Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

I'm just saying here, he doesn't seem to be all that great at preventing the human race's extinction when 1) he isn't tackling the actual problems we're facing here on earth, because they cut into his business operations; and 2) his supposedly great ideas are pretty fucking stupid, and not only that, are actually doing more harm than good (the good here being "0" unless you count entertainment and distraction a positive value). Even if his rockets were perfectly clean, including the building and maintenance of the, going to Mars is a dumb shit idea.

Can't believe you guys are so taken in by Musk. It's not hating, I'm just not a big fan of cult of personalities, especially ones that co-opt genuine issues that need to be solved, monopolize the time spent discussing them, and then provide crap solutions for them. Dude's doing more harm than good, and the cult surrounding him gives this stupidity more power and sway than it should have.

I'm all into forcing everyone to ride the bus btw

Xp

Electric cars powered by solar cells with big batteries to support the power grid when the sun isn't out - those are dumb ideas?

Well the best idea is to immediately make cars illegal

I dont like Musk at all but you are making nonsensical arguments

Xp

The home energy cell stuff is pretty good (normal caveats for rare earth metal mining apply, though) and it's making investors hate him, but I think bringing that business into Tesla makes sense.

I don't think his goal is some weird lofty thing like preventing human extinction (?!?) but putting investment into technologies that he believes are genuine goods. Hyperloop seems like a solution that doesn't quite fit with any existing problem but it's something that could be useful long-term. Electric vehicles, technology that harnesses renewable energy and developing better battery storage, making space launch technology that's reusable... all seem pretty good uses of resources.

Sending humans to mars is of questionable utility to me, but it's a goalpost that drives a lot of useful technology that will need to be created in the interim.

That doesn't really do much good for the world, except take power from one industry and locate it in another; who's sitting on the throne of that particular industry you may ask? Well, if it isn't Elon Musk! Wonder why this is such a big issue for him. Solar power, electric cars, they will not do anything to solve climate change or our shitting up the earth. It's a gamble to become the head of a new empire, which seems more suited to Musk's actual personality than Earth Savior.

It's interesting from a business perspective, but the cult around him just grosses me out.

xxp

I have a friend who works at SolarCity but I haven't talked to him for a while and have barely discussed his work, other than that he likes his workplace.

He wrote out his plan, if anyone is interested:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

Solarcity is a good company fwiw

elon musk wants to be hank scorpio but he's really clive sinclair

the other thing, and i always find myself beating this drum on these threads, but it's not like there is something 'natural' about automobile ubiquity that just responds to innate human needs or demands. okay, we can't force everyone to ride the bus. but we do a ton to force people to take cars! or at least manipulate the conditions that make that choice an appealing nexus that reconciles many needs and opportunities conveniently.

this has all been documented and rehashed a thousand times but the big ones to bear in mind are that highway spending and to a great degree local road-building is treated as a free good with the costs levied on everybody, drivers and non-drivers alike; federally-backed mortgages make living in a detached single-family home (and thus the associated low-density development pattern) unbelievably cheap; enormous sums are devoted to foreign policy and general support for energy companies, which has kept petrochemicals much more readily available than you would expect for something that is unbelievably expensive and slow to locate and exploit; local governments dedicate extensive resources to providing driver's ed and issuing licenses (versus another universe where, say, the operation of a dangerous high-speed one-ton death machine would have been restricted to skilled professionals very early on) .... etc. etc. plus there are the historical circumstances of zoning, how urban disinvestment starting with the depression combined with red-lining and white flight to create additional pressures towards suburbanization - - - and the old business of the auto companies tearing out the streetcar lines, and so on and so on.

i'm sure most in this thread know all this stuff so forgive me for running through it. and none of it has much to do with elon musk directly. but i think it's a loaded decision to start a conversation about automobiles in america, and what to do about climate change and other related problems, by saying "well basically widespread automobile use is inevitable so all we can really change is what kind of car it is and who builds them." this isn't to speak to the other points about (potentially) (hypothetically) reducing loss of life, maybe reducing the total surface area of roads and parking, and maybe being able to make a more convincing and viable overall package for cars running on renewables. those would all definitely be good things but these things are all entangled with each other.

Solar power, electric cars, they will not do anything to solve climate change or our shitting up the earth.

I just want to say... wrong

(DrC also otm about cars being treated as an inevitability btw)

but i think it's a loaded decision to start a conversation about automobiles in america, and what to do about climate change and other related problems, by saying "well basically widespread automobile use is inevitable so all we can really change is what kind of car it is and who builds them."

i'm not sure if i'm the one you mean - what i said was "like it or not, cars and the massive infrastructure already built up to support them are here for the foreseeable future." but just in case i am, let it be known that i totally agree with you that today's reliance on personal automobiles wasn't inevtable, for all the reasons you cited, and that i don't think it's inevitable for the rest of our lives. i do think it's inevitable for the foreseeable future, by which i just mean the next 20 or so years. there's just too much currently invested in it, and too much psychological attachment, for it to be abandoned before then (although i would love to be wrong on that). since the window for avoiding the worst projections for climate change is rapidly closing (we're likely already past the point of no return for some effects), the things that we do in the next 20 years, working off of existing infrastructure, are very important. carpooling using electric cars strikes me as something that is feasible and something we should be pursuing.

i do think it's inevitable for the foreseeable future, by which i just mean the next 20 or so years.

and just in case anyone is wondering, yes, i can see the future of the next 20 years. it's gonna be crazy, believe me!

yeah, sorry - i did sincerely lose the actual plot of my post in there somewhere. basically what i was going for is more like "if elon musk is an altruist whose dream is solving the climate and automobile fatalities, there is all this other shit to work on, and accepting the automobile technology as a given, whatever its pros and cons, doesn't really make him a visionary."

the electric automatic carpooling thing surely has lots of potential in some form or fashion, mind you. and i agree - there's not going to be an overnight shift away from the world we've built since WWII. infrastructures aren't quite as durable or locked-in/path-dependent as some people think, but they do have some longevity for all kinds of reasons. but there can be lots of mini-transformations going on slowly in the midst of what seems like a stable socio-technical system, til you look around one day and realize, huh, people don't really get from city to city by train anymore, everybody's got cars, when'd that happen? and the other way around. but yeah there is way too much wealth and emotional attachment and ideology sunk into the suburban automobile life right now to think that in a few years that will all be abandoned wilderness tracts.

Well the best idea is to immediately make cars illegal

― slathered in cream and covered with stickers (silby), Thursday, October 20, 2016 3:39 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a man after my own heart

I thought this interview was going to be completely terrible but he makes a couple of good points.

http://www.theverge.com/a/verge-2021/google-x-astro-teller-interview-drones-innovation

filing to read later, I saw that dude speak in like... 2001? and I own his fiction book somewhere around here

https://twitter.com/griph/status/796539192721506304

https://twitter.com/sacca/status/796445435162345472

Theranos: truly horrible.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/the-personal-bloodbath-behind-theranos-rise-and-fall/

http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-whistleblower-shook-the-companyand-his-family-1479335963

I like this one where George Shultz basically stopped speaking to his grandson who blew the whistle.

Is there any scenario in which Elizabeth Holmes goes to jail for any of this shit? I know the answer but WTF

I want to joke but people have actually died from this via guilt, I would imagine if they made it very far with useless blood tests people would indirectly have died from a lack of diagnostic ability

feel like holmes has a better shot at being in the trump administration than going to jail.

health and human services post still open iirc

Tombot what is your take on the future of 18f/usds in the trump era https://twitter.com/waldojaquith/status/802729794437664768 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-trump-tech-silicon-valley-231819

USDS, specifically the white house / EOP aspect, is probably going to go *poof* if for no other reason than Mikey, Erie et al. are going to find better things to do. That's my hunch.

The 18F people I know are planning to stick it out, like me, and their organization is now "a real boy" as part of the GSA Technology Transformation Service: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/category/25729

"And if you're the person in that role, you might have far more power than you might think. If you're asked to perform work that is going to hurt people, quit then."

If it was President Romney, or Ryan, or even Pence, this would be a good point - if you ask the civil service to do something, and they refuse, that's embarrassing, because you're embarrassable. The same doesn't really apply to Trump?

There's a bit in here that I want to get teased out more in the coming months:

'But Catherine Bracy, who ran the 2012 Obama campaign's technology-focused San Francisco office and now heads the group TechEquity, sees danger in the belief among some of her peers that technology is politically neutral.

"It's different being [a] lawyer in USDA" who's trained in legal norms, said Bracy, "and being someone building tools that have the potential to make an authoritarian, totalitarian, fascist administration more efficient. We in the civic tech movement have to be careful about how that power gets deployed."'

We need some sort of cultural reckoning wide enough that it soaks deep into the blithely naïve world of tech/SV but also to all the sheltered kids in school for this stuff that the gear you're working up is this neutral positive.

I dunno; make more students and start-ups watch "Real Genius" a few times or something. Gotta be a start somewhere.

yeah, one fallout of all my STS reading last year, and taking in the discussion in this and the Uber threads, is that maybe one component of my dream of a renewed american social-studies curriculum would be be a unit on thinking critically/historically about technology. i think issues-based readers at the college level have long existed in this vein, but it would be really really helpful going forward if the overwhelming majority of the population didn't think of technology as just this thing that inevitably happens and makes "progress," bearing no values of its own etc. etc. it's a seriously dulling and blinding kind of idea.

"fallout" wrong word obv

as a social studies teacher, i agree with this idea.

The best part of the movie Flash of Genius touches on that:

Good morning, everybody. I want to welcome you all to the first day of the quarter for Applied Electrical Engineering. My name is Dr. Robert Kearns and I'd like to start by talking to you about ethics.

I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering. Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. And who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save tens of thousands of lives, another man helped kill millions.

Now, I don't know what any of you are gonna end up doing in your lives, but I can guarantee you that there will come a day where you have a decision to make, and it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber. Everything we do in this classroom ultimately comes back to that notion. All right?

make every brogrammer read about Therac-25

tech/SV but also to all the sheltered kids in school for this stuff that the gear you're working up is this neutral positive.

Oops, should read "is NOT this neutral positive."

damn, silby, I had not heard of that particular case

got past the intro and thought "there should be a hardware.." before reading the no hardware interlocks gotcha

jesus christ people, software is great but if a physical safety device is possible, always have one

I say this but science friends complain about undertrained people loading a centrifuge to spin down samples in an unbalanced manner and I always wonder why the fuck such a thing would start if unbalanced

HamNo on the weird White House/SV/Stanford anti-poverty event

Of course, the illusion that poverty can be solved by the ingenuity of civic-minded tech zillionaires is an alluring fantasy for the White House. Silicon Valley is the new cradle of extreme wealth in America. Philanthropy is popular with the rich tech set, and that situation is certainly preferable to them hoarding all their money. More preferable still, however, is what we should be doing: taxing extreme wealth (or making it hard to accumulate outlandish fortunes in the first place by passing laws that ensure wealth is spread more fairly) and then using our democratic process to determine how that public revenue is spent. Philanthropy is the privatization of the social safety net.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/19/14004442/talkspace-therapy-app-reviews-patient-safety-privacy-liability-online

I mean WWWWWWTTTTTTTFFFFFFF Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

I think I got a mailer from my insurance company (or one of the little tier of health services company my employer contracts with) about a therapy over video chat thing that they support, which seems... ok? But a public company doing that, without the right patient services and notification systems in place, seems... very SV

After receiving a list of detailed questions, Oren Frank emailed various editors at The Verge, as well as the CEO of Vox Media. "I will not hesitate to have The Verge answer legally, financially and professionally to any unsubstantiated claim, anonymous quote, or libelous statement that results in damage to our business," he wrote in one.

hey buddy maybe your service should answer legally and professionally before you start threatening others

talkspace is UK-based iirc but the dude who runs it seems like tim ferriss if tim ferriss came up under new labour

I'm a little concerned today that basically all technofuturism seems to have no use for or understanding of consent. Looking at you, Google.

software developers are inhuman garbage is why

it's more like
- wow this system is kind of hard to use, I'll just make some software that connects users and whatever they want and no other strings attached
- people like our service! they get exactly what they want. things are good
- uh it turns out some of those "strings" were actual legal requirements but laws are bad
- it now seems some of those requirements were to keep people from dying or being harassed into oblivion
- day 1385: we have built the perfect system, why must people keep writing about our numerous victims and the pile of trash outside our office door. we will make a profit any day now, we just need another hundred million dollars of investment

you don't hear "don't be evil" very often any more

someone finally figured out extended negligence and evil are on about equal footing in the morality stakes