A few days ago, I listened to a conversation between two American engineers whom I’ve been following for years. Among other things they talked about the scrutiny Elon Musk’s plan for humanity is under and expressed complete disbelief in how anyone could possibly criticize this plan. This triggered me to explain why it is in fact completely rational to do so.
Elon Musk tries to build rockets and everything else that is necessary to get humanity to become a multiplanetary species. This, Elon Musk claims, would allow us humans to survive a strike on any one planet, so that we can extend the light of consciousness into the world and into the universe and persist long into the future. So far so good but he also constantly states that what he really cares about is humanity and that he is operating on behalf of all of humanity. Meaning, he is doing it for you, me, and everyone else.
How could anyone possibly criticize such a noble mission and work? This is precisely the point the two engineers were making. And how could anyone want Elon Musk to care about humanity but not in the way he’s doing it right now? This seems to be incomprehensible to the two engineers’ minds.
Elon and the two engineers —the three super engineers— assume they know what people want while actually they don’t. There is a flaw in how they think about people.
A super engineer is a person who in their thinking reduces wholes to pieces and parts to make new and different wholes. While doing so he loses sight of the importance of the interactions between the pieces and parts that make up the whole and from which, crucially, the differences between wholes made of similar parts emerge. When this way of thinking is applied to human beings and when the super engineer does what he does with machines with humans, he reduces humans to parts until the differences between humans disappear. Uniqueness disappears.
From here it doesn’t take much to believe that since I’m made of the same parts as you, and I can’t see any difference between me and you, you probably want the same stuff as I do. Why wouldn’t you, you are the same as me. And so what I want must be what you want and what everyone else wants. So, as long as the super engineer is doing what he wants, he thinks he’s doing what everyone else wants, and it’s not worth asking anyone about what they truly want.
Then, the belief that everyone wants the same thing because we are all the same gets bunched together into one term “humanity” in which every human can be replaced by any other human.
This is the humanity the super engineer wants to save. He doesn’t care about you, he cares about humanity. In humanity, humans are little building blocks with two legs and two hands and a head that make up humanity. He cares as much about you as you care about a single one of your skin cells. You need your skin cells and you care about your cells but you couldn’t care less about each cell individually. He cares about humans but not about specific humans, not about what makes you you.
For a lot of technologists and engineers the ultimate goal of all of humanity is survival. That’s what they assume we are all going for on this planet and that it is our highest purpose in life. Of course this is also the goal of the super engineer. Survival of humanity. It’s an acceptable goal and there is nothing to say against it per se but what he doesn’t get is that some people simply don’t care about it as much as he does or don’t care about it at all. People don’t want the same things.
He doesn’t get, for example, that enjoying life could be something that humanity wants. Maybe people just want the world to be comfortable. Maybe people just want to enjoy their time here on this planet in peace with their loved ones. Maybe people don’t really want the world to be full of work and ambition and competition. Maybe some people want the world to be just right, for them, whatever that means.
So what DOESN’T the super engineer do? Exclusively help people who need him. Although that is exactly what a superhero —that’s who Elon seems to compare himself to— does. A superhero shows up and helps people that are clearly in need, while he leaves everyone else alone. The super engineer also doesn’t understand what people want as I’ve argued. And he doesn’t deeply understand people in general. For the super engineer or anyone else to assume that they do understand what everyone else on the planet wants is simply ignorant. If it’s not ignorance then I would simply call it arrogance. For someone as powerful as Elon Musk this arrogance can then quickly turn him into someone dangerous.
In my opinion, this will be a problem with the American way of thinking in this new administration, run by super engineers and others who think similarly, who to say the least do not know their own limits, and who hold the constant belief that they have to save humanity, while not being able to see who the people they are trying to save really are and what they really want.
Gute Gedanken !