We justify everything we do.

ETA: If you had invested $1,000 in 2016 when Tesla Roof was announced, you'd have $25,000 today. 25x return in 10 years.

Uncertainty is much more useful. Uncertainty helps us prepare. We don't know what's going to happen, so we start to plan: If X happens we do Y; meanwhile we'll stock up on Z, just in case we need it.

The problem with anger is that it feels good. It's easy--you don't have to do anything--but it feels like you're doing something. You can convince yourself that being angry is enough. Once people realize how angry you are, the problems will cease. And if they don't, well, you already know what to do: get angrier. No thinking required.

Anger is your genes' way of psyching you up to throw a punch. If someone steals your food, or hurts your mate or your children, you get angry and fight back. I get that. But you can't punch AI.

Of course, often weird/different is how you get the breakthroughs and innovations. I'm not trying to stamp out weird. I just don't think everyone can be or should be weird (which is the implication of the OP).

But everyone can be a change agent and help to change the present into the future.

Cooling is probably the easiest problem to solve, easier than power. And in both cases, the problem is solved by mass to orbit. All you need for cooling is a big f-ing radiator. Solar panels are chips, and not trivial to manufacture. But a radiator is just a hunk of metal with some pipes.

That's why the cost of mass to orbit is the most important thing. You can solve almost any space problem by just throwing more mass at it.

But anyone who thinks they can predict those prices in ten years is wildly overconfident.

If (a) demand for AI continues to increase, and (b) SpaceX can get to ~$100/kg to orbit, then they will have a ridiculously deep moat. Probably more like 10 years, though.

But as you said, who knows.

The problem with weird is that not everyone can be weird, almost by definition. Moreover, people get things done collectively, and for that to work, the group (at whatever size) has to push in the same direction. Pushing in the wrong direction just to be weird will cause the group to fail.

Instead, I think, the future belongs to those who help change the present.

At the limit, any existing process can be done by AI, given a goal. What AI cannot do (and must not do) is come up with new goals. Coming up with new goals must always remain a human prerogative.

We don't need humans to work the assembly line--we need humans to make the assembly line better. AI can't do that alone because it cannot define "better". Humans must decide what "better" means. Do we want the assembly line to be faster or use fewer resources? Should it continue to produce this product or work on a new one? Should we build a bigger assembly line or turn the whole thing into a park?

As long as the world keeps changing, we will need humans to direct that change. People who fear change, who want everything to stay the same will have the hardest time in the future. Those are the people who will be replaced by AI.

The future belongs to those who change the present.

I'm convinced that I would have been happy without children. I would have lived a wonderful life, maybe with a spouse, maybe alone, traveling the world, working on my interests, and generally doing whatever I wanted to do. You don't miss what you never had.

But now that I have two kids, that life seems so hollow. Kids make you feel things that you've never felt before. It's like suddenly discovering a new rainbow of colors, or like listening to a piece of music that makes you simultaneously giddy with joy and wistfully sad and you can't explain why.

You can't compare the joy of having kids with any other pleasure you've experienced. It's like trying to compare having sex with having a great meal. It's not even the same scale.

Of course, everyone's different. Some people absolutely regret having kids (and that's sad for everyone). But if you have even a slight feeling like maybe you want to have kids, I would absolutely do it. My only regret is that I waited so long.

1. Imagine AI replaces all jobs.

2. Since AI is controlled by a very small number of people, they will be the ones that get all the money, since they are doing all the work.

3. Since there are no jobs, everyone else will die because they won't have money to buy anything.

But this causal chain makes no sense.

Imagine that I find a Magic Lamp that grants me unlimited wishes. Suddenly, I don't have to work! I wish for a sandwich, I get a sandwich. I wish for a car, I get a car. Etc.

Does the economy collapse? Of course not, because everyone else still has to work for a living (the poor fools). The fact that I don't need a job has effectively removed me from the economy.

One day I discover that I can wish for another Magic Lamp! I give the new Magic Lamp to another family and now they remove themselves from the economy. After a few weeks, 10,000 people have their own Magic Lamp. Has the economy collapsed? No, because the remaining 8 billion people still form a robust economy.

In this scenario, the economy won't suffer until a significant percent--maybe 50% or maybe 90%--have Magic Lamps. But at that point, it's no longer controlled by a "small number of people."

One argument is that once I have a Magic Lamp, I can disrupt the economy by (e.g.) creating cars for free and selling them for cheap. There's no incentive for me to do this--I don't need money--but let's pretend I'm doing it just to help people. Now a lot of people have cars but also a lot of car builders are out of a job. That sucks.

But wait! More cars also means more jobs. If you don't have to pay for a car, then you can use the money to pay for a driver. You have more cars, so you're paying more for insurance, so now there are more insurance jobs. There are more accidents, which sadly require more hospitals. And we need to hire people to dispose of all these cars at end-of-life.

If I use the Magic Lamp to get rid of part of the economy, the other parts get bigger because (a) there is more money to spend on it, and (b) there is often more need.[1]

The only way I can really destroy the economy with a Magic Lamp is to give everyone a Magic Lamp. But that's not a dystopia--that would be paradise!

---------------

[1] If you don't believe this, just consider farming. Farming used to be 90% of the economy. Now the revenue from farming is concentrated in less than 5% of the people of the US. Did everyone else starve? Are we all out of jobs? No--the rest of the economy grew.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315329

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

Another tech friend of mine just bought a Model Y and he was similarly raving about how awesome FSD it.

Just anecdotes, I know, but I feel FSD is eventually going to go viral among normies.

I don't know if orbital datacenters will work out--it depends on the price of launch and the price of tokens in 2030. Maybe they'll try it and abandon it. We'll see.

But my point is that if it does work, if they can be cheaper than terrestrial tokens, then SpaceX can dominate the market because no one else is even close to being able to deploy orbital compute.

And if it doesn't work, SpaceX will be fine because they are printing money with Starlink.

Cybertruck is a good example--they never hit their sales targets, but Tesla is fine because they are making money on Model Y and they are investing in Robotaxi (which has a bigger potential than Cybertruck anyway). And if Robotaxi doesn't work out, they will pivot to a cheaper model or something.

SpaceX will be fine, not because orbital datacenters are guaranteed, but because they keep betting on things that may or may not work, but if they do work, they make a ton of money.

That's actually a reasonable prediction.

I understand skepticism--maybe they will never be able to compete economically with terrestrial datacenters. But the profound certainty that detractors have is amazing to me.

There are a lot of unknowns, mostly around prices in 2030 (price to orbit, price per MW on Earth), but detractors are dead certain that not only will orbital datacenters fail, but they will never even be deployed because they violate the laws of physics. It's astounding.