The Musk Obsession

Image: Unsplash

I find the conservative celebration of Musk taking over Twitter incredibly disturbing. Nothing about him says he's on team good. 

- He's a major pusher of the Green revolution. His car company is at the forefront of providing the technology for it. 

- His company was behind an over priced, under capable battery being set up in South Australia. Instead of real energy infrastructure, like coal or gas power. Though I suppose he was just offering a product that overly zealous carbon neutral targeting politicians wanted. 

- He is a major encourager of the transhumanist movement, and has openly discussed his desires to meld the human mind with software, and humans with machines. A course that can only go bad. 

"Musk told the World Government Summit in 2017 that as humanity’s daily dependence on technology increases, humans should simply merge with machines.

“To some degree, we are already a cyborg,” Musk told the audience at the summit. For Musk, becoming a cyborg — a sort of superhuman with both biological and technological capabilities — is only one step away. Think Iron Man.

We all love a good superhero movie, but anyone who’s seen one knows what happens to the innocent bystanders. Mary Shelley warned us about this more than 200 years ago.

Become a human-robot hybrid yourself, Musk argues, and mankind may still end up on top when the inevitable robot wars come. True, if the purpose of humanity is simply mere survival, then why should we not ensure our immortal existence as highly intelligent yet soulless machines?

“I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer,” Musk said in an interview in 2016, “Just as your cortex works symbiotically with your limbic system, your third digital layer could work symbiotically with you.”

Nothing about him says he is on team good. He's a genuine technocrat, a highly capable, skilled and brilliant one, for sure. But nothing of this means he's on team good. 

Why does a tech billionaire want to buy one of the biggest social media platforms in the world? We can't know for sure, but it's definitely not for charitable reasons. Having access to so much user data must be useful to him. 

He's part of the upper echelons of the elite. Why is this so exciting for people? 

Because he said he believes in free speech? Free speech can't save the West.

Because he's anti-establishment? In what ways? 

Perhaps this is a genuine conflict between different factions of the global elite, and we, the ordinary citizens, may benefit from it. But I find that hard to believe, considering his desires to technologically evolve humanity in ungodly ways. 

Edit: interesting statement mister Musk. A pretty clear signal of allegiance.