There are biologists who’ve spent their careers working on some species of beetle in the tropical rainforest, and they just love the rainforest in their bones And they feel that when they go testify in Congress to some committee, that they can’t just say, “I love it in my bones and you guys will love it too, if you share it with me.” They have to say, “Oh, we’ve done all this math and computed that there’s an ecosystem service here.” And I think that that has really impoverished our debate about environmental issues.
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I think the obvious thing to do with one computer per planet is fix climate change before it destroys agriculture and leaves billions of people to starve. That seems like a fairly reasonable kind of an objective. You know, there are all kinds of little optimizations you could do with these things, but fundamentally the big unsolved challenges that humanity faces are climate change and resource scarcity.
We have been having a discussion amongst ourselves about elitism and to the sort of voices that we’re hearing in a project like this. And one of the tricks of talking to people about the future is that often you get people who have a lot of time to think about the future.
My main goal is not to die in the first place. I hope to keep living, hopefully long enough that science will have solved the aging problem and I won’t have to die. But since I don’t know how long that’s going to take, cryonics is the real backup policy for me.
My main point is that Internet technology today does not support the right of assembly, and therefore it cannot and does not support democracy. The reason is that even though we can easily form groups on Google, Facebook, you name it, we don’t know who the people on the group are.