Building Castles in the Drive

In The Expanse, humanity’s sprawling interplanetary empire rests on a single, elegant piece of fiction: the Epstein Drive. This miracle engine effortlessly defies physics, allowing ships to accelerate continuously, cross the solar system in mere days, and make far-flung Ceres as accessible as a commuter suburb. The show’s true genius lies in its grounded illusion: it layers the Drive with convincing jargon, detailed specs, and plausible limitations ("the Tori models can’t sustain 5G burns for more than 12 hours"). You’re genuinely tempted to believe it because the entire world feels engineered, not simply dreamed up.

Yet, peel back that veneer, and the Epstein Drive evaporates. Do the math, and it collapses into pure fantasy. But that’s perfectly fine: it’s science fiction. Its purpose isn't to deceive, but to enable a rich, compelling story about humanity’s future.

Today’s tech leaders, however, are selling us their own versions of the Epstein Drive, but with a dangerous twist.

They present vaporware as an impending inevitability, wrapping grand, emotional promises around voids where actual technology should be. Unlike The Expanse, which invests in realism to sell fiction, these tech companies use fiction to sell unrealistic promises. They skip the hard engineering and go straight to the fantasy, demanding we buy into it.

Tesla’s Tango

Remember when Elon Musk "debuted" Tesla’s "humanoid robot" in 2021? What we got was a person dancing on stage in a suit. No prototype. No functional code. Just choreography. Then came the masterstroke: Musk, with a straight face, soothed fears by declaring it would be deliberately slow (5 mph—"you can outrun it!").

The pitch inverted reality. The glaring absence of a working robot suddenly became a virtue ("See? We made it harmless!"). Fast forward to 2025, and what do we have? A crude lab puppet that can barely manage a simple task, let alone fold a shirt. The original promise wasn’t just broken; it was cleverly replaced by a narrative about safety, expertly masking the technological void at its core.

Anthropic’s Self-Solving Apocalypse

Anthropic’s CEO has been busy warning that AI will, any day now, erase "most white-collar jobs." What he conveniently omits? His current models are nowhere near capable of doing this. Not today. Not soon. He’s essentially conjuring a monster only he can tame, using tools he himself admits don’t yet exist. The implied message? "Buy my shield against the sword I’m currently forging." It’s a closed loop of manufactured fear and promised salvation, all built on an Epstein Drive called "Existential Risk" that his own company supposedly controls.

OpenAI’s AGI Mirage

OpenAI’s entire rhetorical universe floats on its own powerful Epstein Drive: AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). "When AGI comes…" the company whispers, "everything changes." But here’s the rub: AGI is undefined. Unbuilt. Unproven. Like The Expanse’s Epstein Drive, it functions as a potent narrative catalyst—except here, it’s used to justify astronomical valuations, calls for regulations, and an endless stream of hype, while today’s actual AI (which is error-prone, limited, and real) hides in the shadow of tomorrow’s promised godhood.

The Bait-and-Switch Playbook

Notice a pattern here? It's a surprisingly simple playbook:

1. Invent the Epstein Drive: Give your vaporware a catchy name (AGI, Safe Robots, Job-Replacing AI).
2. Sell the universe it enables: Revolution! Utopia! Existential Danger! (Emotion consistently trumps Engineering).
3. Mask the void: Distract with manufactured safety debates ("Our non-robot is intentionally slow!") or self-fulfilling prophecies ("AI will eventually kill all jobs. So you better fund us to stop it!").

This is where the distinction becomes crucial: The Expanse invests in realism to sell fiction, while tech companies use fiction to sell unrealistic promises.

The Expanse’s writers respect us: they build a world so compelling that we voluntarily suspend our disbelief. Tech CEOs, on the other hand, often insult us: they demand we suspend critical thought. Their "Epstein Drives" aren’t clever plot devices. They're smoke machines expertly hiding empty stages.

We’re not colonizing the Belt. We’re funding fairy tales that are being sold as groundbreaking manifestos. Until we demand more than promises wrapped in equations that simply don’t balance, we’ll keep buying tickets to ride engines that, for now, exist only in marketing slides and optimistic press releases.

Tech’s promises are today’s Epstein Drives: magnificent engines powering journeys to nowhere.

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