You see, silicon tech executives have grown up and lived ( and made billions of dollars ) in an industry that produces revolutionary new products almost on an annual cycle... ever faster, cheaper, and smaller.
One might even think that we are making new "technology" not as evolution ( breaking Moore's Law ) but as revolution... that aliens from Zenu are giving their technology to us ( think back to Terminator 2 and the scene where the time traveled chip technology arrives 4 or 6 decades from the future to inspire the 1980s Cyberdyne scientists "in completely new direction" ).
Only that is complete bullshit. None of today's computer technology is "revolutionary"... there is a direct path from the 1940s to 2026 and the evolution of circuits. Electrons go in, electrons come out. timing signals are generated by vibrating bits of crystals, gates open and close based on circuit logic... and the output is predictable. We have simply gone from "hundreds of such operations per second" to many billions of operations per second. In fact... over the last 10 years, the rate at which these circuits execute ( the computer clock speed ) has slowed down dramatically. The very "fastest" CPU today operates at 5 GHz whereas 10 years ago... it was 3 GHz. What has changed is that instead of 1 core or CPU doing 1 operation... we have packed thousands of special CPUs, each doing 1 operation, into a computer chip not much bigger than the older generation CPU ( and we call these GPUs or NPUs or even ASICs ).
The folks who were lucky enough to ride this evolutionary scale ( make use of this technology to apply to new things that people like and pay for ) became billionaires. But for every Facebook, there was a MySpace.. and for every Google there was an "askjeeves". where the not so lucky maybe made some money, but not billions.
So naturally these Silicon Valley types think they are geniuses... that all problems faced by mankind are tractable to the same "we just need to wait a few years for high tech to solve the problem". Sometimes in those other fields of endeavor that does happen ( in the 1960s is was postulated that we would never be able to feed 2 billion people, but now we "sort of" feed 9 billion, thanks to some scientists like Norman Borlaug. However, fusion energy has always been ( in my lifetime ) "30 years away" and, maybe... but just maybe... is now 20 years away. Not much evolution, no revolution - certainly not at the speed of computer technology.
Climate change is another place where there doesn't seem to be a solution in the offing. Not only that, but I don't know if AI will ever be able to help... or rather will be able to help soon enough. AI reminds me of Douglas Adams and his "Hitchhikers Guide" set of books where the aliens from a distant planet decide to build a huge computer to answer the ultimate question about "life, the universe, and everything" only to wait hundreds of years for the computer to spit out the answer "42"... and then they demand to know what that means and the computer says "you have to ask the right question, and for that you need to build a new computer, one that will be the size of a planet... and we will call it Earth... and the jokes abound (mice that are actually multi dimensional aliens that built the planet doing experiments on people by running around in a maze to get some cheese _ "how subtle"... to another alien that enjoyed making fjords in Norway).
I Forgive the tech billionaires a little bit because of their lived experience with computer tech... but that doesn't make them into the geniuses that they imagine themselves to be, nor does that mean they can solve the big science and big tech problems with more big science and big tech solutions. That Fusion energy is just 2 more years away from being commercial and providing at least as much electricity to the grid as their AI "token factories" will consume by then.
Such statements are a function of ego gone wild and too much money being thrown at them, often in a space of just a few years...
These are not the people that we should turn to for a solution to all of mankind's issues. OTOH, they are the only people with enough concentrated wealth to replace governments in the funding of new science or technology based solutions ( since governments now want to ignore that the problems even exist ).
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