[f1yght]

I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.

[elefanten]

Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.

Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.

So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?

[bko]

I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models.

What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more?

Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.

So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.

[mbgerring]

There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:

- electrify everything, including industrial processes

- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification

- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation

- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere

It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.

I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.

I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.

Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.

[bee_rider]

> What does "working on climate change" look like?

There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).

[gusmally]

>I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.

But neither of those things is their goal. If they happen to build tech that makes your life better, it's because it makes them money (that, generally speaking, they try not to pay taxes on)

[housebear]

Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."

I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.

[lesuorac]

Nobody wants to be told that they have to install solar panels to save climate change.

Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.

There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.

[bobxmax]

Elon has done more to help stave of climate change than every climate activist and non profit org on this planet combined. He's a megalomaniacal douche who has undone all of that goodwill, but it doesn't change the fact that he did that against all odds.

Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.

"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.

[derektank]

While I more or less agree with your assessment, capitalism won't solve the problem of negative externalities like CO2 emissions unless private actors are provided incentives by public actors like governments. Tesla has done a lot to reduce CO2 emissions from personal vehicles, but they wouldn't be where they are today without loans from the DOE or tax credits on electric vehicles.