Tech's Vision of the Future
At Tesla’s “We, Robot” event, Elon Musk took the stage and pitched a vision of the future that included parking lots converted into parks thanks to robotaxis, and humanoid robots that were both our servants and friends. Much of the press coverage was about how the product reveals were lacking in detail and how the robots were actually controlled by humans, but the biggest takeaway for me didn’t have much to do with how much of the presentation was real vs how much was vaporware that is a decade or more away.
What was most striking to me was that Elon Musk’s pitch for Tesla’s future products, the style of which may have felt inspiring ten years ago, fell flat. Making EVs affordable by allowing people to monetize them when not in use? People can already do that with Turo. Eliminating parking lots? Start by no longer mandating for them to be built. But what’s wrong with these answers? They conspicuously leave out the need for robotaxis. Sam Altman has said of Musk that he “desparately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.” If we don’t need robotaxis to make the world a better place, where’s the moral imperative for allowing Musk to expand his business empire unchecked?
There’s a problem with entrusting today’s tech billionaires with paving our path to the future is that too often, their vision of the future is heavily based on what is good for them, not society as a whole, even if they try to spin it otherwise. A good example is Larry Ellison’s pitch for an AI-powered surveillance society straight out of 1984, where drones and cameras,– powered by Oracle’s AI platform, to be sure!– are constantly recognizing, tracking and monitoring individuals to keep them “on their best behavior.”
Meanwhile, the crypto industry has become one of the largest sources of political contributions in the 2024 election to promote crypto-friendly candidates. In response to an article on the crypto industry’s apparent bet on Trump for creating a looser regulatory environment for cryptocurrency, which has been beset by fraud and environmental concerns, the CEO of a major crypto exchange defended the industry, referring to Bitcoin’s “humanitarian mission.”
We’ve had an incredible few decades when it comes to tech innovation, and more incredible decades are to come, but it’s becoming apparent that tech innovation alone isn’t going to lead us to the right future, especially in an environment where it has become too commonplace to obscure the profit motive under a layer of moral purpose. We need to keep each other honest and recognize that sometimes the solution is not a shiny new tech, but the harder, messier process of civic and political action, and maybe even something as boring as adopting electric trains.
Plus: After writing this post, I came across a Politico article that hits on the problems with handing the reins over to someone with a “technology for technology’s sake” philosophy.