I can jump in here for the delusions part. My knowledge of Musk comes only from watching every video and reading anything he said until about a year ago.
A) FSD has been coming for a while now. The historical record seems to indicate that he was either delusional by at least years, or knowingly lying. I would bet on the prior.
B) he stood in front of everyone at Boca Chica and with a straight face said that the very early Starship prototype behind him was going to orbit. Again, I actually believe maybe he thought it. Which is kinda weird/scary?
To be fair, it is arguable that Musk has accomplished more good-for-the-species stuff than any one human, ever.
> To be fair, it is arguable that Musk has accomplished more good-for-the-species stuff than any one human, ever.
Is this a serious take? He has worked in EV cars and rockets. Cars are something we should be moving away from and not towards. How have those things benefited even a fraction of the global population? Even in the U.S., inequality has continued to rise, poverty has risen, education has decreased, and several other poor indicators. Musk has used a huge portion of public funds in his companies, funds that could be used to solve these very real problems, and he’s done nothing to return value back to the general public.
> cars are something we should be moving away from…
Well there are lots of things humans should be doing, and never do. But I do believe Musk already did accomplish Tesla’s goal of accelerating electrification of the planet. Combustion is just less efficient. The ball is now rolling. Resistance is futile.
I believe it is arguable that some of the more damaging climate change scenarios are possible. So anyone moving the needle there could be extremely beneficial in the long run. Musk moved the needle more than anyone in modern history, hasn’t he?
I also do buy into the long-term goal of making Earth’s life spread beyond Earth. I happen to believe that complex lifeforms are extremely rare volumetrically. It does seem worth it to me, and I truly cannot think of a greater goal. SpaceX has revolutionized orbital boosters with F9 and FH already dropping costs by at least half. If/when Starship and Superheavy are up and running, then the economics of getting to space may be 10x better.
On the other hand Musk is not omniscient and scares the crap out of me sometimes.
The boring company plan for West LA didn’t make sense beyond paper and pencil prototyping.
I got banned from multiple Tesla forums for being upset about Tesla’s proof of work crypto investment. Eventually Musk came around on that too, but why did it take so long? How did this even pass muster?
The scariest thing is Neuralink though. The goal is to give humans a fighting chance to compete with a possible future AGI by greatly increasing our i/o bandwidth. Ok, but assuming AGI is created, then it’s fair to assume that it will be possible to increase the AGIs speed using various methods. Maybe we will have a chance to compete up to some point, but that time will pass as AGI develops further.
We are trading a fleeting advantage against a possible future threat in exchange for giving read/write access to our brains to the governments, corporations, and NSO Groups who we all know and trust. Would love to be talked down from that one because this appears to be monumentally dumb to me right now.
There are exactly zero examples through human history, of individuals who did enormous things for the species, although they had their extraordinary or even mundane faults.
This is not to excuse Elon - or indeed any of us. The expectation that any human being is free of these kinds of moral sins, is unreasonable. And such parody is exactly why, indeed, [1] the imperative to make humans multi-planetary - i.e. with strategically enhanced survival potential, is important.
Unless of course you are in the 'humans are dumb and must perish' camp. Jump you to [1], human!
Because what has Musk done for the "good of the species"?
I mean you have guys like Fritz Haber, whose Haber-Bosch process is responsible for the production of nearly two-thirds of the world's foodstuffs and literally feeds half the world.
Or Stanley Norman Cohen, father of genetic modification. Whose patents touch nearly every other biological field today. You literally cannot calculate the number of lives he has potentially saved.
Those are great examples which are certainly currently higher-ranked. I suppose the argument for Musk would only make sense in a few decades, if climate change was catastrophic and he could be credited with something like advancing electrification by 10 years, and a Mars settlement was bustling. Then maybe he could be up there with the greats.
A) FSD has been coming for a while now. The historical record seems to indicate that he was either delusional by at least years, or knowingly lying. I would bet on the prior.
B) he stood in front of everyone at Boca Chica and with a straight face said that the very early Starship prototype behind him was going to orbit. Again, I actually believe maybe he thought it. Which is kinda weird/scary?
To be fair, it is arguable that Musk has accomplished more good-for-the-species stuff than any one human, ever.