π Faster, Please! Week in Review #45
The meaning of SpaceX's Starship, governing ChatGPT, and Sonny Bunch on pessimistic Hollywood
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
β Looking forward: SpaceX and Starship provide an aspirational opportunity for America
β Do we need a World Congress to govern AI?
β Is America ready for another rocket disaster?Best of the Pod
β A conversation with entertainment and culture critic Sonny Bunch on the importance of Hollywood's vision of the future
Essay Highlights
π Looking forward: SpaceX and Starship provide an aspirational opportunity for America
While only a test flight, a successful launch of the SpaceX Starship rocket would be America and humanityβs most important step forward since Apollo 11 toward becoming a true spacefaring and multiplanetary civilization. Not only does Starship provide a teachable moment β current events, economics, history, science β but also an aspirational one. For their entire lives, kids have been fed a diet of dystopian images about the future: out-of-control AI, chaotic climate, extreme inequality, and plagues that will either kill you or zombify you. Starship provides an opportunity to present a different vision of what the future can be. America took a 50-year pause from the Atomic and Space Ages. Now we are on the verge of simultaneous Biotechnology, Machine Learning, Nuclear (and Geothermal), and New Space Ages. Are we culturally ready for them? We donβt need to be a country of extreme risk takers. But enough us of need to see possibility of a better future so government doesnβt block the risk taker and innovator.
π€ Do we need a World Congress to govern AI?
Even more than the absurd notion of an indefinite, multiyear, government-enforced moratorium, the idea of holding a βWorld Congressβ really gets under my skin. Letβs think about who might attend such an august global gathering. Of course, China would attend. Not only would that nationβs communist rulers embrace the opportunity to help draft global governance rules and show it runs a responsible emerging superpower, but Beijing might well see the World AI Congress as an opportunity to play catch-up with America, which currently has a lead when it comes to generative AI. Why would we trust China to follow any sort of pause or stay within any sort of guardrails given that it looks to have just suffered its own version of Sputnik? And of course, the US would send representatives. But donβt expect them to advocate the sort of light-touch regulatory approach Iβve been advocating. Indeed, I think I might fear the outcome from a World AI Congress right now far more than my biggest concerns about how machine learning might evolve.
π₯ Is America ready for another rocket disaster?
Just after SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded, so did social media with plenty of gleeful reactions from people who simply donβt like Elon Musk. Certainly ignorance about the iterative, trial-and-error model of SpaceX is playing a role here. As the great space journalist Eric Berger writes at Ars Technica : βNASA followed a linear design method, complete with extensive and expensive analysis, because a failure of the SLS rocket would have raised serious questions about the agency's competence. Fortunately for SpaceX, the company can afford to βfail.ββ If Starship were a NASA program, all else equal, I wonder what the reaction would be today after yesterdayβs test flight than ended in an explosion. There might well be hearings and calls for funding cuts from anti-space politicians. Elon Musk has previously said that βthere's a window that could be open for a long time or a short timeβ when it comes to creating a multiplanetary civilization, and speculated how any use of nuclear weapons could create βa very powerful social movement that's anti-technology.β After watching the reaction to single exploding rocket, something far less consequential than a nuclear explosion may do the trick.
Best of the Pod
Sonny Bunch is the culture editor for TheΒ Bulwark, where he hostsΒ The Bulwark Goes to HollywoodΒ newsletter and podcast.
James Pethokoukis: I write a lot about negative future-pessimistic media. Netflix has a big new movie in the works, a $200 million film directed by the Russo brothers, who you may know from the Marvel movies. Theyβve got Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt. Big production. It's called The Electric State. And this is a summary of this film: βA runaway teenager and her β¦ robot travel west through a strange USA, where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside heaped together with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline.β And then it goes on about our βhollow core of civilization has finally caved in.β
This might be a fantastic film, and I have a lot of confidence in the Russo Brothers and that budget. Here we are, we have a lot of interesting things cooking in the world from the Musk rockets and AI and huge breakthroughs in biotechnology, and that's the movie they're giving us for $200 million, about the decline of consumerist society. You've been writing a bit about this topic. When does it end?
Sonny Bunch: It's interesting because I was thinking about this the other day: Really, what is the only truly utopian vision of the future? It's Star Trek. That's about it. In terms of mass popular entertainment, the only really, truly utopian ideal of the future is Star Trek. Now, there's still conflict in Star Trek. But it is at least a kind of post-scarcity society where folks are interested in exploring the world and bettering everyone. Look, part of this is it is easier to create tension and drama out of things that are bad. And what's the easiest way to look at how things might be bad? Look at what basically works about right now and say, βWell, what if this doesn't work? What if it's actually bad for us?β The idea of Netflix producing a stirring condemnation of consumerist society is kind of funny in and of itself. Netflix is the absolute peak of consumerism.
Literally, the mission statement of Netflix is to sit on your couch and consume; consume so much you don't fall asleep. The initial argument for Netflix one of the creators the company made was, βWe are trying to win the war against sleep.β They're not winning the war against sleep by encouraging people to create wonderful new advancements of society. Itβs just to sit there and passively consume. So it's kind of funny. I like a good dystopian action movie. I can watch those all day long, so I'm probably as much of the problem as anything else. But it's definitely a thing.