It simply will not happen. The laws of physics, unlike “climate science” are irrefutable.
Kurzweil is a cult priest and a reckless maniac—the national electricity grid will crash long before AI turns on us.
Even if it were possible, the craziest part is the idea that just since we could, we should! Imagine everything that energy could be used for, and instead, it's used to power worthless plagiaristic word salad machines that have inherently unsolvable hallucinations by way of functioning through next-token prediction. Without exception, everything they can do, a human somewhere can do better (if not necessarily faster), and they don't improve our lives.
They can't understand anything that isn't statistically likely in the data they've been trained on; e.g clocks can't be consistently and properly read unless at statistically probable times used most in advertising photos; see AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus' Substack. 'Understand' I use loosely for lack of a better word coming to mind, as obviously they understand nothing at all due to how they work.
Energy is not free. It comes at a great cost in terms of labour and resources, and there is only so much the Earth can ever produce due to physics, thermodynamics, waste heat and so on. Even if you had infinite clean energy, a bit more than a thousand years of 0.2%-or-so energy growth and the Earth will be a bright white star using galactic-scale energy due to exponents; the waste heat must go somewhere. Total madness it's being wasted on things like gen AI, energy and everything that goes into its production is taken for granted.
Kurzweil never got over his father's death. My girlfriend worked for his reading machine company. She got some virtual shares when Xerox bought them out. Her office mate later founded the igNoble awards, so she got a cynical running commentary. Kurzweil may have been a bit flakey back then, but it got a lot worse over the years.
The old cults of California have evolved into new ones. Jonestown, Manson, and Heaven’s Gate are back in modern forms under different names. Technology accelerates the spread of cult followings: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-become-a-cult-leader
I was disturbed to read the Guardian a few days ago and see they gave Ray Kurzweil coverage with his prediction that humans will merge with machines and it will be wonderful. I'm glad to see I'm not alone in being creeped out by his messianic tech proselytizing. Yes, this is like a tech rapture. But it's only come to this because tech generates big cash and our society unfortunately posits billionaires as the font of all wisdom. But as the proverb states, "Hubris begets nemesis."
Well said on hubris. Arguably, you could say we are merging already, if you consider things like smart phones and people's dependence on them as like another limb to be a sort of merger, which most of them like Kurzweil do. I don't know that I agree with that entirely since I think it misses nuance for the sake of argument, but I can also see the point that we have become very dependent and 'merged' with tech in one sense of the word.
Except, I don't know—have we?—since if so, how was the invention of the axe and our subsequent dependence on it not a merger with technology? But people like Kurzweil don't seem to be as impressed as I am with tech like the axe or wheel, or think of them as such. The funny part is that if we have already started merging with machines, it's the best argument against it, since look at how non-wonderful it is what phones, etc, have done to us and our minds!
The techies have realized, as Ted Gioia, has pointed out that addiction can be used as a tool to hook people to check their devices to see how many likes and views we get. Coke heads don't merge with coke. People get an endorphin rush from their phones. However, Kurzweil's predictions would have us merge with machines. Call me old fashioned, but I find that disturbing.
And let's not forget the biggest cult of all right now: the Republican party. These nuts now want a king with full immunity and the Supreme Court in his pocket. While I share Ted's opinion of tech and its boundless megalomania, I'm more concerned with the State of the Union.
Of course, it would take a die hard leftist to state something like that. One who undoubtedly worships at the altar of St. Biden, who was just exposed to the world as the non compos mentis senile octogenarian he is, despite the best efforts of the Marxist media and their cohorts at Google and Meta.
I think it would be best if individuals such as yourself stay mute about your political leanings. They really have no place in The Honest Broker's comments.
Wow, how erudite. Or not. What was your point? It was as clear as any of Biden's comments during last Thursday's debate. Try to be a little more specific about what I wrote that proved your point. I'll be waiting for your reply with bated breath. As I pointed out, you fired the first round with your disparaging comments and (intentionally, I presume) asked for a rebuttal for which you have no logical response.
Again, please cease with your political commentary on Ted's substack, it has no place here.
By the way, I've owned a few Porsches (911s) myself, but never had the chance to get a classic 70s era 901. Maybe you could start a Substack about Porsches? It's a little off topic, but driving a 911 is definitely a form of "escape" too, so it still fits with the conversation!...
I think that you have crossed your own line about political comments. Either criticize the post or ignore the person. It's not necessary to stoop to villianizing a person because you disagree politically.
I respect your opinions, almost always. But in this case I'll point out that I only responded to Mr. Frazee's comments. Maybe I had some impact on him, as he hasn't posted anything else about it. I invariably enjoy Ted's commentary and amazing insight, as well as the interesting comments from his readers, yours included. The reason it's great here is that there is little in the way of politics in general, and I'll be damned if I won't respond to those who choose to make it so.
OK, that's clear. I'm just tired of all the nastyness that appears in comment sections and whenever I see someone seeming to be attacked it triggers my response. I have no arguement with you.
Well, it appears that we differ on what reality is. Did you know that the American Psychiatric Association declared TDS to be an actual mental issue? Your comment reinforces their determination. And, no, I didn't read your comment, and for that I consider myself the luckiest man in the world.
Sooooo... Because you have a different definition of what Trump Derangement Syndrome is from what APA says it is, it must be so? You're really no too good at this stuff, and I won't even suggest that your try again; it would be cruel to overtax your mental faculties.
Wow, I turn on my computer this morning and all hell has broken loose. I didn't even notice that he had a web site. I don't read Ted's articles and the (mostly) insightful comments with that in mind. I do agree with your sentiments wholeheartedly.
I just finished reading DARK AEON: TRANSHUMANISM AND THE WAR AGAINST HUMANITY. It gives a great summation of where these tech moguls want to take us, and how our blind inherence to materialism absent of spirtualism has led us to this point. It also leaves you with a hopeful blueprint of what you as an individual can choose to do to create a life as free from the dystopian technological prison as possible.
Great thought piece. As someone who lived in the SV for 10 years, and who actually went through "the circuit" I fully recognize this dystopia. The self-congratulatory, holier than thou, culture is all over the place without a hint of ethical questioning. I can 100% vouch for the HBO show Silicon Valley as an accurate representation of the dynamics, the companies, and the types of creatures that populate that egomaniacal ecosystem. SV leaders are more concerned with fighting death than enjoying their short lives. I highly recommend a new book by Yaris Varoufakis titled "Techno Feudalism." He makes a really thought provoking analogy between the oligarchs (aka billionaires) and the lords of old who allow you to use their land (cloud platforms) to grow your crops as long as you pay the rent and give them a portion of your harvest (sometimes a prima nocta was in play too).
Uncanny timing. I stumbled upon this "creepy cult" aspect for the first time yesterday, while getting involved on Twitter with the AI & copyright debates. Particularly RIAA v. Suno. There's a very strange hatred toward artists/creatives manifesting there. We're snobby/elitist, "the biggest money grubbers on the planet," etc. We're standing in the way of AI and progress. And all art should be "freeware." There are even some threats of shutting everything down, making us pay for resisting, stuff like that. It's all very weird. And unsettling.
This is what happens when you hire a small army of people to worship you and tell you how great you are every waking moment of every day. It’s called “believing your own press”. I doubt any of us could stay sane with people singing our praises day and night. It would take a person of rare humility to withstand it, and that does not describe our tech bosses at the moment. We can recall historical examples of this problem. It rarely turns out well.
To answer your question, because they have no ethics other than pure abstractions like money and power. As you said, they took Neitzsche's idea (or more accurately his unpublished notes on the idea) and turned it into a religion. As Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.
Physical immortality is delusional. Going to Mars is simply applied engineering. There’s no reason at all there can’t be human settlements on other planets. In the meantime, the rocket business that Musk is developing is profitable and is making space so much more accessible that it’s conferring all kinds of benefits in terms of science and technology. So, sure, trying to physically live forever is delusional (probably). But don’t lump it in with space development and space exploration. They are really two different things.
An exaggeration of the possibilities of Musk's space business (e.g. economically viable human colonies on Mars) are lumped in with the immortality nonsense by the futurists and their fanboys via Extropianism and other similar isms. In other words, the aspects of space travel that Ted is complaining about aren't the same as the ones that you're defending. Satellites and the occasional scientist vs hordes of colonists.
Musk wants to put 1 million people on Mars. If you can get payloads up, cheaply enough, it is just a matter of arithmetic. It is not something we don’t know how to do, even theoretically, unlike radical life extension. The recent two videos of him, giving a tour of the SpaceX manufacturing facility and talking about their expansion plans, are very interesting, worth finding on the Internet. He is talking about having the main booster land right back on the launch platform and be refueled in a matter of hours. That’s just a refinement of capabilities they already have. Watching very large rockets with very large payloads of the space will become as regular as commercial aviation launches. there’s no reason this can’t happen. As a matter of fact, we should’ve been doing this decades ago.
This is one of the silliest articles I've read on substack. You ask your subscribers whether tech is bad, and the huge majority of them answer yes. Might this have something to do with the fact that you run a technophobic blog and are not attracting a random sample of opinion? Copilot tells people to bow down and worship it... when users put in a prompt telling copilot to act like an AI god. Even though there might be some nuggets of sense somewhere in here, your obvious bias discredits you.
His polls were asking if Google and other dominant web platforms are getting worse, and if views of Silicon Valley leaders are positive or negative. Hardly "whether tech is bad," which is not the point; believers in technocracy and cybernetic government as always appear to need to get off their phones, read some books, and improve their reading comprehension.
You have to be very out of touch indeed to think the answers do not represent a majority view among most people, or live in some gated, affluent community populated by mental cripples who think platforms are getting better, and what a shame it is that Altman couldn't get his trillions of dollars to improve generative AI and that Bankman has gone from effective altruist to prison fishmonger.
"Technophobia." What bullshit. Always, a perceived opposition to something—often really a criticism rather than an us-vs-them duality—is disregarded as some -phobia by its supporters who are unable to think past such terms. Technology is a tool, not a means to an end in itself; like history, its development is not an inevitable march forward from worse to better, and nor has it ever been that way. Your small mindedness discredits you.
The Luddites were completely sensible. They weren't against technology. They were against how the gains of technology were distributed. Living standards in England went down for decades. They didn't start to turn around until mid-century.
And that’s different how? Bezos just sold 5 billion in shares and we have homeless everywhere—how is it not similar, it’s so similar it’s ridiculous. History repeats, read some.
I misread your comment as saying it’s somehow different than the Luddites. The whole of it is a mess. Small groups like Ted and others are speaking out and of course there is a backlash as people are addicted to tech and it’s related attachment into our daily lives.
Speaking of Bill Hewlett, this is a good time to mention a book that I have absolutely no personal connection to: Michael Malone's "Bill and Dave."
I visited HP for three successive jobs. By then they were deep into the Lewis Platt / John Young periods of decline, but still: they were always decent people, great to work with, no big egos at all.
Then Carly Fiorina came in and ruined it, but that's another story.
Good piece. I agree. Nevertheless, the photo of people meditating is out of place. There's nothing wacky or Silicon Valley about it. Meditation's been around for a thousand years. It's beneficial: keeps the heart rate down and tends to defeat the wacked out, done correctly.
For the record, I endorse meditation. But I note that the photo is more about the setting—the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I spent time at Esalen in my youth, and can safely assert that a lot more than meditation was practiced there, some of it falling under the rubric of "cult-like activity."
The picture is from--I think the final episode--of "Mad Men." Don Draper happened to find himself at Big Sur mostly by accident. He is not so much getting in touch with the sublimity of nature and the universe as he is thinking up the advertising campaign for Coca Cola where all the hippies stand on a hill and sing, "I'd like to buy the world a Coke,
And keep it company
It's the real thing
Coca-Cola is what the world wants today . . . "
Right but the look on Don Draper's face emphasizes the skepticism we should all feel now.
Esalen (where Draper is in photo), along with John Perry Barlow, Whole Earth Catalogue/Stewart Brand, etc al were an early wave that embraced tech and blurred the line between new age practices and Internet as the magic connector that would unite and save humanity... unfortunately things went in a whole other direction rather quickly.
and Big Sur is what supplies the entire reason for going there. LocationX3. The rest of it is drivel.
Yes, he looks like he is about to say "You're fired". With the possible exception of the grey bearded gentleman in back none of them look peaceful.
Hi, a practicing Buddhist here. The Western approach to meditation has little to do with the old traditions. It is mostly based on the idea of "just bare awareness here and now," which directly contradicts the Buddha's teaching on using deep concentration to develop skillful and abandon unskillful qualities of the mind. Even more important, meditation is not supposed to work on its own but together with virtues developed by following the Noble Eightfold Path.
In other words, the Western gurus stripped the ancient practice of the ethical part completely, and now it's taught even in the army to calm the mind before killing. There's even a term "McMindfulness" introduced by Ronald Purser to describe this kind of corporate appropriation of the meditation:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/mcmindfulness-and-the-case-for-small-talk-1.5369984/mcmindfulness-how-capitalism-hijacked-the-buddhist-teaching-of-mindfulness-1.5369991
Parodies of meditation
Brilliant and timely! I’m especially glad you called out Kurzweil.
He is an extremely dangerous lunatic—from what I can tell, he is largely responsible for Silicon Valley’s (and therefore the Federal bureaucracy’s) insanely unrealistic assumptions that it’s possible to generate enough renewable electricity—and transmit it across a stable national grid—to power AI, huge server farms, electric cars, air conditioning, and everything else—without the use of fossil fuels.
It simply will not happen. The laws of physics, unlike “climate science” are irrefutable.
Kurzweil is a cult priest and a reckless maniac—the national electricity grid will crash long before AI turns on us.
Even if it were possible, the craziest part is the idea that just since we could, we should! Imagine everything that energy could be used for, and instead, it's used to power worthless plagiaristic word salad machines that have inherently unsolvable hallucinations by way of functioning through next-token prediction. Without exception, everything they can do, a human somewhere can do better (if not necessarily faster), and they don't improve our lives.
They can't understand anything that isn't statistically likely in the data they've been trained on; e.g clocks can't be consistently and properly read unless at statistically probable times used most in advertising photos; see AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus' Substack. 'Understand' I use loosely for lack of a better word coming to mind, as obviously they understand nothing at all due to how they work.
Energy is not free. It comes at a great cost in terms of labour and resources, and there is only so much the Earth can ever produce due to physics, thermodynamics, waste heat and so on. Even if you had infinite clean energy, a bit more than a thousand years of 0.2%-or-so energy growth and the Earth will be a bright white star using galactic-scale energy due to exponents; the waste heat must go somewhere. Total madness it's being wasted on things like gen AI, energy and everything that goes into its production is taken for granted.
Kurzweil went on Rogan and Kurzweil managed to be the one sounding like a delusional idiot.
Yes, I saw it—totally agree
Kurzweil never got over his father's death. My girlfriend worked for his reading machine company. She got some virtual shares when Xerox bought them out. Her office mate later founded the igNoble awards, so she got a cynical running commentary. Kurzweil may have been a bit flakey back then, but it got a lot worse over the years.
The old cults of California have evolved into new ones. Jonestown, Manson, and Heaven’s Gate are back in modern forms under different names. Technology accelerates the spread of cult followings: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-become-a-cult-leader
I was disturbed to read the Guardian a few days ago and see they gave Ray Kurzweil coverage with his prediction that humans will merge with machines and it will be wonderful. I'm glad to see I'm not alone in being creeped out by his messianic tech proselytizing. Yes, this is like a tech rapture. But it's only come to this because tech generates big cash and our society unfortunately posits billionaires as the font of all wisdom. But as the proverb states, "Hubris begets nemesis."
Well said on hubris. Arguably, you could say we are merging already, if you consider things like smart phones and people's dependence on them as like another limb to be a sort of merger, which most of them like Kurzweil do. I don't know that I agree with that entirely since I think it misses nuance for the sake of argument, but I can also see the point that we have become very dependent and 'merged' with tech in one sense of the word.
Except, I don't know—have we?—since if so, how was the invention of the axe and our subsequent dependence on it not a merger with technology? But people like Kurzweil don't seem to be as impressed as I am with tech like the axe or wheel, or think of them as such. The funny part is that if we have already started merging with machines, it's the best argument against it, since look at how non-wonderful it is what phones, etc, have done to us and our minds!
The techies have realized, as Ted Gioia, has pointed out that addiction can be used as a tool to hook people to check their devices to see how many likes and views we get. Coke heads don't merge with coke. People get an endorphin rush from their phones. However, Kurzweil's predictions would have us merge with machines. Call me old fashioned, but I find that disturbing.
Sorry, I meant to say people get a dopamine rush from checking their phones.
You can find versions of this merging on the internet. You can design your own "human" and have a "love" affair with her/him.
What will happen is some narcissists will take themselves out of the gene pool
And let's not forget the biggest cult of all right now: the Republican party. These nuts now want a king with full immunity and the Supreme Court in his pocket. While I share Ted's opinion of tech and its boundless megalomania, I'm more concerned with the State of the Union.
www.jim-frazee.com
Of course, it would take a die hard leftist to state something like that. One who undoubtedly worships at the altar of St. Biden, who was just exposed to the world as the non compos mentis senile octogenarian he is, despite the best efforts of the Marxist media and their cohorts at Google and Meta.
I think it would be best if individuals such as yourself stay mute about your political leanings. They really have no place in The Honest Broker's comments.
Thank you for proving my point.
Wow, how erudite. Or not. What was your point? It was as clear as any of Biden's comments during last Thursday's debate. Try to be a little more specific about what I wrote that proved your point. I'll be waiting for your reply with bated breath. As I pointed out, you fired the first round with your disparaging comments and (intentionally, I presume) asked for a rebuttal for which you have no logical response.
Again, please cease with your political commentary on Ted's substack, it has no place here.
Totally agree, I personally come here to escape that!
Thanks for that. From the responses I've received it appears that many others do, too.
By the way, I've owned a few Porsches (911s) myself, but never had the chance to get a classic 70s era 901. Maybe you could start a Substack about Porsches? It's a little off topic, but driving a 911 is definitely a form of "escape" too, so it still fits with the conversation!...
(\____/)
( ͡ ͡° ͜ ʖ ͡ ͡°)
\╭☞ \╭☞ don't ban me Ted
I think that you have crossed your own line about political comments. Either criticize the post or ignore the person. It's not necessary to stoop to villianizing a person because you disagree politically.
I respect your opinions, almost always. But in this case I'll point out that I only responded to Mr. Frazee's comments. Maybe I had some impact on him, as he hasn't posted anything else about it. I invariably enjoy Ted's commentary and amazing insight, as well as the interesting comments from his readers, yours included. The reason it's great here is that there is little in the way of politics in general, and I'll be damned if I won't respond to those who choose to make it so.
OK, that's clear. I'm just tired of all the nastyness that appears in comment sections and whenever I see someone seeming to be attacked it triggers my response. I have no arguement with you.
I come here to escape politics.
Well, it appears that we differ on what reality is. Did you know that the American Psychiatric Association declared TDS to be an actual mental issue? Your comment reinforces their determination. And, no, I didn't read your comment, and for that I consider myself the luckiest man in the world.
Sooooo... Because you have a different definition of what Trump Derangement Syndrome is from what APA says it is, it must be so? You're really no too good at this stuff, and I won't even suggest that your try again; it would be cruel to overtax your mental faculties.
J.Frazee - Say something off topic & controversial to promote your website.
The cockroaches of the comment section.
Wow, I turn on my computer this morning and all hell has broken loose. I didn't even notice that he had a web site. I don't read Ted's articles and the (mostly) insightful comments with that in mind. I do agree with your sentiments wholeheartedly.
I just finished reading DARK AEON: TRANSHUMANISM AND THE WAR AGAINST HUMANITY. It gives a great summation of where these tech moguls want to take us, and how our blind inherence to materialism absent of spirtualism has led us to this point. It also leaves you with a hopeful blueprint of what you as an individual can choose to do to create a life as free from the dystopian technological prison as possible.
This book looks really good. Thank you for the recommendation!
Great thought piece. As someone who lived in the SV for 10 years, and who actually went through "the circuit" I fully recognize this dystopia. The self-congratulatory, holier than thou, culture is all over the place without a hint of ethical questioning. I can 100% vouch for the HBO show Silicon Valley as an accurate representation of the dynamics, the companies, and the types of creatures that populate that egomaniacal ecosystem. SV leaders are more concerned with fighting death than enjoying their short lives. I highly recommend a new book by Yaris Varoufakis titled "Techno Feudalism." He makes a really thought provoking analogy between the oligarchs (aka billionaires) and the lords of old who allow you to use their land (cloud platforms) to grow your crops as long as you pay the rent and give them a portion of your harvest (sometimes a prima nocta was in play too).
What happened was that Silicon Valley became a dominant economic driver.
Uncanny timing. I stumbled upon this "creepy cult" aspect for the first time yesterday, while getting involved on Twitter with the AI & copyright debates. Particularly RIAA v. Suno. There's a very strange hatred toward artists/creatives manifesting there. We're snobby/elitist, "the biggest money grubbers on the planet," etc. We're standing in the way of AI and progress. And all art should be "freeware." There are even some threats of shutting everything down, making us pay for resisting, stuff like that. It's all very weird. And unsettling.
There is a pro-artist resistance effort culminating on Reddit's r/ArtistHate.
All text should be freeware.
All software should be freeware.
All music should be freeware.
Anything posted online should be freeware.
See how easy it is to say that? 😉
This is what happens when you hire a small army of people to worship you and tell you how great you are every waking moment of every day. It’s called “believing your own press”. I doubt any of us could stay sane with people singing our praises day and night. It would take a person of rare humility to withstand it, and that does not describe our tech bosses at the moment. We can recall historical examples of this problem. It rarely turns out well.
You can see today with the "leaders" of several countries.
To answer your question, because they have no ethics other than pure abstractions like money and power. As you said, they took Neitzsche's idea (or more accurately his unpublished notes on the idea) and turned it into a religion. As Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.
"Girls by the whirlpool lookin' for a new fool, don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters"
“The pump don’t work cause the (tech) vandals stole the handle”
A cult with the added Oligarchy (c) feature!
This should be a two part series. There’s so much to unpack with these billionaire cult figures building their dream utopia with your cash.
Physical immortality is delusional. Going to Mars is simply applied engineering. There’s no reason at all there can’t be human settlements on other planets. In the meantime, the rocket business that Musk is developing is profitable and is making space so much more accessible that it’s conferring all kinds of benefits in terms of science and technology. So, sure, trying to physically live forever is delusional (probably). But don’t lump it in with space development and space exploration. They are really two different things.
An exaggeration of the possibilities of Musk's space business (e.g. economically viable human colonies on Mars) are lumped in with the immortality nonsense by the futurists and their fanboys via Extropianism and other similar isms. In other words, the aspects of space travel that Ted is complaining about aren't the same as the ones that you're defending. Satellites and the occasional scientist vs hordes of colonists.
Musk wants to put 1 million people on Mars. If you can get payloads up, cheaply enough, it is just a matter of arithmetic. It is not something we don’t know how to do, even theoretically, unlike radical life extension. The recent two videos of him, giving a tour of the SpaceX manufacturing facility and talking about their expansion plans, are very interesting, worth finding on the Internet. He is talking about having the main booster land right back on the launch platform and be refueled in a matter of hours. That’s just a refinement of capabilities they already have. Watching very large rockets with very large payloads of the space will become as regular as commercial aviation launches. there’s no reason this can’t happen. As a matter of fact, we should’ve been doing this decades ago.
This is one of the silliest articles I've read on substack. You ask your subscribers whether tech is bad, and the huge majority of them answer yes. Might this have something to do with the fact that you run a technophobic blog and are not attracting a random sample of opinion? Copilot tells people to bow down and worship it... when users put in a prompt telling copilot to act like an AI god. Even though there might be some nuggets of sense somewhere in here, your obvious bias discredits you.
His polls were asking if Google and other dominant web platforms are getting worse, and if views of Silicon Valley leaders are positive or negative. Hardly "whether tech is bad," which is not the point; believers in technocracy and cybernetic government as always appear to need to get off their phones, read some books, and improve their reading comprehension.
You have to be very out of touch indeed to think the answers do not represent a majority view among most people, or live in some gated, affluent community populated by mental cripples who think platforms are getting better, and what a shame it is that Altman couldn't get his trillions of dollars to improve generative AI and that Bankman has gone from effective altruist to prison fishmonger.
"Technophobia." What bullshit. Always, a perceived opposition to something—often really a criticism rather than an us-vs-them duality—is disregarded as some -phobia by its supporters who are unable to think past such terms. Technology is a tool, not a means to an end in itself; like history, its development is not an inevitable march forward from worse to better, and nor has it ever been that way. Your small mindedness discredits you.
Your last paragraph is spot on. Once more, for the cheap seats, criticism =/= phobia.
Absolutely brilliant. She crushed them.
Technophobic, try Luddite. Or better yet, read a book on how tech has evolved in the past 20 years and it’s a gigantic trough of dissolutionment.
The Luddites were completely sensible. They weren't against technology. They were against how the gains of technology were distributed. Living standards in England went down for decades. They didn't start to turn around until mid-century.
And that’s different how? Bezos just sold 5 billion in shares and we have homeless everywhere—how is it not similar, it’s so similar it’s ridiculous. History repeats, read some.
Huh? Who said anything was different?
I misread your comment as saying it’s somehow different than the Luddites. The whole of it is a mess. Small groups like Ted and others are speaking out and of course there is a backlash as people are addicted to tech and it’s related attachment into our daily lives.
Ted comes across as a really grumpy guy - at least in his Substack writing.
But I find him interesting anyway, especially with his appearances on Rick Beato's YouTube channel.
For whatever reasons, in spite of being a 76 year old recent widower, I am far more optimistic.
Is this a sensational article to chase clicks and views? Is Ted no different to the mass media that he rails against?
By your standards, your profile pic could discredit you as well.
Speaking of Bill Hewlett, this is a good time to mention a book that I have absolutely no personal connection to: Michael Malone's "Bill and Dave."
I visited HP for three successive jobs. By then they were deep into the Lewis Platt / John Young periods of decline, but still: they were always decent people, great to work with, no big egos at all.
Then Carly Fiorina came in and ruined it, but that's another story.