alt Hacker NewsColonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man.
Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.
But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
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> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.
And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.
You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.
I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.