Longtermism is the belief that we should discount short-term harms to real existing human beings—such as human-induced climate change—if it brings us closer to the goal of colonizing the universe, because the needs of trillions of future people who don't actually exist yet obviously outweigh the needs of today's global poor. If you accept that it's our destiny as a species to take over the cosmos, then it follows that longtermist entrepreneurs are perfectly justified in moving fast, breaking things, and ruthlessly maximizing profit extraction, as long as they spend their wealth on colonizing Mars. Which is just the first step on the road to conquering the galaxy and a bunch of other stuff like mind uploading, becoming immortal, creating artificial intelligences to do all the tedious work, resurrecting the dead, and taking over the universe. It posits a destiny for humanity, which of necessity makes it a secular religion. It means that if you don't believe in their plans, then you're some kind of anti-science backsliding reactionary heretic. And if this sounds just slightly insane to you, well, that's probably because you're not Elon Musk or Peter Thiel.

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So I exist in a symbiotic relationship with my readers. They keep buying my books as long as they remain enjoyable. And my publishers keep publishing my books as long as the readers keep buying them. So like other SF writers I've got a financial incentive to write books that readers find enjoyable, and that usually means conforming to their pre-existing biases. Which are rooted in the ideas they absorbed previously. Science fiction as a genre has inertia, and it's hard to get new ideas to stick if they force the readers out of their comfort zone.

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Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.

What the reading does lack is the versatility and depth that human actors bring to the same work. It’s a far cry from, say, Stephen Fry, who created a unique voice for dozens of characters while reading the Harry Potter audiobooks. But Project Gutenberg’s audiobooks are free, the process is quick, and the text-to-speech system used is scalable.

Sous l'influence du capitalisme, la culture suivra naturellement la même voix que toutes les autres activités humaines: des tomates hors-sol sans saveur “mais pas chères”.

Les joies de la concurrence, episode 37: les applications pour payer son parking…

Quand même, le principe des voitures avec des fonctionnalités sur abonnement, c'est de la bonne grosse merde mais je sens que c'est le genre de truc qui est parti pour se généraliser …

Une réflexion que je trouve très intéressante, sur l'impact du numérique dans le travail

Moi enfant : dans le futur les robots feront toutes les tâches et on pourra profiter de la vie et créer de l'art et faire de la philosophie.

Le futur : le robot a détecté que pendant les 126 000 secondes de votre semaine, seulement 121532,2 on été productives, un rapport a été envoyé à votre collaborateur N+1 pour une review des possibles optimisation de votre pourcentage de secondes productives !

Aussi futur : les robots font de l'art a votre place :/

Mais en y réfléchissant c'est pas si surprenant: les robots ça coûte une blinde et c'est très dur d'en faire pour des tâches un minimum variées, du coup dans sa recherche d'augmentation de la productivité, c'était plus facile pour le Capital de développer des méthodes de flicages automatisées des gens pour les faire bosses plus …

La même gamme de véhicule: poids multiplié par 1,5 , prix multiplié par 1,8 (en tenant compte de l'inflation), puissance moteur multipliée par deux, consommation pratiquement égale malgré 40 ans de progrès de motorisation. Quel gâchis.

Tout ce béton, tout cet acier, pour produire des salades …