Promises tracker 1

This is gonna be short and sweet, and relies on my ongoing strand of thinking about the Big Promise.

Long story short: tech’s decades of failing to fulfill its promise of moonshot societal change is catching up with it. As a result, companies have subtly shifted from promising to fix society with vaporware like self-driving cars and death cures to promising to replace society with vaporware like web3/the multiverse and AGI. It turns out it’s a lot easier to “fix” a reality that you have total control over than it is to make a positive impact on the one we all have to share.

Anyhow, here’s a tweet:

And the way you should read it is: after failing to deliver on any of his many promises to ship self-driving cars or labor-saving robots, Elon is hoping we’re too wowed by the Big Promise of AI to notice that none of the smaller ones he’s made have ever been fulfilled.

Are we?