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Are the Wealthy Plotting To Leave Us Behind? (medium.com)
"The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind," writes Douglas Rushkoff, describing what he learned from a high-paying speaking gig about the future of technology for "five super-wealthy guys...from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world," -- and what it says about perceptions of technology today.
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down. This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader...?
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.... It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride... The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively. This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities... Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
The piece -- titled "Survival of the Richest" -- is an interesting read, and ends by suggesting this inspiring counter-philosophy.
"Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team sport."
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.... It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride... The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively. This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities... Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
The piece -- titled "Survival of the Richest" -- is an interesting read, and ends by suggesting this inspiring counter-philosophy.
"Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team sport."
Dude, it's a book. Someone wrote a book. You don't have to go full retard and shoot a gun off, we get it, you're upset about the thought experiment. Ok. Let's breathe and watch Trump go off to prison together.
I don't think it's just "the wealthy" ... it's a common temptation / failing of human kind.
Don't believe me?
You there, with the trendy facial hair ... whadya say we bring along the folks with the MAGA hats? What's that? No?
...one of the most stupid posts I've seen on slashdot.
Seriously...leaving "us" behind? Is this some sort of attempt at class warfare? Someone just read Piketty and is all-fired about inequality?
In the breakdown of society that's postulated, 0.01 seconds after the electronics die, these guys are poorer than Gomer the Gas Station attendant because he at least has usable mechanical skills and a store full of parts that people will be desperate for. Peter Theil? Elon Musk? Richard Branson? They will all lost the vast bulk of their wealth the moment the volatile memory recording their wealth goes off; all their properties? They wouldn't be able to defend them from squatters, and they'll have nothing to actually pay their security WITH.
This is colossally stupid. When the "end times" comes, the wealthiest people on earth are going to be the vast majority of 3rd (and maybe 2nd) world farmers who still have skills needed to continue to produce food.
-Styopa
they're going to leave us behind with Automation. Once they've got robots to build their mansions, jets, run their farms and their military they won't need the 99% anymore. They'll have a smattering of engineers to keep it running, some doctors to keep them running and a few slaves for entertainment of one kind or another and the rest of us will be screwed. We'll be left with nothing. Think of the Indians stuck on reservations but on a global scale.
If we're going to do something about it now's the time. Now would be the time to establish a guaranteed quality of life for all human beings. Food, shelter, healthcare, Education, and transportation established as birth rights. The hard part is to get the 99% to stop fighting among themselves long enough to do it. Hell, I can't even convince my lower middle class friends that a living minimum wage won't cause prices to spiral out of control let alone get them onboard for single payer health care....
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I think we can see what a lifetime of being driven batshit insane by listening to Fox news blaming absolutely everything wrong in the world on the left does to a human brain. The right is literally nominating neo-nazi candidates, yet you think the left is where the hate is coming from.
ou must really lead a miserable, agonizing life, forever being stark-raving bonkers at the mere thought that someone else deserves equal rights to a white man.
And yet here you are, sucking on the teat of a collective endeavour.
Libertarians and other hyper-individualists wander around the supermarket of civilisation, stocked and supplied by other people, filling their pockets, and acting indignant and crying 'robbers!' when security stops them as they try to leave without paying.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
As US cities fail to keep their streets safe and clean.
Police who don't remove tents and parked RV.
Drug use and police who don't enforce laws due to city politics and demographics.
People with any kind of work ethic and money save up and escape to great parts of the USA.
Clean cities, no crime, no tents, no waste left on streets. Well paid police who are friendly and who have the skills to enforce laws.
Working city governments who work hard to attract new jobs rather than tax jobs.
The more wealthy are buying passports into great nations like New Zealand with the idea of exiting the USA when riots start.
Clean up your city and good people will stay and innovate.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Calling everyone that doesn't fully subscribe to your nutter prepping bullshit a "Future Victim" is a bit provocative.
We got through Hurricane Harvey just fine after stocking up on a few extra groceries (both perishable and non-perishable). Nothing else on your list would have really helped much aside from a spare battery pack. A flashlight was plenty sufficient.
The only scenario where these things would really make sense is in a full on invasion (alien, military, or otherwise), and I think there will be bigger concerns than two changes of clothes and a life straw.
Seriously, people need to get their heads out of...er...whatever weird place they are in now. We are pushing our technological boundaries because that's what we do. It's not some grand conspiracy to fuck the world over, its just what makes sense to do right now. And with each breakthrough we make, "what makes sense" will change, and people will adapt to that.
Perhaps, but to an outside observer it is indistinguishable from a grand conspiracy to fuck the world over.
Laissez-faire capitalism is an environmental and societal suicide pact, and we must break it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It really needs to get very bad before a place like Mars is better for us than earth. First, you can only get a tiny group to leave earth.
Second, with the investment needed it's always possible to create a better place for them here than you'd achieve elsewhere.
I can think of two reasons to explore space
1. pioneering. No rationale required
2. not putting all your eggs in a single basket. Things might get that bad that humanity kills itself off.
They may make only 35% of all the "income", but top 5% also own roughly 70% of the total wealth, so that distribution seems somewhat equitable to me.
And just for the record, the remaining 95% also pay taxes: federal, state, and local taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, social security taxes, and so on. And for that 95%, those taxes often make up a much, much larger percentage of their available disposable income.
We all have a stake in the pie.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You are assuming the human genome will stay the same. We can already precisely edit DNA,
Just because we can precisely edit DNA doesn't mean we know what exactly we are doing. We don't understand completely how DNA works and how changing bits of the genome affects everything.
and it shouldn't be too difficult to fix the genes associated with bone calcium and other low gravity issues.
That's a huge leap you are making there. Sure, we'll undo billions of years of evolution by messing around with a few genes, and at the same time not producing terrible side-effects. This is at least one level of complexity up from GMO food and whatever. I have not seen these X-Men-like genetically modified humans walking about.
By the time SpaceX is ready to start shuttling people to Mars, we can already have a modified sub-population ready to go.
Extremely unlikely.
Not only is the genetic modification required science fiction, but you wouldn't really know all the things you would need to do until you had 2-3 generations of people living on Mars. There is just too much we don't know.