The moon is all the rage these days. China wants to send people there. So too does the United States and NASA. In fact, just about every country with a space program has some sort of lunar ambition that they hope will play out over the next few years.

Now, there’s a new entrant in this new space race, a nonprofit organization called the Open Lunar Foundation. Based in San Francisco, it’s a group made up of tech executives and engineers—many of them with former ties to NASA—who have serious ambitions to create a lunar settlement.

The driving ethos behind the foundation is to start a development that would not be beholden to a particular country or billionaire. Instead, as the group’s name suggests, Open Lunar wants to create technology for exploring and living on the moon as a type of collaborative effort.

“Our highest ambition is catalyzing and enabling a peaceful and cooperative lunar settlement,” said Chelsea Robinson, the director of policy and governance for Open Lunar. “At this time when there are so many commercial and government actors advancing their efforts on the moon, we are excited to demonstrate a civic approach to participation.”

Open Lunar began a few years ago as something of a thought exercise. A group of friends in Silicon Valley were taking stock of the dramatic improvements in aerospace technology along with the falling cost of rocket launches, thanks to companies like Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab. The friends came to the realization that it might soon be possible to create a small lunar settlement for about $2 billion to $3 billion. It’s a hefty sum, but a very achievable one in an era that abounds with wealthy space enthusiasts. And so, the friends decided to explore the idea of going to the moon in earnest.

“The picture that emerged out of those meetings was that you could create a permanent, economically self-sustaining presence on the moon that could be done for the single-digit billions,” said Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist, who provided the initial Open Lunar funding. “I got excited by that idea and the compelling nature of the people involved.”

Some of the most prominent members of the group include the astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has spent time on the International Space Station; Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler, co-founders of the satellite maker Planet Labs Inc.; Simon “Pete” Worden, the former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center; and Jurvetson, who has invested in both SpaceX and Planet Labs. Hadfield is listed as a director of Open Lunar in nonprofit filings, while the others are advisors to the foundation. These individuals, along with dozens of other people, have spent the last 18 months meeting in private to figure out what sort of early missions would make the most sense. Working ideas include smaller, cheaper missions to put various probes and robotic systems on the lunar surface rather than one, massive mission.

Some of the most prominent members of the group include the astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has spent time on the International Space Station; Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler, co-founders of the satellite maker Planet Labs Inc.; Simon “Pete” Worden, the former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center; and Jurvetson, who has invested in both SpaceX and Planet Labs. Hadfield is listed as a director of Open Lunar in nonprofit filings, while the others are advisors to the foundation. These individuals, along with dozens of other people, have spent the last 18 months meeting in private to figure out what sort of early missions would make the most sense. Working ideas include smaller, cheaper missions to put various probes and robotic systems on the lunar surface rather than one, massive mission.

It was Robinson, a longtime nonprofit organizer, and Jessy Kate Schingler, a software engineer who most recently worked at a rocket startup, that turned the brainstorming into a formal organization. Schingler took on the role of director of policy and governance. Now, the foundation’s small team has been hiring full-time hardware and software engineers for Open Lunar and putting the rest of the executive structure in place.

“Lunar activity is exploding,” Jessy Kate Schingler said. “There are governments and companies intensely focused on going, but there is no third pillar representing the possibility of doing things differently. If we don’t roll up our sleeves and get involved, then by definition the future of human settlement in space will reflect the status quo of those currently in power. To see things done differently on the moon, we had to start experimenting now.”

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Also see:

Designing the First Full-Time Human Habitat on the Moon

Have Engineers Just Discovered The Perfect Spot To Build An Underground Colony On The Moon?

COLONIZING THE MOON

Russia to build Moon colony by 2040

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday said that computers are getting smarter than humans in more and more spheres and that the trend will continue.

“We will be far, far surpassed in every single way. I guarantee it,” Musk said to Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

The comments highlight an evolving landscape in technology, including in artificial intelligence — an area technology companies are tapping to enhance their products and sell to businesses.

Musk pointed to advances in chess and the Chinese board game of Go as evidence of progress in AI.

“Your cell phone could crush the world champion of chess, literally,” Musk told Ma.

He talked about how in the future technology from Neuralink, a start-up he co-founded, could give people a way to boost their skills in certain subjects. The company is seeking to draw on AI for augmenting people’s cognitive capabilities with brain-machine interfaces. The company is not there yet, though.

“The first thing we should assume is we are very dumb,” Musk said. “We can definitely make things smarter than ourselves.”

Ma had a different view, suggesting that a computer has never spawned a human being, or even a mosquito.

“I’ve never in my life, especially [in the] last two years, when people talk about AI, human beings will be controlled by machines,” he said. “I never think about that. It’s impossible.”

And Ma said that he does not want to play chess or Go against a machine. These games were designed for people to play against each other, he said.

“I’ll be happy to see two computers fight each other,” Ma added.

The Tesla chief has spoken previously about AI. In 2017 he suggested that competition among nations in AI could lead to World War III.

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As brave Hong Kongers protest the totalitarian communist Chinese regime in the streets and at the airport of their city, the mood here in the West, even in the United States, seems to be going in the opposite direction.

I’m not just referring to the violent so-called anarchists of Antifa, who often turn out to be emotionally disturbed community college instructors behind their Guy Fawkes masks, but to the larger zeitgeist. From Big Tech to Hollywood to our media to our campuses to the campaign rhetoric of virtually every Democratic candidate, we are moving toward a homogenization of thought and action that is, well, Chinese communist in style and ultimately in content.

Chairman Mao said, “Let a hundred schools of thought contend,” knowing full well whose would prevail. We’re no longer even paying that kind of lip service. Some form of political correctness has dominated our major institutions for years with minimal pushback.

Except for the election of Donald Trump, which was considered a horrifying aberration by our elites. How could such a vulgarian rise to such power? (No matter that they themselves were equally, if not more, reprehensible, as the Epstein revelations demonstrate.)

Because Trump’s policies were often arguably good and sometimes even conventionally so, attacks on him concentrated on his personality. That was especially true because his very persona upended that unifying and totalitarian (what else?) impulse toward political correctness.

So an American Cultural Revolution—not that distant from the original Chinese one, except so far no dunce caps—has been put in place by those various elites of the Academic-Hollywood-Media Complex. Actually, it’s been in place for a long time; only now it is escalating and approaching a point of no return.

Writers and thinkers are ghettoized. Only approved Republican pundits are allowed space, at least for long, in mainstream newspapers or television shows. The arts have become almost entirely off-limits to the right. Conservative professors are an endangered species at our universities, if not already extinct.

That is why it is no accident that you see Democrat proposals on the 2020 campaign trail that could have been taken from Lenin’s playbook. They are just part of this metastasizing zeitgeist. That these ideas have failed over and over is of no consequence. They sound good.

Don’t look at China or the Soviet Union or Cambodia or Cuba or Venezuela or North Korea or the entire Eastern Bloc when it was communist, not to mention Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia plus many others that all flirted with socialism/communism uniformly to disastrous ends. Look at Denmark! And please ignore that that extremely homogeneous country has a tiny population roughly half the size Los Angeles County’s and that they have been becoming less socialist themselves in their actual policies. We can use the land of Hans Christian Anderson as our model.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented that “China is the future” at the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday.
Speaking with Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma at the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this week, Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk discussed the opening of Tesla’s Shanghai Gigfactory, calling progress in the country “mind-blowing.”

Musk stated during the conference:

I spend a lot of my time on sustainable energy with tesla with you know electric cars and solar and batteries and that kind of thing and I’m really excited to be here in Shanghai for the Shanghai Gigafactory which is I think that Tesla china team has done an amazing job on. It is really mind-blowing like I’m just astounded by how good the job is and how much progress has been made and I think it’s a good story for the world and to say like look how much progress you can make in China.

This is extremely impressive like my hat is off you know you guys rock so I’ve never seen anything but so fast in my life before. To be totally frank I’ve seen some crazy things so you know I think it’s like I really think China is the future.

The National Development Plan touts the necessity of building a professional public service and a state capable of playing a transformative and developmental role.

It highlights several challenges that hobble the democratic state, such as unevenness in state capacity, unstable administrative leadership, skills gaps, erosion of accountability and authority, poor organisational design, as well as inappropriate staffing and low staff morale.

One of the ways in which the governing African National Congress (ANC) can address these challenges is by embracing a technocratic model of government. And the ANC must look to the East Asian nations of Japan, Singapore and China for inspiration and guidance. Partly, these countries owe their economic success to strong governments underpinned by technocratic elites and expertise.

Renowned author and global strategist Parag Khanna describes a technocracy as a “government built around expert analysis and long-term planning rather than narrow-minded, short-term populist whims or private interests. It is meritocratic (elevating competent leaders) and utilitarian (seeking the broadest societal benefit). Technocratic leaders are selected more by IQ than by popularity contest. They are extensively educated, trained and experienced professionals, not just pedigreed elites.”

Ministries rule, politicians reign

Japan’s bureaucracy played a pivotal role in the country’s impressive rise in the post-war period. At the core of the country’s development was the role of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). MITI formulated and implemented trade and industrial policies. It provided ‘administrative guidance’ on a raft of domestic and foreign economic policies including technology, investment, energy and power, modernisation, competition as well as pollution control. MITI’s close ties to Japanese industry facilitated a foreign trade policy that complemented its efforts to shore up domestic manufacturing interests.

In his book the late Japanologist Chalmers Johnson chronicled the country’s post-war model of governance. He concluded that Japan was “ruled” by powerful, independent, and very competitive government ministries. By contrast, he pointed out that politicians merely “reigned,” operating mainly as a “safety valve” in the case of bureaucratic overreach.

Singapore represents the apogee of technocratic rule. Bureaucratic leadership is deeply embedded: public servants are expected to be technically minded, long-term thinkers and with a strong utilitarian streak. Although the role of the founding father Lee Kuan Yew in the city-state’s success has been immeasurable, Singapore’s progress has also been a product of a system of expert rule, focus on meritocratic talent and long-range thinking. These institutional strengths have contributed to the transformation of the country from a poor backwater into an economic dynamo: an export-oriented manufacturer, a coveted port, a flight hub as well as a financial centre with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.

As Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted, “our system shielded civil servants from political interference, (giving them) the space to work out rational, effective solutions for our problems [so they can] practise public administration in almost laboratory conditions.” Singapore’s major accomplishment has been to merge the political and expert components of the governing system.

Technocrats dominate

China today is significantly different from what it was during the revolutionary years of Mao Zedong. Whereas Mao and his generation had limited formal education, successive generations of Chinese leadership have boasted higher education qualifications. Over the past few decades engineers and scientists have dominated Chinese political leadership. Until recently, all but one member of the nine-person (since reduced to seven) Chinese Communist Party Standing Committee – the country’s highest decision-making body – have been engineers, including the current president Xi Jinping and erstwhile presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

Not only do technocrats dominate the top echelons of political office in China, they also permeate all levels of the Chinese government. They include mayors, local and provincial party secretaries, and governors. The technocratic mindset is deeply ingrained in Chinese political culture. Mencius, a loyal disciple of Confucius, once remarked, “Let those who labour with their heads rule those who labour with their hands.”

Japan pioneered technocratic governance, Singapore perfected it and it is in progress in post-Mao China. Despite their distinctive histories and, in the case of Singapore and China, authoritarian development models these countries provide useful lessons for South Africa to emulate. To be sure, technocratic rule is not a panacea for South Africa’s governance problems. And it has its shortcomings, including the fact it is arguably inimical to the country’s political culture; it could erode democratic accountability, thereby create a government for the people without the people.

Even so, it can contribute towards remedying the country’s institutional deficiencies. It can enable policymakers to fulfil the objectives set out in the NDP including depoliticising the public service and making it a career of choice, developing technical and specialist professional skills among public servants, improving relations between national, provincial and local government and bolstering the functioning of state-owned enterprises.

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In 1969, when Theodore Roszak wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, it was at least as difficult to be an optimist as it is half a century later. The United States had spent most of the Sixties locked in a bloody, pointless war. At home, its cities had suffered the biggest spike in violent crime since the Great Depression.

In the face of all this, Roszak, then aged 37, conducted a survey of populism among younger generations that was critical in places but recklessly hopeful at its core. “It is the young”, he wrote, “arriving with eyes that can see the obvious, who must remake the lethal culture of their elders, and who must remake it in desperate haste”.

Today, inured to a very different set of stereotypes about the young, one reads passages like this with envy for Roszak’s optimism. In hindsight, few prominent public intellectuals of his generation were so wrong about so many things. Even fewer were so right on the main points.

Roszak is hardly remembered as a great thinker. When he died in 2011, obituaries described him as the wonk whose greatest achievement was to coin the term “counter culture” to describe the liberal anti-institutionalism of Sixties radicals.

In 1969, there were hundreds of radical or quasi-radical groups with vaguely overlapping sensibilities: Krishnas, Black Panthers, doves, stoners, acidheads, hippies, Yippies, Weathermen. Recognising, as many did, that these groups had something in common was much simpler than spelling out where their commonality lay.

By Roszak’s reckoning, the one thing these groups shared was an enemy. What hippies called the Man or the System or the Establishment, he called “technocracy”: the scientific managerial approach that sustained a hyper-organised industrial society. For many of Roszak’s generation, the consummate technocrat was Lyndon Johnson’s defense secretary Robert McNamara, former president of the Ford Motor Company. Mcnamara had tried to run the Vietnam War effort in much the same bloodless manner he’d brought to the factory lines at Ford, with disastrous results.

Technocracy was not left wing (McNamara himself was a Republican), but it wasn’t right wing, either. It was, to be sure, a political ideology—the elevation of bureaucracy above freedom and dignity—but voting Democratic or Republican wouldn’t defeat it.  Nor, Roszak argued, would the tactics that the left had been using for the last few decades:

“If the melancholy history of revolution over the past half-century teaches us anything, it is the futility of a politics which concentrates itself single-mindedly on the overthrowing of governments, or ruling classes, or economic systems. This brand of politics finishes with merely redesigning the turrets and towers of the technocratic citadel.”

…

Yet despite its flaws, Roszak’s analysis of technocracy is still illuminating. The 50 years since the publication of The Making of a Counter Culture have been good for technocrats and bad for everyone else, particularly the young. The major hardships people under 40 now face are nightmarish versions of those Roszak identified: wandering aimlessly in a technocratic economy, subjected to algorithmic surveillance and dependent for food, recreation and pretty much everything else on corporations that view people as data points.

And yet nobody on the left seems to be talking about technocracy enough. In the US., the radical left is divided, instead, between Sanders-style socialists and single-issue politicians who can’t decide whether capitalism, race, gender, or some intersectional combination of them all is the proper lens for analysing society. If any public discourse about technocracy exists today, it is the bigoted version proffered by right-wing pitchmen — from Steve Bannon, with his rants about the Deep State, to Michael Gove, smugly confident that Brexiteers are sick of McNamara-ish experts.

Surely one key reason for the left’s sheepishness about technocracy is that, by and large, it was left-wing people working in places like Silicon Valley who reshaped technocracy into the enormous, charming monster it is today. Thanks to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others, today’s technocrats have mounds of digitally-reaped data at their disposal, which they use to guide their subjects’ thoughts and behaviours more precisely than ever.

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