‘The push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives’The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like.
The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”.When Reich asked whether this state would be a democracy, he got a cool no.
“Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told. “To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.” Continue reading…