You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think.
I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.
The mega rich have been building bunkers and preparing for the downfall of humanity for a long time now. Look around and you'll notice that greed wins out over everything else. We're surrounded by companies doing nothing or only small token gestures to protect humanity or the world we live in and instead focusing on getting rich, because getting rich is exactly why people become shareholders. Don't rely on those guys to save the world, it'll be the boring committees that are more likely to do that.
Yeah that makes sense. Work your whole life building a company worth billions of dollars so that you can burn down the world and live in a bunker eating canned beans until the roving bands of marauders flush you out and burn you alive. I'm sure that was their greedy plan to enjoy eating canned beans in peace!
More like they'll try to maintain their palaces and force more serfs to the bunkers. Not familiar[1]?
Now imagine the rich talking about climate change, arguing to bring policies to tax the poor, and then flying off to vacations in private planes[2]. Same energy.
They assume they wont be around for when their legacy completely uproots society, be the king now, let everyone else deal with the consequences later. The hedge is to rebuild the world in their image from the New Zealand command center, should it all happen too soon.
This happens to intelligent competitive people all the time. They don't want everyone to be worse off but what they really don't want - is to lose. Especially to the other guy who is going to do it anyway.
in Steve jobs case, hlel didn't want to admit he's a moron who knew nothing about fruit, nutrition and cancer
the problem with eugenics isn't that we can't control population land genetic expression, it's that genetic expression is a fractal landscape that's not predictable from human stated goals.
the ethics of doing things "because you meant well" is well established as, not enough.
More realistically, "live in extremely gated luxury island apartments somewhere in New Zealand, Bahrain or Abu Dabhi while the rest of the world burns".
You realize money isn’t magic, right? If the world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland billions of dollars doesn’t mean anything. You aren’t getting any wagyu beef down in your bunker.
More like "Republic of Weimar" kind of apocalypse, this time with the rich opportunists flying to New Zealand instead of Casablanca or the Austrian Alps.
Because given the historical precedents, they know they will probably die peacefully in their beds before they have to pay any real consequences for their actions. Sure, a few dictators at the very end of their reign had to pay some consequences, but their cohorts? Soviet Russia, South America Banana republics, the aristocratic european families that enabled fascism and nazism...
Probably a few CEOs great grand-childs will probably have to write how they're very very sad that their long forgotten relatives have destroyed most of the planet, and how they're just so lucky to be among the few that are still living a luxurious life somewhere in the Solomon Islands.
You think they wouldn't give up wagyu beef and the idea of the US dollar for a shot at rebuilding society with a massive head start over the 99.9% percent of the population that don't have a bolt hole?
They already have massive influence over society with the added benefit of not having to rebuild 10,000 years of human progress so no I don’t think that makes any sense at all. That is cartoon supervillain nonsense. No real person thinks that way.
Lmao yea the conspiracy theorising behind a lot of this stuff is so poorly thought through. Make billions, live a life of luxury, then end life living in underground bunker drinking your recycled urine. Bill Gates plan all along!
The rest of us just can't afford most of the insurance that we probably should have.
Insurance is for scenarios that are very unlikely to happen. Means nothing. If I was worth 300 mil I'd have insurance in case I accidently let an extra heavy toilet seat smash the boys downstairs.
Throw the money at radical weener rejuvination startups. Never know... Not like you have much to lose after that unlikely event.
Insurance amortizes the risks that large numbers of people are exposed to by pooling a little bit of their resources. This is something else though I'm not quite able to put my finger on why I think it is duplicitous.
Maybe it's risk mitigation without cost sharing to achieve the same economies of scale that insurance creates.
Its a rich man's way of removing risks that we are all exposed to via spending money on things that most couldn't seriously consider due to the likelihood of said risks.
I don't think it's duplicitous. I do resent that I can't afford it. I can't hate on them though. I hate the game, not the players. Some of these guy would prob let folks stay in their bunker. They just can't build a big enough bunker. Also most folks are gross to live with. I'd insist on some basic rules.
I think we innately are suspicious when advantaged folks are planing how they would handle the deaths of the majority of the rest of us. Sorta just... Makes one feel... Less.
Arguably only some of his time is spent on that kind of instability promoting activity. Most law enforcement agencies agree... Palantir good.
Most reasonable people agree... Funding your own senators and donating tons to Trump and friends... Bad.
Bad Thiel! Stick to wierd seasteading in your spare time if you want to get wierd. No 0 regulation AI floating compute unit seasteading. Only stable seasteading.
All kidding aside, you make a good point. Some of these guys should be a bit more responsible. They don't care what we think though. We're wierd non ceo hamsters who failed to make enough for the New Zealand bunker.
The bunkers are in new Zealand which is an island and less likely to fall into chaos with the rest of the world in event of ww3 and/or moderate nuclear events.
I'm sure the bunkers are nice. Material notions got little to do with it. The bunker isn't filled with Ferraris. They are filled with food, a few copies of the internet and probably wierd sperms banks or who knows what for repopulating the earth with Altman's and Theils.
So is Thiel, famously, but I don’t think that proves they want the world to be destroyed. It’s an interesting kind of problem to think about and you have to spend money on something. It’s the same kind of instinct that makes kids want to build forts.
But surely, being a rich and powerful billionaire in a functioning civilization is more desirable than having the nicest bunker in the wasteland. Even if we assume their motives are 100% selfish destroying the world is not the best outcome for them.
They do happen to have some effect on the outcome for the rest of us. It's a bit like the captain of a boat that has already taken the first seat in the lifeboat while directing the ship towards the iceberg and saying 'don't worry, we can't possibly sink'.
If you are suggesting that billionaires like Thiel don't have any skin in the game (of human civilization continuing in a somewhat stable way) you're nuts.
If we hit the iceberg they will lose everything. Even if they're able to fly to their NZ hideout, it will already be robbed and occupied. The people that built and stocked their bunker will have formed a gang and confiscated all of his supplies. This is what happens in anarchy.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336350). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
people like Steve jobs are the best example of flawed logic. in the face of a completely different set of heuristic and logical information, he assumed he was just as capable, and chose fruit smoothies over more efficacious and proven medication.
they absolutely, like jobs, are playing a game they think they fully understand and absolutely are likely to chose medicine akin to jobs
just watch Elon and everything he's choosing to do.
these people are all normal but society has given the a deadly amount of leverage without any specific training.
Really what we're observing with these people is the survivorship bias of humans with astounding levels of cognitive dissonance — which nearly all humans have. Except they have the rare combination of wealth and luck on their side...until it runs out.
Nobody is arguing that they have the intent to cause the apocalypse, but it's more that their actions are certainly making society less stable and they don't see any issue with it. In fact some qre quite openly advocating for such societies.
Why would even the people employed in those bunkers listen to some billionaire after the world collapses? At that point there's no one to enforce your ownership of the mega bunker, unlike the government from before. And all the paper money is worthless of course.
Very true. Triangle of Sadness was a good movie kind of about this.
When the shit hits the fan the guy in charge of the bunker is going to be the one who knows how to clean off the fan and get the air filtration system running again.
Violence can only get you so far. Sure, maybe the guy who knows how to get food will get you some food if you threaten to kill him. But if he refuses, and you do kill him, then what? You still don't know how to get food for yourself.
people in the violence frame aren't doing the long term thing. but we absolutely know they exist and in no scenario can you be assured they're not in that position.
Yeah, people are smart though. Like if you’re good at getting food you find the person who’s best at violence and promise to get them plenty of food if they protect you from the other violent people. Maybe you divide up the work among the good at food getting people and the good at violence people and pretty soon you got yourself a little society going.
Exxon shareholders are also part of humanity. The company has known about the dangers of climate change for 50 years and did nothing because it could have impacted short/medium-term profits.
In reality ownership is so dispersed that the shareholders in companies like Microsoft or Exxon have no say in long-term issues like this.
There was incredible global economic growth the last 50 years which had to fueled somehow. If Exxon didn’t provide the energy, other oil and gas companies wound have
That economic growth wasn't an absolute necessity that had to be powered, it was a choice based on the assumption that creating new stuff is always a positive and that we have functionally limitless natural resources that we should use before someone else does.
Incredible global economic growth by what measurement, and how does that measurement translate to something beneficial to society at large?
Also, I mean, you're kinda assuming that there weren't any stifled innovations (there were) or misleading PR to keep people from looking for alternatives (there were) or ...
Interestingly, we've continued with incredible global economic growth by most measures, despite the increasing use of newer alternatives to fossil fuels...
I interned at Exxon during the gulf oil spill and saw two interesting actions play out while there.
Exxon was responsible for the oil spill response that coagulated the oil and sank it. They were surprisingly proud of this, having recommended it to BP so that the extent of leaked oil was less noticeable from the surface.
Exxon also invested heavily in an alternative energy company doing research to create oil from a certain type of algae. The investment was all a PR stunt that gave them enough leverage to shelve the research that was successful enough to be considered a threat.
Ha! Tell that to the species of primates that will happily squeeze even the last ounce of resources from the only habitable planet they have, to enrich said shareholders. Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than their immediate family, and this is no exception.
> Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than their immediate family, and this is no exception.
As far as we can tell humans are the only species that even has the capacity to recognize such things as “resources” and produce forecasts of their limits. Literally every other species is kept in check by either consuming resources until they run out or predation. We are not unique in this regard.
And I never claimed otherwise. We might be aware of the problems we cause, but that doesn't seem to imply we're able to fix them -- we're still primates after all.
That is no reason to throw all ethic considerations over board. We have ethics panels on scientific studies for a very good reason, unless you want to let Dr. Mengele and his friends decide on progress.
It is a good thing that society has mechanisms to at least try and control the rate of progress.
There is no objective ethic considerations, furthermore the events unfolding now have absolutely 0 evidence that "ALL" ethic considerations are being thrown overboard.
The really interesting question is whether AI, provided with superhuman inference, is better at this than humans. All the most powerful humans remain relentlessly human, and sometimes show it to tragic and/or laughable effect.
To some extent human societies viewed as eusocial organisms are better at this than individual humans. And rightly so, because human follies can have catastrophic effects on the society/organism.
Cmon, there's a myriad of examples where corporate/shareholder interest goes against humanities interest as a whole, see fossil fuels and PFAS for ones in the current zeitgeist.
The climate crisis has proven pretty thoroughly that companies will choose short term profit over humanity’s long term success every time. Public companies are literally forced to do so.
Nobody knows “humanity’s long term interest” with any certainty. Consider that fossil fuels allowed humanity to make massive technological advancements in a relatively short time. Yes, it caused climate change, but perhaps those same technological advancements allow us to fix or adapt to that. Then, in 500 years, another disaster like an asteroid or a solar flare or the Earth’s magnetic poles reversing or whatever happens, and without the boost from fossil fuels we would have been too technologically behind to be able to survive it. What was in humanity’s long term interest then?
I’m not saying that’s definitely the case, but moving slowly when you live in a universe that might hurl a giant rock at you any minute doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Corporate shareholder interest has been proven to be short sighted again and again throughout history. Believing such entities can properly prepare for a singularity event is more delusional than asking a fruit fly to fly an aircraft.
especially when corporate governance is basically just a stripped down social government. almost all dystopian fiction shows that they're nothing more that authority without representation to the greater good.
sure, we should have competitive bodies seeking better means to ends but ultimately there's always going to be a structure to hold them accountable.
people have a lot of faith that money is the best fitness function for humanity.
Shareholders tend to be institutions whose charter is to maximize profit from the shares. An economic system that doesn't factor in human welfare is worth a thousand villains.
As opposed to what? (National) Socialism was for the benefit of the working people on paper, but in practice that meant imprisoning, murdering and impoverishing anybody thought to be working against the people's welfare. Since this included most productive members of society it made everyone poorer anyway.
Human welfare is the domain of politics, not the economic system. The forces that are supposed to inject human welfare into economic decisions are the state through regulation, employees through negotiation and unions and civil society through the press.
What you describe is indeed the liberal (as in liberalism) ideal of how societies should be structured. But what is supposed to happen is necessarily not what actually happens.
The state should be controlled by the population through democracy, but few would claim with a straight face that the economic power doesn't influence the state.
They do not want to exterminate humanity or the ecosystem, but rather profit from the controlled destruction of life, as they try to do out of everything.
You might notice that history has shown that businesses - especially large ones - and their leadership are very bad at considering the impacts to anyone but themselves. Almost like their entire purpose is to make money for themselves at the expense of literally anyone (or ideally everyone) else on the planet.
Worse yet, the businesses they're competing against will include people willing to do whatever it takes, even if that means sacrificing long-term goals. Almost like it's a race to the bottom that you can see in action every day.
I'm sure Exxon's shareholders and leadership were also part of humanity in the 70s & 80s, and presumably by your logic this means they wouldn't have put their corporate profits ahead of suppressing climate research that perhaps indicated that their greed would contribute to an existential threat to civilisation and the quality of life of their children & grandchildren?
That assumption hasn't worked with the cigarette, oil, or pharmaceutical industries. Why would it work here?
It doesn't take a cartoon supervillain to keep selling cigarettes like candy even though you know they increase cancer risks. Or for oil companies to keep producing oil and burying alternative energy sources. Or for the Sacklers to give us Oxy.
I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.