Tech Culture
December 13, 2015
11:00 AM PST
by Chris Matyszczyk
President Donald Trump becomes very upset because Mexico won't pay for the wall, so he presses the nuclear button.
Vladimir Putin's troops invade Norway because their GPS malfunctions.
Switzerland decides it's tired of being beige and attacks Liechtenstein.
Please forgive me, I'm merely imagining scenarios for the start of World War III. I've been moved to such thinking by Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk.
In a new interview with GQ, Musk was asked about his ambitions to colonize Mars -- which he hopes will be achievable through his Space X rockets. He was curiously sanguine.
One shouldn't imagine, he said, that technological progress is a given.
"Most of us instinctively assume that technology relentlessly marches forward, but there have been times before now in human history -- after the Egyptians built the pyramids, for instance, or after the multiple advances of the Roman Empire -- when the civilizations that followed could no longer do what had been done before, and perhaps there's a complacency and arrogance in assuming that this won't happen again," he said.
Complacency and arrogance are, indeed, two characteristics sometimes associated with today's tech industry. Musk, though, fears that a global war could set back humanity in many ways.
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