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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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The article's entire premise is Musk saying some random shit. Remember how Musk said that he would land a man on Mars in 10 years 13 years ago? Honestly, I am incensed that people like Musk and Trump can just say shit and many people will just accept it. I can no longer tolerate it.
He says this after mentioning UBI. He really doesn't want to confront the unfortunate fact that UBI is entirely a political issue. Whatever magical beliefs one may have about how AI can create wealth, the question of how to distribute it is a social arrangement. What exactly stops the wealthy from consolidating all that wealth for themselves? The goodness of their hearts? Or is it political pushback (and violence in the bad old days), as demonstrated in every single example we have in history?
I'd say the problem is even worse now. In previous eras, some wealthy people funded libraries and parks. Nowadays we see them donate to weirdo rationalist nonsense that is completely disconnected from reality.
This is followed by four whole paragraphs about how the office sucks and wouldn't it be wonderful if AI got rid of all that. Guess what, we have remote work already! Remember how, during COVID, many software engineering jobs went fully remote, and it turned out that the work was perfectly doable and the workers' lives improved? But then there were so many puff pieces by managers about the wonderful environment of the office, and back to the office they went. Don't worry, when the magical AI is here, they'll change their minds.
Yes, there are "mindless, stupid, inane things" like chores that are unavoidable. There are also other mindless, stupid, inane things that are entirely avoidable but exist anyway because some people base their entire lives around number go up.
This isnt the only thing, the man made so many promises that were lies, or didnt work out it is almost amazing people give him the benefit of the doubt. But people have to or the economy might crash (which seems more and more inevitable now, as a fantasist related crash cant be avoided (and it is worse, if you have seen Andreessen latest weird interview it is clear Trump and Musk are not the only mental voids with a lot of money, so they might be all like that)).
The Blindsight vampires are here already.
@Soyweiser The irony is that if Musk was serious about landing a man on Mars by 2022, he had Falcon Heavy flying in 2017 and Crew Dragon flying with crew in 2020. The amount he's spent on Starship would have covered several fully-expended FH launches to Mars transfer orbit and development of a long duration crew module. We know how to soft-land ~1-2 tons on Mars.
… What, you wanted him to bring the astronauts *back* afterwards? Are you some kind of Commie?
(But my point stands.)
This was my thought the whole time: if the political will existed, we could probably already do everything that AI is supposed to "enable" here. Some of the work people would choose not to do would end up being actually important, and the market in its infinite power would need to find a way to get that work done, whether that's paying more to invent new types of automation or compensating people enough that they choose to do it without the threat of starvation and homelessness (or finding new ways to exploit people to do it, but I believe there's a floor on that at which the other two options become more economically viable), but that's the whole pitch for having a labor market in the first place. At the same time, absent that political will there's no reason to expect any change in productivity to change the current arrangement. At best the people working any jobs that get eliminated are discarded as obsolete, lose their ability to participate in the market, and are eventually handled by the criminal justice system or otherwise removed from consideration.