
Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy' - denzil_correa
https://www.wired.com/story/musk-zuckerberg-bezos-and-ethically-iffy-philanthropy/
======
whack
This is one of the laziest articles I've read. Let me boil down the author's
entire argument into one sentence: _" These tech billionaires want to help
millions of people, not just the person next door. How heartless!"_

There are many valid critiques that could have been made. For example: _"
Zuckerberg claims that all lives have equal value, and hence, we should
prioritize the countless future humans over existing ones. However, human
quality of life has been growing exponentially across generations. Extreme
poverty has been decimated over the past generation, and can realistically be
eliminated completely in the next few decades. Similarly for medical progress.
Hence, it is those suffering in the present, who will suffer the most, and
need the most help."_

Or with regard to Blue-Origin or OpenAI: _" Bezos and Musk think that by
pouring billions of dollars of resources into sci-fi projects like AI and
Space exploration, we can best help humanity. However, these projects are
nothing more than vaporware. We have no idea how or when truly intelligent AI
will be built, and worrying about super-evil AI, is like worrying about
dinosaur attacks. With regard to space exploration, humanity's problems today
have little to do with physical resources, and everything to do with disease
and human development. Building space rockets isn't going to bring humanity
forward any more than building ferraris. That Bezos and Musk are spending
billions on such hobby-projects, shows how out of touch they are with the
suffering of the world's poor."_

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the above arguments, but I can at
least respect them. Unfortunately, the author doesn't present any such
argument whatsoever. _" These billionaires have big ideas on how to change the
world, and how to best help billions of people. How heartless! Clearly they
have no respect for us as individuals."_ /s

~~~
petermcneeley
Is it horribly irrational to simply assume that the philanthropic gestures of
the very wealthy are just targeted to achieve their own personal utility
maximization? I think that it is normal to just assume self interest even in
the case of philanthropy and this of course limits the type of philanthropy to
that which has over-unity personal cost benefit ratio.

~~~
whack
If by personal-utility, you're including the satisfaction and happiness that
good-hearted people derive from helping others, then I completely agree. Not
just for the "very wealthy", but for everyone.

Often, people twist this into somehow being a bad thing. _" Bill Gates isn't a
good guy. He's just donating billions to charity and saving millions of lives
because that makes him happy"_.

Problem is, you can twist any good deed into pure selfishness, using this
chain of logic. " _Your father wasn 't a good man. Working hard to take care
of his family, gave him great happiness, and that's why he did it"_.

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melling
Bezos is right. Most people don't think about the long game. What can we do
today to more quickly increase our tech tree 25, 50, 100, 200 years into the
future? If we spent more of our GDP 50 years ago on R&D, our knowledge would
be much greater than today. Solar energy, electric vehicles, etc would already
be mainstream, for example. Our ability to treat cancer(s), alzheimer's, heart
disease would be 20 years more advanced.

"Jeff Bezos, too, is thinking at the species-existence level. “The solar
system can easily support a trillion humans,” he says. “And if we had a
trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and
unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for
all practical purposes. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's
great-grandchildren to live in.” That’s why Bezos is spending a billion
dollars a year on Blue Origin, his space travel company—and that’s why,
controversially, he thinks that Blue Origin is really the only way to spend
such enormous resources. If something you did today could materially improve
the lives of trillions of humans in the future, then that benefit would have
to outweigh anything you did for mere millions of humans in the present."

~~~
thaumasiotes
With a trillion humans, a lot more of the energy available to perform work
would be human effort. The humans providing low-level effort will be
desperately poor, because that low-level effort isn't worth much.

The Black Death did wonders for the peasant class of Europe by killing a third
of them. Those who didn't die were much richer than peasants had been
previously. (Nobles were poorer, because most of the wealth of nobles was the
peasants who worked their land. Losing a third of your wealth isn't so great;
losing a third of your competition is.)

If you want humans to have unlimited resources and unlimited power, you should
focus on driving numbers down, not up.

In a different but related analogy, _Seeing like a State_ likes to emphasize
how intensive agriculture by peasants who are intimately familiar with the
local land, weather, crops, and pests is more productive (in terms of food
produced per acre) than modern industrial agriculture. The difference is that
the local peasant devotes all his time to cultivating a man-sized area of
land. The extra productivity goes to him, and he eats it, but he's very poor.
One man using inefficient machines to cultivate 20 fields at 80% efficiency is
a lot richer than any of the 60 men cultivating a third of a field each at
100% efficiency, and the society around that one man is richer too because,
unlike the 60 peasants, he produces a lot of surplus to trade with them.

~~~
cwkoss
Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems
which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by
the elite and/or powerful.

We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably
several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack
of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle'
greed so that you still motivate productive work without allowing those with
disproportionate power to game the system in their favor. Technology can help
us solve this.

~~~
wilsonnb
I think that the idea of technology saving us from our inherent natural
tendencies is nice to think about but ultimately naive.

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jessaustin
If we're going to squint at charities, there's a lot more squinting to be done
one or two rungs down the ladder from Gates and Bezos. Of course, that would
involve uncomfortable observations about people who care about what is said
about them and have the resources to spread their displeasure, so we don't see
that journalism.

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arpyzo
The part of this philosophy that I disagree with is that I believe solving the
problems of today will put us in a much better position to solve tomorrow’s
problems.

With that in mind I feel that completely discounting people alive today in
favor of a theoretical future is both cruel and short sighted.

------
thedarkginger
If it's unethical for billionaire tech founders to focus on the needs of
future generations, what moral grounding does, say, environmentalism have?

By this logic, would it not be fair to say that every dollar invested in green
solutions comes at the expense of other worthy societal projects that could
meaningfully change the status quo?

Those efforts are largely seen as virtuous. Seems to me the only difference
here is the origin of the money: tech.

~~~
sp3000
I agree. And reading through the article, I didn't really see any argument
made against why what Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos are doing is unethical.

When all is said and done, Bill Gates will go down as the person who saved
more human lives in a systematic and deliberate way than any other human in
history. We need people like him. We also need people like Jeff Bezos, who
seems to naturally operate on a super long-term thinking mental model. I've
said it before on here: Thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of
billions, if not trillions, of people populating multiple star systems in this
galaxy. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people like Bezos and
Musk, and the steps they are taking today to address space travel and AI.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Bill Gates will go down as the person who saved more human lives in a
> systematic and deliberate way than any other human in history

There's nothing special about doing it in a systematic and deliberate way.
According to legend, the Yellow Emperor taught the Chinese to practice
agriculture. In terms of contribution to human life, this would dwarf anything
Bill Gates could ever accomplish.

In reality, of course, agriculture arose in an unorganized way, but does that
make it less significant?

~~~
focal
Reminds me of Haber-Bosch, credited for saving billions of lives via synthetic
fertilizer. [http://www.scienceheroes.com/](http://www.scienceheroes.com/)

~~~
nefitty
Assuming this is true, it seems reasonable that on larger timescales, and with
greater resources, even more future human lives can be saved. It's a
refreshing view, considering my main impetus for a long time has been, "Reduce
suffering in the universe." Actively trying to create more life is
antithetical to that goal, as suffering is an integral experience of a
sufficiently intelligent being. I don't mean to say that that's where I've
landed, but my mind is beginning to claw at the edified ethical structures it
has built up, thanks to this mega-long-term frame.

Does it make sense to make the universe more welcoming to life, if life is the
vehicle of suffering? Would Super-AI's possibly have unbounded levels of
suffering-potential? If there is a non-zero chance of that being true, is
creating AI the ultimate ethical iniquity possible?

The people that were saved by this fertilizer, did their lives contribute to a
net reduction in suffering in the universe? I'm doubtful of that but I'm
beginning to question the edge value of this Singerian utilitarian philosophy.

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dleslie
> In the eyes of Bezos and Zuckerberg, it’s equally bad to concentrate on the
> suffering of the living, if doing so means ignoring the needs of the untold
> billions of people who are not yet born.

> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.

How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of
individuals not yet born; I would say that it's heartless to consider the
needs of those billions presently alive to the exclusion of those not-yet-
living. Self-serving, even.

~~~
Lionsion
>> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.

> How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of
> individuals not yet born

Are they _really_ considering the needs of unborn individuals, or just
ignoring the needs of actual living individuals to focus on sci-fi tech stuff
that excites them?

By focusing too much on the speculative sci-fi needs of future generations,
you may condemn those generations to suffer through the same hard problems we
have now that were left unsolved so some tech billionaires could focus on sexy
stuff.

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headsoup
The main thing I dislike is Bezos mentioning there being trillions of humans,
with the assumption growth must continue and we'll figure it out.

The assumption that we must grow and spread through the galaxy, rather than
determine if there's some sort of reasonable limit to keeping Earth in order
first, seems inherently flawed in assuming unlimited population inflation in
itself is net 'good.'

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asadlionpk
Maybe solving the 'sci-fi' problems will make today's problems irrelevant. I
feel that's what they all are counting on.

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teaspoons
a trillion humans, 8 of which own 90% of the wealth

~~~
jessaustin
It is natural for the Ruler to desire more Subjects.

~~~
teaspoons
"you must suffer now so that generations to come can worship me"

------
yuhong
I don't like the idea of the current debt based economy that allows infinite
amount of US debt to be printed in the first place, effectively meaning that
other countries has to be poorer.

