Interesting article: How Did Silicon Valley Turn into a Creepy Cult?
I should have noticed when tech leaders started talking about attaining immortality and resettling on Mars. It’s easy to ignore crackpots like that, or pity them—because they live in delusion and still end up dead here on planet Earth.
They talk a lot about going to mars or the moon but do not actually want to do it even though the technology for the latter is 70 years old and can be done, especially with modern improvements like computers. Having billions of dollars and status on earth is a good enough disincentive to risk it on a literal moonshot.
Of course, there were wacko techies in Silicon Valley even back in the day. Linus Pauling wanted everybody to take huge doses of Vitamin C—it could cure cancer, he claimed. And his student William Shockley really went off the deep end with his disturbing eugenics theories.
It’s too bad to see him repeat tired, wrong tropes. Mendelian inheritance implies that eugenics must work…it’s not a theory so much as it’s a fact. Even polygenic traits like intelligence are highly heritable and can be selected for. The fact that farmers and animal breeders apply eugenics, shows it works and is not merely a theory.
The social consequences and suppression of such research, including genetic individual and group differences, incidentally created the false perception that such research had been rebutted. What better way to kill an inconvenient truth than to end the career of anyone who espouses it.
‘Big tech’ companies will continue to get bigger and tech billionaires even richer (hence, why I’m invested in leveraged versions of tech companies). Search results and other content will keep getting worse, but it will not hurt profits of these companies. Such tech riches are juxtaposed with more societal decay seemingly elsewhere in America.
AI has/will become so pervasive that distinguishing between human vs. automated content will become impossible, if it hasn’t already. Paradoxically, as I argue here, this had led to more demand and status of legacy media, due to legacy media implicitly being vetted as authentic and ‘real’, compared to fake news and automated content seen everywhere else. When fake or out-of-context video is always going viral on Twitter or other social media, who can you trust? Legacy media, despite obvious political biases, is at least vetted by humans compared to having to trust unvetted media.