A couple days ago I ran up a post, What’s a (metaphorical) moonshot? [TALENT SEARCH], where I looked at a couple of articles where Mercatus Center fellows talked of moonshots. I was looking for the metaphorical work done by the idea of ‘moonshots’, and I missed it. ‘Moonshots’, whatever they are, are obviously awesome. But why?
Why? The idea seems to carry the connotation that these are very risky ventures where success is not certain. That’s certainly what Tyler Cowen seems to think. After all he’s asserted that if most of his picks for Emergent Ventures aren’t failures, then he’s not doing it right (you’ll find the link in the previous post). But as Graboyes and Stossel pointed out (again, link in previous post), Project Apollo was not a particularly risky venture, not from an engineering point of view. We knew all the relevant physical principles. It was just a matter of getting the engineering right. The time table may have been a bit tricky, but as long as we’re willing to commit the resources success seemed certain. And it was.
So what’s the big deal?
THAT was the big deal, that success was all but certain. What does it imply about who and what we are that, when a nation set out to land a man on the moon within a decade, it did so? What does it mean that that (kind of) feat is within our capabilities
Mars too. Elon Musk says we could have a base on Mars by 2028. Do I believe him? Yes/no/I don’t know. But it’s the timing I’m iffy about, not the technical capability. If we’re willing to commit the resources, then YES, we can do it. Well, I’m also iffy about the psychological capacities of humans in a venture like that. But what kind of doubt it that?
On the other hand, while I think that computers will be doing some pretty interesting things in 2028, some of them not anticipated at the moment, I don’t think we’ll have common sense knowledge under control, nor do I think we’ll be anywhere near ‘artificial general intelligence’, whatever that is. In this domain we lack knowledge of the fundamental principles governing mental phenomena and so we’re just grope around trying this or that. Some things succeed spectacularly, others fail, but we don’t quite know why in either case. We’re accomplishing something, learning something, but just what, who the hell knows? We don’t. Not yet.
Back to moonshots. It seems to me that what underlies the metaphor’s power is the simple fact that, YES, we set out to land a man on the moon and we did it, on time and on budget (I think). What’s awesome about Project Apollo isn’t that it was a crapshoot that came through. Rather, what’s awesome is that it WASN’T a crapshoot and there was little substantial doubt that we would succeed (at least not among the engineers and scientists who planned and designed the mission). That such a thing is now within human capacity, THAT’S WHAT’S AWESOME.