...or is she consciously tapping into something deeper, a rising tide of dissatisfaction with fast moving technological changes, their impacts on everyday life, and a people feeling increasingly powerless to harness its benefits?
Regardless of the article, this trend is certainly increasing, and for valid reasons. Many technology companies seem to believe in change for the sake of change, enjoy it themselves, and don't consider i the actuual, non-technical users, care for randomly rearranged screen icons every year to feel modern and whatever the proper marketing terms are.
That we've taken the smartest people in the world, paid them a ton of money, and optimized their efforts for selling ads, strikes many people as absurd as well. Despite Google's many (and increasingly comical) efforts to spread their wings outside their core competencies of search, they appear utterly comical in their attempts, and the new response to any Google product of "Oh, this, too, shall pass..." is increasingly correct, to self fulfilling prohacy values of correct.
Yet, we have made the rich radically richer, and... that which is commonly used is simply turned into addictive ways to sell yet more ads. All of so-called "social" media has turned into nothing but a gore show, seeking ratings (advertising impressions) over all else, regardless of the very real harms to humans. The delivered future does not work quite as advertised, and involves spending very real sums of money in terms of phones, phone plans, internet plans, computers, etc, for the honor of making others far wealthier.
This is our promised technological future? That we can pay dearly for the privilege of personalized ads piped into every aspect of our life, via addictive devices that deny us even the previous moments of silence and contemplation in our increasingly noise-filled worlds? That the solution to noise is expensive, short-lived noise cancelling devices that we cannot repair, and must discard when they are worn in a few short years, so they can be ever thinner? Devices that become unsafe to use on a network in a few short years, because the manufactures cannot be bothered to update them when a new one, with different bugs, is more profitable?
Consider the world outside our technological bubbles and how this is perceived. It is madness!
Wherein, an innovator like Musk is viewed as a scapegoat for societal ills, rather than someone who is creating new solutions and alternatives to the status quo.
If one is upset with the technology industry, one can hardly find a better figurehead of dislike than Musk. Page and Brin have had the good sense to exit the industry for whatever yacht they find interesting, Gates has taken his wealth (from an older iteration, certainly) and is trying to do some reasonable amounts of good with it, Jobs is dead and Cook is a boring (yet highly effective) business person, and Bezos at least has the sense to shut his mouth at times when running it resembles nothing so much as an auger further into the ground. Musk is a product of the tech industry, believes clearly in the obviously superior future that the tech industry can deliver (despite his inability to deliver on his promises), and has clearly not learned the value of shutting up and letting his actions and the products of his companies speak, instead preferring to hype everything to the moon as he yet again fails to deliver on his most visible promises.
The article really could have been about anything, from the fracking industry, genetic engineering, to advancements in AI and automation.
Some of which, those saying early, "Hey, this may be a bad idea, we ought to consider it..." got shouted down, and were bad ideas. Others, the verdict is still out, but, yet, appear to be bad ideas. Must we list all the horrible behaviors of so-called AIs? The future of replacing biased human judgement with "big data machine learning" seems to have done nothing but replicate human biases, in a more easily dismissed manner.
When did America stop dreaming big? Hard to say exactly, but it probably coincided with the rise of modern conservatism.
Or, perhaps, when the return on investment on our technologies stopped yielding increasing returns, transitioned to diminishing returns, and, perhaps, has crossed into negative returns. The world is in no particular obligation to give us what we want, and many promising technologies turned out to be nothing but subsidy dumpsters. Supersonic commercial aviation, the "obvious" future of flying, struggled for decades with the problem that it simply cost too much money, both in fuel and in maintenance, for the somewhat limited benefits. Fusion is the technology of the future, and even if it can be done in a net energy positive way, is still useless if the production facilities require anything like the cost of ITER or other large, high energy facilities. Our microprocessors have been reduced in size to near that of the minimum feasible width, and what do we do with the radically improved processing power provided? Ship around higher resolution videos of people without their clothes, and fill data centers with computers determining how to best keep the users, purchasers of their own demise, "engaged" the best, so we can shovel ads down their throat!
Again, explain to an average citizen who has watched the promises never delivered, and has a worse quality of life in the result, why these are so evidently the future?
As for Mars, the robots are doing a fine job, and they keep improving them. Need more data? Send another robot.
And, at some point, the possible answer may be, "We have answered our questions, the place is a dry, barren desert unsuited to any form of human life. We no longer need more data."
Even if it is just for his own glory instead of the good of humanity, or if the money could do more good elsewhere. I think it's good to expand our space travel technologies, plus nerdily I also think it's just cool.
Despite his seeming desire to use Red Faction or Doom as guides to Mars, instead of cautionary tales? He is enough a problem on Earth, would you wish to have him be your dictator on Mars?
Expanding space travel assumes there are things of great value in space, and that the value of them exceeds the weaponization potentials of what we consider doing with them. It is far from evident that asteroid mining or off-earth habitation is anything but yet another fevered dream of the tech world, as a solution to the very real problems on earth. Asteroid mining as the solution to exponential growth assumes that exponential growth is a good thing, and space is far, far more hostile than our worse nightmares early on.
The reason to explore space is conquest of land and resources but machines can harvest any spice found.
Again, you assume that conquest of land and resources is the right solution to whatever problems you believe we face.
...isn't helping cure the abysmal ignorance of an electorate so degenerate it believes in astrology, religion and the GOP.
Your arrogance ensures you will never have the slightest impact on that group, who will rightly ignore anything you say.
They aren't capable of understanding but they ARE capable of feels so it's the duty of leadership to cynically manipulate them for the good of humanity.
I hope, for humanity's sake, you never acquire any political office or position of power with your horrid views of humanity.
The State got us the SLS, which got some contractors and Alabama a lot of money. It has yet to fly despite bringing announced roughly a decade ago.
Nobody has ever pretended the SLS is anything but a jobs program. A working spaceship is a secondary product of no importance to the SLS program. This is a failing of the US government and Nasa relationship, but the design of the SLS is constrained, simply, by "You must keep all Shuttle related companies in business." It is a nonsense design, discarding reusable engines, that, if it does ever fly, will be hideously expensive to run.
As much as I dislike Musk as a person, there is no denying he lead a revolution in the space industry that the US government wouldn’t be able to manage.
He has, certainly, but again one must ask, "What is the value of low cost space launch, and what are the costs?" If we succeed in Kessler syndroming various low orbital shells as everyone rushes to deploy space based internet instead of simply building more low cost towers on land, is this a win? Well, fo those who profit on the process before destroying the commons, yes.
The carbon footprint of bitcoin is absolutely staggering, yet Musk is a huge fan. Why?
Presumably as an easy way for increasing the value of his personal btc holdings, whatever they are, on the company dime.
And, yet, for all his claims about caring about the environment, he fails to do the simplest thing he can with Tesla to improve the environmental impact: Allow others to repair their own vehicles, to lower the cost of ownership and extend the useful lifespan of them. Or, perhaps, to listen to engineers who tell him that, no, automotive part ratings exist for a reason, you cannot simply slap a laptop screen and 8GB eMMC chip in a car and expect it to work long term.
