🚀 Billionaires dreaming of a sci-fi future is a good thing

Attacking techno-capitalists inspired by the stories of their youth is just ideological hugger-mugger

Quote of the Issue

“Punch it!” - “Han Solo,” Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

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The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

“With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic.”

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The Essay

🚀 Billionaires dreaming of a sci-fi future is a good thing

If Scientific American had intentionally written a headline to infuriate me, I doubt the editors could have done a better job than this recent one:

One of the themes in my new book — indeed, it’s right there in the title: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised — is that science fiction plays a really important role in providing images of a future worth striving and sacrificing for today. It would be helpful if Americans had some plausible, future-optimist scenarios at the ready when they hear about breakthroughs in areas such as AI, biotech, and energy. Why take the risk of promoting an Age of AI, for example, if all we can imagine is a resulting world of massive unemployment, hyper-inequality, and an eventual robopocalypse? 

What’s more, many people in science and technology were inspired to get into those fields by the science fiction they grew up reading and watching. And that group also includes lots of high-profile tech entrepreneurs and investors, as the SciAm headline correctly notes, who want to use their know-how and resources to build super-smart computers, nuclear fusion reactors, self-driving cars (flying ones, too), an orbital economy, and colonies across the Solar System. There’s Elon Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, and Sam Altman with OpenAI and Helion, among others.