I just happened to see the transcript of the Q4 earnings call for Tesla, and once Elon started speaking I was astounded by his semi-coherence, and this passage, in particular, stood out:
Amazing era of of abundance and and I think with the with the advent with with the continued growth of AI and robotics. I think we actually are headed to a future of universal high income, not universal basic income, but universal high income. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of change along the way, but but that is that is that is what I see as the most likely outcome.
This is interesting from two perspectives:
The first is that the whole “abundance” thing is something the Technocracy movement of the 1930’s was talking about (I wrote about this some time ago, and Elon’s grandfather was a leader in that movement. Of course it turned out later that he was such a rabid racist that he had to move to South Africa. I am reminded of the sticker you see on some Teslas stating that they bought the car before “Elon went crazy”. Both Elon and his grandfather seemed to, initially, promote a utopian vision, but ended up pushing for racism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theories. Whether either actually changed is up for debate.
The second is that I cannot figure out if he is trying to delude us, or if he is deluding himself. Anybody with an ounce of awareness understands that there is no road from where we are to any sort of universal income, whether high or basic. The current regime is actively working against any sort of “safety net” for non-billionaires. Even in good times we couldn’t agree that nobody deserves to be homeless, starving, and without healthcare.
It is quite possible that his drug-addled brain is so filled with misinterpreted science fiction he somehow thinks that once he replaces all workers with AI, some magic will happen to give everything away to everybody. A sort of missing step plan like:
On the other hand, maybe he is lying with all his might to keep us from noticing how he and his billionaire friends are working hard to establish a techo-feudalist police state.
Or most likely both.
Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy, a utopian dreamer, always thinking about how to “save the world”, wandering through a county fair. In amongst the usual merchants he spots a booth run by an organization called Technocracy. A book with the title “Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?” catches his eye and draws him in. Being shy, he grabs a few pieces of literature and wanders off. Upon reading these it seems to be the very utopian dreams he has had, and this organization claims to have the “blueprints”. He and his father quickly join the organization and become deeply involved in it.
The boy, of course, was me. After many years I gradually drifted away from the organisation. M. King Hubbert, a co-founder of the organization and author of the “study course” left the organization in the 1940s, reportedly due to dissatisfaction with the way the organization was run, not with the ideas. I would like to think that he and I would have been in agreement on a number of points.
However, my purpose here is not to critique the organization, but rather to focus in on one of the key points the Technocrats made, their idea of “energy accounting”. Essentially they proposed replacing the “price system” (our current money/debt based system) with one which used energy measurements. The Technocrats paired this idea with the “abundance” of available resources, which seems paradoxical, since the idea of measuring energy resources becomes much more relevant in an era where energy is scarce. But when Technocracy’s ideas were put together, the resources available seemed nearly limitless. It took another 40 years for us to get our first taste of energy scarcity (I have vague memories of my parents waiting in long lines to fill up the gas tank) This is the point where we needed to start looking carefully at where our energy is coming from and where it is going. Sadly, this never happened.
The more general lesson of Technocracy is that we need to look for opportunities to apply scientific methods to everything we do. The more we can quantify things with objective measurements (whether energy or otherwise) the less prone we will be to being misled by snake-oil salesmen or vacuous politicians. This also means that if evidence is shown that what we are doing is ineffective or causing harm, we need to re-evaluate what we are doing. Sadly the Technocracy movement never figured this out, and even more tragically, we, as a culture, have veered farther from this ideal than we were when the Technocracy movement first started.