If I was a Bay Area VC, and I had $5m to invest annually and $100k to donate to people researching the long-term future (e.g. because it’s interesting and I like the idea of being the one to drive the research), it would be foolish to spend some of the $5m investing in people researching nanofactories.
But it would also be foolish to donate some of the $100k to the kinds of people who say “nanorobotics is an obvious scam, they can just make up whatever they want”.
And people don’t realize that short-term investment and long-term predictions are separate domains that are both valuable in their own way, because there are so few people outside of the near-term focused private sector who are thinking seriously about the future.
They just assume that thinking about the long-term future is just a twisted, failed perversion of the private sector, because of how deeply immersed they are in the private sector’s perspective exclusively.
As a result, they never have a chance to notice that the long-term future is something that they and their families might end up living in.
If I was a Bay Area VC, and I had $5m to invest annually and $100k to donate to people researching the long-term future (e.g. because it’s interesting and I like the idea of being the one to drive the research), it would be foolish to spend some of the $5m investing in people researching nanofactories.
But it would also be foolish to donate some of the $100k to the kinds of people who say “nanorobotics is an obvious scam, they can just make up whatever they want”.
And people don’t realize that short-term investment and long-term predictions are separate domains that are both valuable in their own way, because there are so few people outside of the near-term focused private sector who are thinking seriously about the future.
They just assume that thinking about the long-term future is just a twisted, failed perversion of the private sector, because of how deeply immersed they are in the private sector’s perspective exclusively.
As a result, they never have a chance to notice that the long-term future is something that they and their families might end up living in.