Nicholas Agar
Says More…
This week in Say More, PS talks with Nicholas Agar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and the author, most recently, of How to Think about Progress: A Skeptic's Guide to Technology.
Project Syndicate: You recently wrote that the “horizon bias” – the belief that what could happen will happen soon – “is most consequential in those with enough expertise to be able to offer scientific and technological solutions to big challenges” – people like Elon Musk. In your book How to Think about Progress: A Skeptic's Guide to Technology, co-authored with Dan Weijers and PS’s Stuart Whatley, you draw a sharp distinction between a moonshot and the “Mars-shot” that Musk has articulated. What makes for an effective technological moonshot, and what are the potential pitfalls – or benefits – of Musk-style Mars-shots?
Nicholas Agar: Many of our civilization’s recent missteps stem from mistaken thinking about the future. The book describes one reason for such thinking: what we call “horizon bias.” First, we’re sold an enticing vision – say, human colonies on Mars or a wholesale cure for cancer. Next, we’re told a story about how that future is imminent. Since none of the steps between the present and that future is impossible, and every step is described in the kind of “scientific detail” that one finds in hard science fiction, we buy into the vision.
It’s fun to speculate about Mars as the Plymouth Rock of a future intergalactic empire. And it can be easy to look at the rising valuations of Musk’s businesses and choose to believe that the combination of nerd bravura, “extremely hardcore” employees, and access to the US president’s ear will get us there – and soon. But there’s a fundamental difference between Musk’s “Mars-shot” and the “moonshot” that actually got humans to the moon: the latter was meticulously planned, to the last boring detail.