Jill Lepore offers theory that billionaire’s mission to colonise Mars reflects technocratic philosophy
Where does Elon Musk get his ideas from? What is he trying to achieve and who does he want to be? Many of us are desperate to understand the world’s richest man, whose electric vehiclemaker Tesla is now, according to the stock market, worth a trillion dollars. Jill Lepore, a historian at Harvard University, suggests Musk was shaped by his adolescent love of science fiction and the strange, science-obsessed politics of his Canadian grandfather.
Believing that science and technology could cure all ills, Haldeman campaigned for the capitalist monetary infrastructure to be replaced by a new universal currency, based on a unit of heat, to be known as the erg. The technocrats even wanted an end to prices, in the view that scientists could handle distribution within society far better than the market.Jill Lepore, Harvard University historian
What Lepore finds disturbing is that Musk appears to have misinterpreted the science fiction he was reading, something she believes should worry us all. “A lot of what he seems to be inspired by as though it was utopian,” she said in an interview, “was in fact dystopian.”Much science fiction in the middle of the century was meant as a warning of how science could come to dominate our lives. But young Elon Musk, Lepore says, instead found the dystopian future exciting.
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