The exoteric hoi polloi get pablum and propaganda. (They can't appreciate good scifi anyway). Give them moral fables wrapped in cowboys with laser-guns.

(Underwater Love, Smoke City, 1995)

The author provides an alternative, but perhaps readers might miss it.

Science fiction is fiction not science.

The alternative to science fiction is the scientific method and the elucidation of scientific fact.

But these individuals are outcasts, dropouts, social failures.

Not interested in education generally.

Not interested in conventional occupations.

They believe they know enough yet they barely know anything.

Understanding computers is a far cry from understanding life.

It's arguable, due to the time committment required, the more one understands computers the less one probably understands "the real world".

Are these individuals interested in scientific fact, or are they more interested in fantasy and belief.

Like Elisabeth Holmes.

Charles Stross, the author of this op-ed, makes his living writing science fiction and fantasy.

"Stick to what you know." Unlike "tech billionaires", Stross knows what he is talking about.

The problem is the future is being created by sociopathic, crony capitalist neo-reactionary cultists who want to rule over a broken world as its brutal philosopher kings, and consign everyone else into the mouth of Moloch. These are the people for whom the meme "Please don't create the Torment Nexus" was made. These people are the reason Ted Kaczynski is so popular amongst the tech underclass.

I don't know what the alternative is, but we should be concerned.

Always has been.

Funny how we think about needing to live longer or travel faster than light.

Entangled particles aren’t going to help us. (Wish i could find that video that explains why…)

Related tangent, the first time I met a meme IRL was when I first sat down with the CTO of a pretty well funded "startup" in the valley and as he was trying sell me on working there, regaling me with the story of him and his cofounders (good 30 years my senior) hustle and grind in the Stanford library before they started while I looked at his model of the Enterprise on his desk...

But then, many alive today have probably seen more of the world through a screen than outside of one, so it perhaps shouldn't be surprising.

Dunno, maybe Plato was onto something when he wanted to ban fiction in his republic...

It's easier to be optimistic and to write optimistic when your society has high marginal tax rates and visibly uses those rates to combat poverty, fund research, and subsidize college (and when you're part of the demographic receiving most of those benefits).

When you see societal protections being stripped away and privatized, the suffering that was caused by that, and the callous nature of your fellow citizens who "got theirs" and continue to vote for politicians who attack and tear down the systems that enabled such growth and optimism, you're more likely to write stories shaped by that world view.

Dystopian fiction has a long history, but from stories I've read it feels like the inflection point was, as with so many things, the Vietnam war, which for many people shattered the myth of technological infallability.

As a kid I used to want things to like Star Trek.

I now have a smart phone instead of a communicator, touch screen tablets, a universal translator, my house responds when I call it "computer," and I've seen those expensive in-wall coffee/tea makers . . .

But that wasn't what I really wanted. I wanted the future where people didn't have to worry about money, where the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy wasn't a concern for anyone, and where people were enabled to learn and produce and contribute as they truly desired, so they did.

Gene Roddenberry died. Everything Star Trek turned dark and twisted. And I realized that I didn't get my dream so much as a pile of consumer goods, most of them trying to advertise at me, surveil me, or both.

I think I'm not the only one with this experience.

That’s why people need to STFU about Rokos basilisk.

Not perfectly cooperative, sure, but shockingly cooperative. Just recently I was sat in a commercial airline for 9 hours and struck by how much harder it would be to transport several hundred consciousness chimpanzees.

They myth that when things break down, people revert to some ultra-survivalist hyper-individual bloodline protecting supersoldier has to die.

What happens is that society reverts to pre modern relationship templates where who you know and interpersonal skills reign supreme. Our modern society enables this myth and makes us more like it in our everyday lives than our natural cooperative base state.