Oddbean

In 2000 Bill Joy wrote an article entitled, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”. it was published in Wired magazine. Californian technologistas are sometimes very pessimistic and often very bad at predicting the future. There’s no reason to believe that the future has to be a bad one or that any of the tools that are being invented now are going to be the tools that destroy mankind. Over and over again dire predictions about how technologies are going to end mankind, will cause terrible catastrophes and other fear porn guff have been trotted out again and again; it’s always by the same class of people who are more or less the same age. They are super pessimistic, un religious, ignorant, normally super rich and desperate to control other people. These people need to be ignored. First of all, spreading unwarranted FUD is unethical (AnthropogenicGlobal Warming for example), second there’s no technology that man has inside computers that can’t be switched off, even if it were to become a problem, which there’s no evidence that AGI is going to be. The choice everybody faces is whether we’re going to live like a bunch of frightened children, or are we going to live like men and go to the stars and do all those other things. If everybody’s frightened of every single invention that comes forward and goes into the market, man will never get anywhere, and I’m personally sick and tired of reading the fear from people who don’t have powerful imaginations and to want everything to stay the same forever. These same people are terrified of bitcoin and they’re very very scared that if it gets big, deflation will happen and the economy will be destroyed. Of course they’re totally wrong. Bitcoin is not dangerous and the fear mongers will be ignored. However this is a perfect example of how these technologists who are scaremongers don’t really understand what they’re talking about, are men of low degree and low character and are antihuman. It’s up to the people who create things to do things responsibly and to not let inventions get out of their labs that are dangerous. Sometimes bad things are going to happen, but the greater risk is to not do things, not experiment and not move forward. The fact of the matter is the future doesn’t need YOU. And that’s YOUR problem, not OURS.