Elon Musk

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pages: 190 words: 46,977

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

Friend, “Plugged In.” 7. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 8. Vance, p. 24. 9. Vance, p. 33. 10. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 11. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 12. Elon Musk, interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 13. Vance, p. 38. 14. Vance, p. 38. 15. Vance, p. 38. 16. Elon Musk, interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 17. Vance, p. 37 18. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 19. Vance, p. 37. 20. Vance, p. 37. 21. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 22. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 23. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 24. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 25. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 26. Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 27.

Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 72. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 73. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 74. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 75. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 76. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 77. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 78. SpaceX.com/about 79. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 80. Shotwell, interview by Chris Anderson. “SpaceX’s Plan to Fly.” 81. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 82. Paris Productions, “EV1 Funeral.” 83. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 84. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 85. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 86. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 87.

Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 57. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 58. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 59. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 60. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 61. Vance, p. 96 62. Vance, p. 95. 63. Kimbal Musk, interview by Susan Adams. 64. Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 65. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 66. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 67. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 68. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 69. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 70. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 71. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 72.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

US Securities and Exchange Commission, April 29, 2016. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459016018886/tsla-10q_20160331.htm Chapter 13 163when an Elon Musk tweet suddenly blew them away: Elon Musk. Twitter, July 10, 2016. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/752182992982843392 163The company’s stock jumped 4 percent: BBC. “Tesla stock rises after Elon Musk’s masterplan tweet.” BBC, July 11, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36765823 164Six days later, Musk tweeted: Elon Musk. Twitter, July 16, 2016. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/754272832440250368 164The next day he delayed again: Elon Musk. Twitter, July 17, 2016. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/754772663365664768 164Musk finally delivered: Elon Musk. “Master Plan, Part Deux.”

Business Insider, February 23, 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-about-the-familys-casual-attitude-to-wealth-2018-2 25having sold his first computer game at age twelve: Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco (HarperCollins), 2015. 26“It’s a million-dollar car”: Elon Musk best videos. “Young Elon Musk featured in documentary about millionaires (1999).” YouTube video, October 24, 2015. https://youtu.be/eb3pmifEZ44 26Musk would say that his first meeting with Straubel “was really what ultimately led to Tesla as it is today”: Darren Bryant. “Elon Musk recounts Tesla’s history at 2016 shareholders meeting.” YouTube video, January 10, 2017. https://youtu.be/AKfiKvbqbQw 26Afterward, Straubel emailed Musk: Elon Musk. “In the Beginning.”

“Tesla plans to disconnect ‘almost all’ Superchargers from the grid and go solar+battery, says Elon Musk.” Electrek, June 9, 2017. https://electrek.co/2017/06/09/tesla-superchargers-solar-battery-grid-elon-musk/ Chapter 10 120As Ashlee Vance tells it: Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015. 121and Musk himself disputes that there was a formal offer: Mike Ramsey. “Elon Musk Takes Uncustomary Humble Tone for Tesla’s Sales.” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2015. https://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2015/05/04/elon-musk-takes-uncustomary-humble-tone-for-teslas-sales/ 122I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car: Alan Ohsnman.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Sept. 7, 2018; David Gelles, “Interviewing Elon Musk,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 2018. 49. Grimes: Author’s interviews with Claire Boucher (Grimes), Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Maye Musk, Sam Teller. Azealia Banks, letter to Elon Musk, Aug. 19, 2018; Kate Taylor, “Azealia Banks Claims to Be at Elon Musk’s House,” Business Insider, Aug. 13, 2018; Maureen Dowd, “Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss,” New York Times, July 25, 2020. 50. Shanghai: Author’s interviews with Robin Ren, Elon Musk. 51. Cybertruck: Author’s interviews with Franz von Holzhausen, Elon Musk, Dave Morris. Stephanie Mlot, “Elon Musk Wants to Make Bond’s Lotus Submarine Car a Reality,” PC Magazine, Oct. 18, 2013. 52.

.,” Business Insider, Feb. 22, 2018; Jeremy Arnold, “Journalism and the Blood Emeralds Story,” Save Journalism, Substack, Mar. 9, 2021; Vance, Elon Musk; Maye Musk, A Woman. 2. A Mind of His Own: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk. Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 15, 2017; Elon Musk, TED Talk with Chris Anderson, Apr. 14, 2022; “Inter-galactic Family Feud,” Mail on Sunday, Mar. 17, 2018; Vance, Elon Musk; Maye Musk, A Woman. 3. Life with Father: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk, Peter Rive. Elon Musk report cards from Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Glenashley Senior Primary School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School; Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow”; Emily Lane Fox, “How Elon Musk’s Mom (and Her Twin Sister) Raised the First Family of Tech,” Vanity Fair, Oct. 21, 2015; Andrew Smith, “Emissary of the Future,” The Telegraph (London), Jan. 8, 2014. 4.

Elon Musk, The Babylon Bee podcast, Dec. 21, 2021; Tad Friend, “Plugged In,” The New Yorker, Aug. 17, 2009; Maureen Dowd, “Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss,” New York Times, July 25, 2020; Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow”; Elon Musk, interview at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, Nov. 15, 2021. 5. Escape Velocity: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Errol Musk, Kimbal Musk, Tosca Musk, Peter Rive. 6. Canada: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Tosca Musk. Postmedia News, “Before Elon Musk Was Thinking About Mars, He Was Doing Chores on a Saskatchewan Farm,” Regina Leader-Post, May 15, 2017; Haley Steinberg, “The Education of Elon Musk,” Toronto Life, Jan, 2023; Raffaele Panizza, “Interview with Maye Musk,” Vogue, Oct. 12, 2017; Vance, Elon Musk. 7. Queen’s: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk, Navaid Farooq, Peter Nicholson. Robin Keats, “Rocket Man,” Queen’s Alumni Review, Vol. 1, 2013; Soni, The Founders; Vance, Elon Musk.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

“If you can’t get this”: Author interview with person familiar with the matter. CHAPTER 17 “If there is a party”: Tatiana Siegel, “Elon Musk Requested to Meet Amber Heard via Email Years Ago,” Hollywood Reporter (Aug. 24, 2016), https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/​rambling-reporter/​elon-musk-requested-meet-amber-922240. Some said they tried: Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle, and Rolfe Winkler, “Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 31, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324. Dealers in Massachusetts: Mike Ramsey and Valerie Bauerlein, “Tesla Clashes with Car Dealers,” Wall Street Journal (June 18, 2013), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​SB10001424127887324049504578541902814606098.

In 2015: Tim Higgins, “Tesla Faces Labor Discord as It Ramps Up Model 3 Production,” Wall Street Journal (Oct. 31, 2017), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​tesla-faces-labor-discord-as-it-ramps-up-model-3-production-1509442202. Those fancy second-row seats: Ibid. That spring while Depp: “Elon Musk Regularly Visited Amber Heard…,” Deadline (July 17, 2020), https://deadline.com/​2020/​07/​elon-musk-amber-heard-johnny-depps-los-angeles-penthouse-1202988261/. Musk seemed to be: Author interviews with Tesla executives. He was spotted by: Lindsay Kimble, “Amber Heard and Elon Musk Party at the Same London Club Just Weeks After Hanging Out in Miami,” People (Aug. 3, 2016), https://people.com/​movies/​amber-heard-and-elon-musk-party-at-same-london-club-weeks-after-miami-sighting/. “Lack of sleep”: Author interview with former Tesla executive.

“I don’t see how”: Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle, and Rolfe Winkler, “Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 31, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324. But it was time: Author interview with people familiar with Field’s thinking. An automation mistake: Email reviewed by the author. Musk’s imperiousness didn’t play: Tim Higgins, “Tesla’s Elon Musk Turns Conference Call into Sparring Session,” Wall Street Journal (May 3, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​teslas-elon-musk-turns-conference-call-into-sparring-session-1525339803.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

“Just three years ago”: Elon Musk commentary in CNN interview, “Watch a Young Elon Musk Get His First Supercar in 1999,” CNN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo. unlike other owners: Musk commentary to Sarah Lacy, “Elon Musk: How I Wrecked an Uninsured McClaren F1,” Pando Daily, July 16, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOI8GWoMF4M. “It was like this Hitchcock”: Author interview with Peter Thiel, September 11, 2021. “So, what can this thing do”… “like a discus”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. See also: Musk commentary to Sarah Lacy, “Elon Musk: How I Wrecked an Uninsured Mclaren F1,” Pando Daily, July 16, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

“I was presented”… “end of the year”: Email from early X.com employee to board member Tim Hurd and group of X.com employees, September 23, 2000, subject line: “Elon Musk.” “Thanks folks”: Email from Elon Musk to early X.com employees, September 23, 2000, subject line: “RE: Elon Musk.” “It was a done deal”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “It was a fait accompli”: Author interview with Sandeep Lal, May 26, 2021. “All, as you know”: Email from Peter Thiel to all@x.com, September 24, 2000, subject line: “Email to all employees.” “Hey everyone”: Email from Elon Musk email to all@x.com, September 25, 2000, subject line: “Taking X.com to the next level.”

“never been a sports”… “go about things”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk (New York: Ecco, 2017), 73. “We developed”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “We think”: Laurie Flynn, “Online City Guides Compete in Crowded Field,” New York Times, September 14, 1998. “It wasn’t a philosophical issue”: Max Chafkin, “Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007: Elon Musk,” Inc., December 1, 2007. “Despite all the interest”: Laurie Flynn, “Online City Guides Compete in Crowded Field,” New York Times, September 14, 1998. “Literally, to my mailbox”… “$21,005,000”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “he has the clean-cut appearance”: Alice LaPlante, “Zipping Right Along,” Upside US ed., Foster City, (vol. 10, issue 11), November 1998, 57–60.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

he and Jeff Dean worked on a project they called “Distillation”: Geoffrey Hinton, Oriol Vinyals, and Jeff Dean, “Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network,” 2015, https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531. CHAPTER 9: ANTI-HYPE On November 14, 2014, Elon Musk posted a message: James Cook, “Elon Musk: You Have No Idea How Close We Are to Killer Robots,” Business Insider UK, November 17, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014-11. Musk said his big fear: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2017). The trouble was not that Page: Ibid. The trouble was that Page operated: Ibid.

Brockman vowed to build the new lab they all seemed to want: Cade Metz, “Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free,” Wired, April 27, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/. nearly $2 million for the first year: OpenAI, form 990, 2016. Musk and Altman painted OpenAI as a counterweight: Steven Levy, “How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers from Taking Over,” “Backchannel,” Wired, December 11, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over/. backed by over a billion dollars in funding: Ibid.

he invoked The Terminator: “Closing Bell,” CNBC, transcript, https://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/18/first-on-cnbc-cnbc-transcript-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-speaks-with-cnbcs-closing-bell.html. “potentially more dangerous than nukes”: Elon Musk tweet, August 2, 2014, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192?s=19. The same tweet urged his followers to read Superintelligence: Ibid. Bostrom believed that superintelligence: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). “This is quite possibly the most important”: Ibid. warning author Walter Isaacson about the dangers of artificial intelligence: Lessley Anderson, “Elon Musk: A Machine Tasked with Getting Rid of Spam Could End Humanity,” Vanity Fair, October 8, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/tech/2014/10/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-fear.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

“Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter, June 15, 2016, 8:07 a.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743097668725940225. “get you back down again”: David Woods, “The Saturn V Launch Vehicle,” Omega Tau podcast, episode 239, March 12, 2017, http://omegataupodcast.net/239-the-saturn-v-launch-vehicle. 14. Pushing the Envelope “don’t take a week off”: Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk Needs a Vacation,” Washington Post, September 29, 2015, accessed November 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/29/elon-musk-needs-a-vacation. “fault tree analysis”: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “There was an overpressure event,” Twitter, June 28, 2015, 8:48 a.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk /status/615185076813459456.

Who’s this Elon Musk guy? He can never do what we do.’” 4 The Internet Guy Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future and be inspired. —Elon Musk The crowds waiting to get into the speech pushed against the doors: groups of students and their chaperones milling through the tumult, young engineers ready to sit in the front row and witness their hero, older scientists prepared to shake their heads. There’s no conference of engineers, astrophysicists, or technologists that doesn’t want a keynote from Elon Musk, the rock star of dorks, whose ambition knows no bounds.

“to what they are today”: Rebecca Hackler, “Interview with Mike Horkachuck,” NASA Oral History Project, November 6, 2012. “not reaching orbit”: Elon Musk, “Plan Going Forward,” SpaceX blog, August 2, 2008, accessed September 22, 2017, http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/plan-going-forward. “rather than Falcon 9”: Elon Musk, “Falcon 1, Flight 3 Mission Summary,” SpaceX blog, August 6, 2008, accessed September 19, 2017, http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/falcon-1-flight-3-mission-summary. “one number, nothing else”: Rebecca Hackler, “Interview with Hans Koenigsmann,” NASA Oral History Project, January 15, 2003. “(starting the company)”: Elon Musk, “Flight 4 Launch Update,” SpaceX blog, October 7, 2007, accessed November 14, 2017, http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/flight-4-launch-update.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

The opening section on Elon Musk draws on the following sources: Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2015); Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all; Tim Fernholz, “What It Took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Disrupt Boeing, Leapfrog NASA, and Become a Serious Space Company,” Quartz, October 21, 2014, https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company; Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 15, 2012, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212; Jennifer Reingold, “Hondas in Space,” Fast Company, February 1, 2005, www.fastcompany.com/52065/hondas-space; “Elon Musk Answers Your Questions!

The discussion on the Falcon 1 is based on the following sources: Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Snow, Lateral Thinking; Chris Bergin, “Falcon I Flight: Preliminary Assessment Positive for SpaceX,” Spaceflight.com, March 24, 2007, www.nasaspaceflight.com/2007/03/falcon-i-flight-preliminary-assessment-positive-for-spacex; Tim Fernholz, “What It Took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Disrupt Boeing, Leapfrog NASA, and Become a Serious Space Company,” Quartz, October 21, 2014, https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company; Max Chafkin, “SpaceX’s Secret Weapon Is Gwynne Shotwell,” Bloomberg Quint, July 26, 2018, www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/she-launches-spaceships-sells-rockets-and-deals-with-elon-musk; Elon Musk, “Falcon 1, Flight 3 Mission Summary,” SpaceX, August 6, 2008, www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/falcon-1-flight-3-mission-summary; Dolly Singh, “What Is It Like to Work with Elon Musk?,” Slate, August 14, 2013, https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/elon-musk-what-is-it-like-to-work-for-the-spacex-tesla-chief.html; Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 15, 2012, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212. 33. Snow, Lateral Thinking. 34. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934; repr., New York: Scribner’s, 1977). 35.

The opening section on Elon Musk draws on the following sources: Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2015); Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all; Tim Fernholz, “What It Took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Disrupt Boeing, Leapfrog NASA, and Become a Serious Space Company,” Quartz, October 21, 2014, https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company; Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 15, 2012, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212; Jennifer Reingold, “Hondas in Space,” Fast Company, February 1, 2005, www.fastcompany.com/52065/hondas-space; “Elon Musk Answers Your Questions! SXSW, March 11, 2018,” video, YouTube, uploaded March 11, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoQARBYbkck; Tom Huddleston Jr., “Elon Musk: Starting SpaceX and Tesla Were ‘the Dumbest Things to Do,’” CNBC, March 23, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/03/23/elon-musk-spacex-and-tesla-were-two-of-the-dumbest-business-ideas.html. 2.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

“Our parents had no idea”: Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 14, 2012. “I thought the Internet”: Elon Musk, “The Future of Energy and Transport,” Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, November 14, 2012. “Well, I don’t think you’ll be coming back”: Elon Musk, “Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders” lecture, October 8, 2003. “The online financial payment system”: Ibid. Given the size of the rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaW4Ol3_M1o. “We were both interested”: Junod, “Elon Musk.” “Because, of course”: Elon Musk, “Mars Pioneer Award” acceptance speech, 15th Annual International Mars Society Convention, August 4, 2012.

“Because, of course”: Elon Musk, “Mars Pioneer Award” acceptance speech, 15th Annual International Mars Society Convention, August 4, 2012. “I just did not want Apollo”: Pat Morrison Q & A with Elon Musk, “Space Case,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2012. As a winged spaceplane: Elon Musk, Stanford lecture. Space was still the exclusive: For more on SpaceX’s early days, see Ashlee Vance, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” Ecco, May 19, 2015. On March 14, 2002, Musk founded: Ibid. At the dawn of the Space Age: Launch data compiled by the consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology. “I would bet you 1,000-to-one”: Jennifer Reingold, “Hondas in Space,” Fast Company magazine, October 5, 2005.

The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, US District Court, Central District of California, case number CV05-7533, October 19, 2005. Boeing was just as dismissive: Leslie Wayne, “A Bold Plan to Go Where Men Have Gone Before,” New York Times, February 5, 2006. The failures were so frequent: Vance, Elon Musk, 124. “I tell folks”: Sandra Sanchez, “SpaceX: Blasting into the Future—A Waco Today Interview with Elon Musk,” Waco Tribune, December 22, 2011. Early on, Musk pegged: Megan Geuss, “Elon Musk Tells BBC He Thought Tesla, SpaceX ‘Had a 10% Chance at Success,’” Ars Technica, January 13, 2016. This was a man who: http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html. 4. “SOMEWHERE ELSE ENTIRELY” Eisenhower entered: Official White House Transcript of President Eisenhower’s Press and Radio Conference #123, https://www.eisen hower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/sputnik/10_9_57.pdf.


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

Space.com, February 15, 2017. CHAPTER 8: SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES COR P. 50Masunaga, Samantha. “SpaceX track record ‘right in the ballpark’ with 93% success rate.” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2016. 51Sam Altman interview with Elon Musk for Y Combinator, September 2016. 52Dillow, Clay. “The Great Rocket Race.” Fortune, October 2016. 53Brown, Alex. “Why Elon Musk Is Suing the U.S. Air Force.” The Atlantic, June 5, 2014. 54De Selding, Peter. “SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9: What are the real cost savings for customers?” SpaceNews, April 25, 2016. 55This figure is quoted across a wide range. Lowest estimates fall at about $1,200 per pound via SpaceX, and go up to about $7,500 per pound for other launch providers.

Air & Space Magazine, January 2012. 58Besides SpaceX, only Bezos’s Blue Origin and, over twenty years ago, McDonnell Douglas’s DC-X prototype have had substantive success in recovering reusable rockets. For more on DC-X, see Gannon, Megan. “20 Years Ago: Novel DC-X Reusable Rocket Launched into History.” Space.com, August 16, 2003. 59Wall, Michael. “Elon Musk Calls for Moon Base.” Space.com, July 19, 2017. www.space.com/37549-elon-musk-moon-base-mars.html. Accessed June 10, 2017. 60Etherington, Darrell. “SpaceX spent ‘less than half ’ the cost of a new first stage on Falcon 9 relaunch.” Techcrunch, April 5, 2017. techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/spacex-spent-less-than-half-the-cost-of-a-new-first-stage-on-falcon-9-relaunch.

Pew Research Center, July 2015. 163Media outlets from the Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos), to the National Review, to Al Jazeera, reported positively on the Falcon Heavy launch and the reactions of people worldwide. CHAPTER 17: A NEW AGE DAWNS 164Address by Elon Musk at NASA’s “ISS R&D conference” in Washington, DC, July 19, 2017. 165“ABC News Special Report.” Interview of Elon Musk by David Kerley from a press conference after launch of the Falcon Heavy, February 6, 2018. CHAPTER 18: YOUR PLACE IN SPACE 2.0 166Interview with the author, October 2016. GLOSSARY Apollo program: The US space program started in the 1960s to allow American astronauts to land on, explore, and return from the moon.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

It spent two minutes shifting through B-roll footage and clips pilfered from documentaries about Musk. The video announced itself with the title American Swindler: The Elon Musk Story and carried an ominous-sounding warning: Foreign-born billionaire Elon Musk. His companies are synonymous with technology and wealth, and his jet-setting lifestyle is the envy of the world. But how exactly did Musk’s companies come about? Who has Elon Musk exploited along the way? And whose world is he actually changing? The truth may startle you. The video proceeded to suggest that Musk has been using his “unprecedented access to the halls of power” to line the pockets of politicians in an effort to secure billions of dollars of subsidies for his ventures Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity—all at the expense of the unsuspecting American taxpayer.

And so it ends up being the Koch brothers are bad, and climate change is bad, and Exxon is bad—and, you know, I think people ought to be for stuff, not against stuff. I think you could be much more effective if you were for something, rather than being against the Koch brothers.” Then Sears’s tone brightened. “Elon Musk—whatever you think of Tesla—Elon Musk didn’t build Tesla by whining about the internal combustion engine.” “Right,” I agreed. “He could’ve!” “Well, now he is whining about the Kochs,” I said, adding: “Quote unquote ‘whining.’” “Okay, fine,” Sears said with a sigh. “He’s wasting his time. He needs to focus on something more positive.

A NOTE ON SOURCES This book relies on a combination of my own reporting and that done by others. For all Tesla-related content, I have relied only on publicly available sources, including news stories, magazine profiles, blog posts, videos, documentaries, court documents, and company filings. For the sections about Tesla’s and Elon Musk’s histories, I am indebted especially to Ashlee Vance’s biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Drake Baer’s reporting for Business Insider, and Max Chafkin’s 2007 profile of Musk for Inc. Chris Paine’s documentaries, Who Killed the Electric Car? and Revenge of the Electric Car, were also valuable sources of material.


pages: 70 words: 22,172

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

Brian Cox explains how curiosity-driven science pays for itself, powering innovation and a profound appreciation of our existence. Burt Rutan The Real Future of Space Exploration In this passionate talk, legendary spacecraft designer Burt Rutan lambastes the US government-funded space program for stagnating and asks entrepreneurs to pick up where NASA has left off. Elon Musk The Mind Behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity . . . Entrepreneur Elon Musk is a man with many plans. The founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX sits down with TED curator Chris Anderson to share details about his visionary projects, which include a mass-marketed electric car, a solar energy leasing company, and a fully reusable rocket.

And although there is no shortage of private projects intending to send people to Mars, only one company can currently make a realistic promise to deliver human bodies to the Red Planet before NASA finally gets around to it. • • • In the same way we can draw a line from Wernher von Braun straight to Apollo 11, when a spaceship carrying astronauts lands on Mars in 2027, we may well be able to draw a line straight to Elon Musk—because that Mars lander will most likely have the SpaceX logo on it. Musk is arguably the most visionary entrepreneur of our time. Seven years after he quit a PhD program in applied physics at Stanford University, he sold his share of PayPal and Zip2, companies he cofounded, giving him a reported net worth of $324 million.

Like von Braun before him, Musk is in love with the idea that humans should become a spacefaring society. He is keenly aware that Earth will not be habitable forever. Musk seems frustrated by our denial about what we are doing to our habitat, and is ever cognizant of a simple fact: humans will become extinct if we do not reach beyond Earth. Elon Musk’s appearance as a rocket man came none too soon. The technology had advanced very little from 1969, when Neil Armstrong placed his boot on the moon, to 2002, when Musk began SpaceX. In fact, according to Musk, space travel since the Apollo program not only hasn’t moved forward much, it has gone “backward.”


pages: 304 words: 89,879

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

Musk also started Neuralink in 2016 to build machines that can interface directly with the human brain, and he formed a company to dig tunnels beneath congested cities. In short, Elon Musk had a lot on his mind when I nudged his memories back to the tiny island of Omelek. He wanted to help. Musk understands the significance of the Falcon 1 rocket to his life, and how its singular success spurred a transformational change across a number of fronts. Before this book, he had never consented to telling the story in full, or to allow an author free rein inside SpaceX to speak with employees about the company’s formative years. But Elon Musk wanted me to talk to everyone for this book. And he meant it. “It was a high-drama situation,” he said of launching rockets from Omelek.

Technician Ed Thomas with the second stage of the Falcon 1 rocket inside the hangar on Omelek. (Hans Koenigsmann) A C-17 aircraft flies by Omelek Island during the Flight One campaign after delivering an emergency shipment of LOX. (Tim Buzza) Elon Musk, center top, with the Flight One launch team and Air Force officials prior to launch. (Tim Buzza) Collecting the wreckage after Flight One. (Hans Koenigsmann) A solemn Elon Musk surveys debris collected after Flight One. (Hans Koenigsmann) Kestrel engine with its expanded nozzle. (Hans Koenigsmann) Zach Dunn poses with a Merlin 1C rocket engine on Omelek. Dunn, who started as an intern at SpaceX, would be instrumental in the development of Merlin.

Flight Four 11. Always Go to Eleven Epilogue Acknowledgments Key SpaceX Employees from 2002 to 2008 Timeline Bulent Altan’s Turkish Goulash Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Prologue September 14, 2019 A fat, red sun sank into the Texas horizon as Elon Musk bounded toward a silvery spaceship. Reaching its concrete landing pad, Musk marveled up at the stainless steel, steampunk contraption looming above, which shone brilliantly in the dying light. “It’s like something out of a Mad Max movie,” he gushed about the first prototype of his Mars rocket, nicknamed Starhopper.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

“Roko’s Basilisk,” LessWrong, https:// www .lesswrong .com /tag /rokos -basilisk, accessed December 9, 2021. 173   “summoning the demon” : “Elon Musk at the MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium,” YouTube Video, July 5, 2015, 1:23:27, https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v =4DUbiCQpw _4. 173   “so that we’ll have a bolt-hole” : Maureen Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the AI Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair , March 26, 2017, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2017 /03 /elon -musk -billion -dollar -crusade -to -stop -ai -space -x. 173   Musk has been developing a neural net apparatus : Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade.” Chapter 13: Pattern Recognition 176   “To the Planetarium” : Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street: And Other Writings , translated by Edmund Jephcott (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2021). 179   “You can build” : Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World (New York: HarperOne, 2020), 78–79. 179   eating local foods is better for our health : Vicki Robin, Blessing the Hands That Feed Us: What Eating Closer to Home Can Teach Us about Food, Community, and Our Place on Earth (Farming Hills, MI: Thorndike Press, 2014). 181   We consume over three billion gallons : Koustav Samanta and Roslan Khasawneh, and Florence Tan, “APPEC-Global oil demand seen reaching pre-pandemic levels by early 2022,” Reuters , September 27, 2021, https:// www .reuters .com /business /energy /appec -global -oil -demand -seen -reaching -pre -pandemic -levels -by -early -2022 -2021 -09 -27 /. 183   They pooled money : Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). 186   “Young people feel” : Elise Chen, “These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy,” New York Times , July 3, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /07 /03 /world /asia /china -slackers -tangping .html. 186   “Amidst global shutdown” : Gaya Herrington, “Beyond Growth,” WEFLIVE , January 23, 2020, https:// www .weflive .com /story /e968fb0963974e1e8f6c636e5654cbc2. 186   “resource scarcity has not” : Edward Helmore, “Yep, It’s Bleak, Says Expert Who Tested 1970s End-of-the-World Prediction,” Guardian , July 25, 2021, https:// www .theguardian .com /environment /2021 /jul /25 /gaya -herrington -mit -study -the -limits -to -growth. 188   “only now … all of us ”: American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee (HBO, 2021), https:// www .hbo .com /specials /american -utopia. 188   There’s no “solution” : See Sarah Pessin’s work, including “From Mystery to Laughter to Trembling Generosity: Agono-Pluralistic Ethics in Connolly v.

Thanks most of all to my wife, Barbara, for lovingly supporting the years of talks and travel recounted here, and my daughter, Mamie, for giving me both hope and a stake in the future. Notes Introduction: Meet The Mindset     5   Elon Musk colonizing Mars : Mike Wall, “Mars Colony Would Be a Hedge against World War III, Elon Musk Says,” Space.com , March 28, 2018, https:// www .space .com /40112 -elon -musk -mars -colony -world -war -3 .html.     5   Peter Thiel reversing the aging process : Maya Kossoff, “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People’s Blood,” Vanity Fair , August 1, 2016, 2021, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2016 /08 /peter -thiel -wants -to -inject -himself -with -young -peoples -blood.     5   uploading their minds : Alexandra Richards, “Silicon Valley billionaire pays company thousands ‘to be killed and have his brain digitally preserved forever,’ ” Evening Standard , March 15, 2018, https:// www .standard .co .uk /news /world /silicon -valley -billionaire -pays -company -thousands -to -kill -him -and -preserve -his -brain -forever -a3790871 .html.     8   “fairer” phones : Bas Van Abel, interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human podcast, March 29, 2017, https:// www .teamhuman .fm /episodes /ep -30 -bas -van -abel -fingerprints -on -the -touchscreen.   10   cars into space : Joel Gunter, “Elon Musk: The Man Who Sent His Sports Car into Space,” BBC , February 10, 2018, https:// www .bbc .com /news /science -environment -42992143.   10   Biosphere trials : Steve Rose, “Eight Go Mad in Arizona: How a Lockdown Experiment Went Horribly Wrong,” Guardian , July 13, 2020, https:// www .theguardian .com /film /2020 /jul /13 /spaceship -earth -arizona -biosphere -2 -lockdown.

Then he spoke carefully, as if into a primitive trans lation machine. “It’s not that I hate AI —I just fear them. That may not be interpreted as a threat to their interests.” The bigger the billionaire, the greater the fear, and the countermeasures. Elon Musk told a 2014 audience at MIT that by experimenting with AI, Larry Page and his friends at Google are “summoning the demon .” In a now famous Vanity Fair account of a conversation between Elon Musk and DeepMind creator Demis Hassabis, Musk explained that one of the reasons he intended to colonize Mars was “so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if AI goes rogue and turns on humanity.” Similarly, Musk has been developing a neural net apparatus that can be lasered onto our brains, which would potentially allow us to compete with a superintelligent rogue AI that turns against us.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

See: https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11830206/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-save-earth-code-conference-interview. Elon Musk doesn’t disagree: Dave Mosher, “Here’s Elon Musk’s Complete, Sweeping Vision on Colonizing Mars to Save Humanity,” Business Insider, September 29, 2016. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-mars-speech-transcript-2016-9. “Mars Oasis”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, September 21, 2012. See: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002: Michael Sheetz, “The Rise of Spacex and the Future Of Elon Musk’s Mars Dream,” CNBC, March 20, 2019. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/spacex-rise-elon-musk-mars-dream.html.

Whatever the case, transportation ten years from today is going to look radically different—and this prediction doesn’t include everything that happened after Elon Musk lost his temper. Hyperloop On an empty swatch of desert outside of Las Vegas, perched atop a high-tech stretch of track, a sleek silver pod begins to quiver. Less than a second later, it’s not just moving, it’s a hundred-mile-per-hour blur. Ten seconds after, it’s zipping down the Virgin Hyperloop One Development Track at 240 mph. If these tracks continued—as they someday will—this high-speed train would take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the time it takes to watch a sitcom. Hyperloop is the brainchild of Elon Musk, just one in a series of transportation innovations from a man determined to leave his mark on the industry.

See: https://spacenews.com/bridenstine-says-nasa-planning-for-human-mars-missions-in-2030s/. .06 percent per person per year: Richard Summers, “Emergencies in Space,” The Practice of Emergency Medicine/Concepts, 2005. See: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a102/d4e61620dd77f93639cf47492f7ca6f8c44f.pdf. Elon Musk once explained: Watch Elon Musk’s speech at the SS R&D Conference on July 19, 2017 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqvBhhTtUm4. Kim is part of the research team behind STAR: Alan Brown, “Smooth Operator: Robot Could Transform Soft-Tissue Surgery,” Alliance of Advanced Biomedical Engineering, August 14, 2017.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

The New Space industry leaders may not be who you think they are. The new operatives in the commercial space game are organizations such as Google, Facebook, and the Tesla-SpaceX complex (within the empire of Elon Musk). Indeed this New Space push is fueled by who we call the space billionaires. At the head of the space billionaire pack are Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com; Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft; Elon Musk (founder of Space X, Paypal, and Tesla); Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites; Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; and electronic game inventor John Carmack, who created “Doom” and “Quake.”

Legislators, bankers, and aspiring space entrepreneurs are far more interested in the views of the super-rich capitalists called the space billionaires. A number of these billionaires and space executives have already put some very serious money into enterprises intent on creating a new pathway to the stars. No less than five billionaires with established space ventures—Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow—have invested millions if not billions of dollars into commercializing space. They are developing new technologies and establishing space enterprises that can bring the wealth of outer space down to Earth. This is not a pipe dream, but will increasingly be the economic reality of the 2020s.

Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the Moon and on Mars, and you would need a million people to be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets…to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars…people to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just—there. No oil.”(Elon Musk, president of SpaceX and Tesla.) On his space business, Virgin Galactic: We'll go into orbit. We'll go to the Moon. This business has no limits. (Richard Branson, reported in Wired magazine January 2005.) On why space is the next frontier: What should exist? To me, that's the most exciting question imaginable.


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

Ryan Mac, Mark Di Stefano, and John Paczkowski, "In a New Email, Elon Musk Accused a Cave Rescuer of Being a ‘Child Rapist’ and Said He ‘Hopes’ There’s a Lawsuit," BuzzFeed News, September 4, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-cave-rescuer-accusations-buzzfeed-email. 58. Jon Passantino, "Elon Musk Says He Sent Ventilators To California Hospitals, They Say They Got Something Else Instead," CNN Business, April 17, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/tech/elon-musk-ventilators-california/index.html. 59. Avery Hartmans, "Elon Musk Lashed Out at Reports That He Never Delivered Ventilators to California Hospitals.

Here’s What’s Going On, and Why Musk’s Ventilator Efforts Have Become Controversial," Business Insider, April 17, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-ventilator-controversy-explained-2020-4#april-2-musk-defends-the-ventilators-he-delivered-after-facing-criticism-for-sending-non-invasive-bipap-machines-instead-of-traditional-ventilators-6. 60. Tyler Sonnemaker, "The Hackers Who Took Over the Twitter Accounts of Joe Biden and Elon Musk May Have Made Off With as Much as $120,000 Worth of Bitcoin—But We May Never Know for Sure," Business Insider, July 16, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-hackers-joe-biden-elon-musk-received-120000-bitcoin-payments-2020-7. 61. Bill Ruthhart and John Byrne, "Chicago Taps Elon Musk’s Boring Company to Build High-Speed Transit Tunnels That Would Tie Loop with O’Hare," Chicago Tribune, June 14, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met-ohare-high-speed-transit-elon-musk-boring-company-20180613-story.html. 62.

The writer Jack Crosbie noticed a similar detail about the legend surrounding Elon Musk while working as a journalist at an unnamed tech blog. Neither his boss nor the audience he was writing for seemed to care about whether the information they were reading was true‚ they just wanted a fun, shareable story about a cool tech dude. “The site largely focused on the kind of stuff that would hit big with the content-hungry crowds of Facebook users interested in pages like ‘I Fucking Love Science,’ Star Wars, and the Marvel and DC comic book universes. Above all, our readers fucking loved, and I mean LOVED, Elon Musk,” Crosbie recalled in a 2020 essay for Discourse Blog.81 “The top-performing social headlines we ran, for the most part, were ones that praised something Musk was doing.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Turner, “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities,” American Economic Association 101:6, 2011. 6 Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, HarperCollins, 2015. 7 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company, December 19, 2018, YouTube.com. 8 Ibid. 9 Aarian Marshall, “Elon Musk Reveals His Awkward Dislike of Mass Transit,” Wired, December 14, 2017, Wired.com. 10 Ibid. 11 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company. 12 Laura J. Nelson, “Elon Musk Unveils His Company’s First Tunnel in Hawthorne, and It’s Not a Smooth Ride,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2018, Latimes.com. 13 Dennis Romero, “Vintage Roller Coaster Fans See Familiar Tech in Elon Musk’s Loop Tunnel,” NBC News, December 28, 2018, Nbcnews.com. 14 Alissa Walker, “Stop Calling Elon Musk’s Boring Tunnel Public Transit,” Curbed, January 8, 2020, Archive.curbed.com. 15 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company. 16 Jenna Chandler and Alissa Walker, “Elon Musk First Envisioned Double-Decker 405 before Tunnel Idea,” Curbed, November 9, 2018, La.curbed.com. 17 E.V.

Nelson, “Elon Musk Unveils His Company’s First Tunnel in Hawthorne, and It’s Not a Smooth Ride,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2018, Latimes.com. 13 Dennis Romero, “Vintage Roller Coaster Fans See Familiar Tech in Elon Musk’s Loop Tunnel,” NBC News, December 28, 2018, Nbcnews.com. 14 Alissa Walker, “Stop Calling Elon Musk’s Boring Tunnel Public Transit,” Curbed, January 8, 2020, Archive.curbed.com. 15 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company. 16 Jenna Chandler and Alissa Walker, “Elon Musk First Envisioned Double-Decker 405 before Tunnel Idea,” Curbed, November 9, 2018, La.curbed.com. 17 E.V. Rickenbacker, “Flying Autos in 20 Years,” Popular Science Monthly 105:1, July 1924, p. 30. 18 Dave Hall, “Flying Cars: Why Haven’t They Taken Off Yet?

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Silicon Valley was embraced as the driver of economic growth, and that included valorizing its key figures and buying into its big plans to remake the world—regardless of how poorly they were thought through. Transportation was perceived to be ripe for disruption. Elon Musk graced the covers of major magazines and was profiled repeatedly as the entrepreneur who was going to “save the planet” with his sexy electric sportscars, before promising trains in vacuum tubes and a large-scale tunnel system to solve traffic congestion. But he was not the only one with big plans for mobility.


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

The only real gating factor preventing the space economy from taking full advantage of this new reality and exploding at internet speed has been a lack of rockets to put up all the new satellites. We needed supercheap rockets that were flying all the time and venture capitalists to fund their creation. For people who already fancied themselves as the next Elon Musk in their dreams, the call to action was loud and clear: Get yourself a team and some money. Let the great rocket race begin. The Peter Beck Project Chapter Eight Big, If True Elon Musk called in the early part of the evening. Or at least my evening. It was November 2018, and I was staying in Auckland, New Zealand, for a couple of weeks, renting a house in a nice suburban neighborhood.

(Ashlee Vance) (For more on the new space landscape, see the illustrations that appear after Chapter 27.) About the Author ASHLEE VANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk and a feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the host of Hello World, a travel show that centers on inventors and scientists all over the planet. Previously, he worked as a reporter for the New York Times, the Economist, and the Register. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Ashlee Vance Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Geek Silicon Valley: The Inside Guide to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose, San Francisco Copyright WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE.

Three previous rockets had been launched from this small plot of jungle-covered land in the middle of nowhere and had either blown up shortly after launch or broken apart during flight. The wounds of those past failures had pushed many of the SpaceX engineers and technicians into a state of serious self-doubt. Maybe they were not as bright and creative as they had told themselves. Maybe Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder and CEO, had made a terrible, costly mistake by believing in them. Maybe they were minutes away from needing to look for new jobs. The conditions for this type of operation were comically less than ideal from the start. SpaceX had set up its rocket-launching facility on Kwajalein Atoll, a collection of a hundred islands hanging out together in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with Hawaii and Australia as their theoretical neighbors.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Also see Marcia Brown, Stone Soup (New York: Aladdin Picture Books), 1997. 17 AI with Hagel. 18 John Hagel, “Pursuing Passion,” Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, November 14, 2009, http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/11/pursuing-passion.html. 19 Gregory Berns, “In Hard Times, Fear Can Impair Decision Making,” New York Times, December 6, 2008. Chapter Six: Billionaire Wisdom: Thinking at Scale 1 Elon Musk, “The Rocket Scientist Model for Iron Man,” Time, http://content.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,81836143001_1987904,00.html. 2 Unless otherwise noted, historical details and Musk quotes come from a series of AIs between 2012 and 2014. 3 AI, XPRIZE Adventure Trip, February 2013. 4 Thomas Owen, “Tesla’s Elon Musk: ‘I Ran Out of Cash,’ ” VentureBeat, May 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/27/elon-musk-personal-finances/. 5 Andrew Sorkin, Dealbook: “Elon Musk, of PayPal and Tesla Fame, Is Broke,” New York Times, June 2010, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/sorkin-elon-musk-of-paypal-and-tesla-fame-is-broke/?

_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0. 6 SpaceX, “About Page,” http://www.spacex.com/about. 7 Kenneth Chang, “First Private Craft Docks With Space Station,” New York Times, May 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/science/space/space-x-capsule-docks-at-space-station.html. 8 Elon Musk interviewed by Kevin Fong, Scott’s Legacy, a BBC Radio 4 program, cited in Jonathan Amos, “Mars for the ‘average person,’ ” BBC News, March 20, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-17439490. 9 Diarmuid O’Connell, Statement from Tesla’s vice president of corporate and business development, reported in Hunter Walker, “White House Won’t Back Tesla in Direct Sales Fight” in Business Insider, July 14, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-wont-back-tesla-2014-7. 10 Daniel Gross, “Elon’s Élan,” Slate, April 30, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/tesla_and_spacex_founder_elon_musk_has_a_knack_for_getting_others_to_fund.html. 11 Kevin Rose, “Elon Musk,” Video Interview, Episode 20, Foundation, September 2012, http://foundation.bz/20/. 12 Daniel Kahneman, “Why We Make Bad Decisions About Money (And What We Can Do About It),” Big Think, Interview, June 2013, http://bigthink.com/videos/why-we-make-bad-decisions-about-money-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-2. 13 Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs”, Fortune, November 21, 2013, http://fortune.com/2013/11/21/the-shared-genius-of-elon-musk-and-steve-jobs/. 14 AI, September 2013. 15 Eric Kelsey, “Branson recalls tears, $1 billion check in Virgin Records sale,” Reuters, October 23, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/24/us-richardbranson-virgin-idUSBRE99N01U20131024. 16 Forbes, The World’s Billionaires: #303 Richard Branson, August 2014, http://www.forbes.com/profile/richard-branson/. 17 Richard Branson, “BA Can’t Get It Up - best stunt ever?

This chapter, which marks the end of that psychological exploration, focuses on the mind hacks of four remarkable men, a quartet of entrepreneurs who have already harnessed exponential technology to build multibillion-dollar companies that forever changed the world: Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page. I’ve had the chance to work in varying degrees with each of these men. Elon Musk and Larry Page are both trustees and benefactors of the XPRIZE Foundation; Jeff Bezos ran the SEDS chapter at Princeton and has been passionate about opening space for the past forty years; and Richard Branson licensed the winning technology resulting from the Ansari XPRIZE to create Virgin Galactic.


pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

Michael Sainato, “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Think the Earth Is Doomed,” Observer, June 30, 2017, https://­observer​.­com​ /­2017​/­06​/c­ olonizing​-­mars​-­elon​-­musk​-­stephen​-­hawking​-­jeff​-­bezos​/­. 4. Corey S. Powell, “Jeff Bezos Foresees a Trillion ­People Living in ­ illions of Space Colonies. ­Here’s What He’s ­Doing to Get the Ball M Rolling,” NBC News, May 15, 2019, https://­www​.­nbcnews​.­com​/­mach​ /­s cience​/­jeff​-­bezos​-­foresees​-­trillion​-­people​-­living​-­millions​-­space​ -­colonies​-­here​-­ncna1006036; Shawn Langlois, “Elon Musk Says Jeff Bezos’s Plan to Colonize Space ‘Makes No Sense,’ ” MarketWatch, May 23, 2019, https://­www​.­marketwatch​.­com​/­story​/­elon​-­musk​-­jeff​ -­bezos​-­space​-­colony​-­plan​-­makes​-­no​-­sense​-2 ­ 019​-­05​-2 ­ 3; Sainato, “Stephen Hawking.” 5.

Here’s What He’s ­Doing to Get the Ball M Rolling,” NBC News, May 15, 2019, https://­www​.­nbcnews​.­com​/­mach​ /­s cience​/­jeff​-­bezos​-­foresees​-­trillion​-­people​-­living​-­millions​-­space​ -­colonies​-­here​-­ncna1006036; Shawn Langlois, “Elon Musk Says Jeff Bezos’s Plan to Colonize Space ‘Makes No Sense,’ ” MarketWatch, May 23, 2019, https://­www​.­marketwatch​.­com​/­story​/­elon​-­musk​-­jeff​ -­bezos​-­space​-­colony​-­plan​-­makes​-­no​-­sense​-2 ­ 019​-­05​-2 ­ 3; Sainato, “Stephen Hawking.” 5. Nicky Woolf, “SpaceX Founder Elon Musk Plans to Get H ­ umans to Mars in Six Years,” The Guardian, September 27, 2016, https://­www​ .­theguardian​.­com​/­technology​/­2016​/­sep​/­27​/­elon​-­musk​-­spacex​-­mars​ -­colony. 6. Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), 210–211. 7.

This may well occur at some point in the ­f uture, ­whether or not ­these socie­ ties represent e­ ither an adjunct to terrestrial civilization or the necessary escape pod promoted by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. This diaspora w ­ ill not occur by 2040, however, u ­ nless the passions that once created a race to the moon bypass the rational approach of an international effort that re­spects the need to maintain a pristine Mars, so far as pos­si­ble, in order to preserve our ability to discover Martian life and to assure that it has not been contaminated by life brought from Earth. What of the deeply held desires of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to send h ­ umans to Mars despite the rationale expressed e­ arlier? H ­ ere a rather cynical compromise may prove pos­si­ble.


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

See also promotions market leader, X.com (PayPal) as, 79 Martin, Paul, 64–66 AuctionFinder and shipping tools, 259–260 background, 97 customer service solutions, 108 departure from PayPal, 264–266 life after PayPal, 312 move to oust Elon Musk, 157–159 positions at X.com (PayPal), 75, 119 reaction to sale of PayPal, 279 response to credit card limit crisis, 127–128 “turn off Checkout” tool, 232 . See also “PayPal Paul” MasterCard sanctions on PayPal, 148, 198 McCormick, Andrew, 255 media coverage CEO change at X.com (PayPal), 112–113 Citigroup C2it, 177 eBay Billpoint tactics, 209–210 eBay buyout of PayPal, 289 eBay “Checkout” feature, 231 Elon Musk’s departure, 177–178 negative, towards PayPal, 179–180, 293–294 PayPal anti-fraud measures, 202–203 PayPal at eBay Live, 275 PayPal IPO, 224–225, 236 PayPal sales of shares, 246–247 positive, towards PayPal, 178 startups, 178–180, 310 town named after startup, 132 meetings communication by, at eBay, 297–298 at Confinity, 24–25 fine for latecomers at PayPal, 197 Melton, Bill, 10 merchant services team at PayPal, 212, 260 mergers and acquisitions Confinity and X.com, 69, 72–73 difficulties from, 113 by eBay, 307 PayPal and eBay, 302 message boards adding to PayPal site, 139 as customer service solution, 101, 107–108, 138–139 “damage control” on, 127 Metcalfe’s law, 42 Microsoft eBay’s tactics compared with, 205, 231 PayPal as “Microsoft of payments,” 26 “Million Auction March,” 186 mission PayPal, 26, 28 PayPal, difference from eBay’s, 307 .

X.com, an ambiguous financial Web site with a name to match, launched its own payments service. If dotBank’s launch concerned Peter, X.com’s entrance into payments made him livid. Up until Confinity’s move to 165 University Avenue a few months earlier, the two companies had been neighbors in a building just down the street. Elon Musk founded X.com in early 1999 after selling his previous company, an online map service named Zip2, to Compaq for $307 million.1 He set up his new venture in a small suite of offices overlooking a bakery that shared common space with Confinity. Although the two companies had no reason to communicate formally, the employees often bumped into one another in the entrance and restrooms.

X.com also revamped the content on its homepage, toning down the “all your financial services in one place” messaging in favor of descriptions touting its ability to conduct auction payments. X.com’s decision to duplicate Confinity’s actions was fair play. We had done the same thing with dotBank’s features just a month before. And, even if the X.com team hadn’t grasped the value of entering the eBay auctions market on its own, Elon Musk’s company did understand what Confinity was up to before we could seize a commanding lead. In an online world where all it takes is several hundred lines of code and a handful of HTML pages to overhaul an entire business, being able to adapt to competitive changes is critical for survival, something I would see demonstrated again and again in the years to come.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

CONTENTS DEDICATION 1 ELON’S WORLD 2 AFRICA 3 CANADA 4 ELON’S FIRST START-UP 5 PAYPAL MAFIA BOSS 6 MICE IN SPACE PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT 7 ALL ELECTRIC 8 PAIN, SUFFERING, AND SURVIVAL 9 LIFTOFF 10 THE REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR 11 THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF ELON MUSK EPILOGUE APPENDIX 1 APPENDIX 2 APPENDIX 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY ASHLEE VANCE CREDITS COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER 1 ELON’S WORLD DO YOU THINK I’M INSANE?” This question came from Elon Musk near the very end of a long dinner we shared at a high-end seafood restaurant in Silicon Valley. I’d gotten to the restaurant first and settled down with a gin and tonic, knowing Musk would—as ever—be late.

What separated Tesla from the competition was the willingness to charge after its vision without compromise, a complete commitment to execute to Musk’s standards. 11 THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF ELON MUSK THE RIVE BROTHERS USED TO BE LIKE A TECHNOLOGY GANG. In the late 1990s, they would jump on skateboards and zip around the streets of Santa Cruz, knocking on the doors of businesses and asking if they needed any help managing their computing systems. The young men, who had all grown up in South Africa with their cousin Elon Musk, soon decided there must be an easier way to hawk their technology smarts than going door-to-door. They wrote some software that allowed them to take control of their clients’ systems from afar and to automate many of the standard tasks that companies required, such as installing updates for applications.

It was only after I’d spent lots of time with Musk that I realized the question was more for him than me. Nothing I said would have mattered. Musk was stopping one last time and wondering aloud if I could be trusted and then looking into my eyes to make his judgment. A split second later, we shook hands and Musk drove off in a red Tesla Model S sedan. ANY STUDY OF ELON MUSK must begin at the headquarters of SpaceX, in Hawthorne, California—a suburb of Los Angeles located a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport. It’s there that visitors will find two giant posters of Mars hanging side by side on the wall leading up to Musk’s cubicle. The poster to the left depicts Mars as it is today—a cold, barren red orb.


Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

Ford’s chief executive Mark Fields said in February 2015 that fully autonomous cars would be on the market by 2020, though he did not say they would be made by Ford. Anthony Foxx, then US Transportation Secretary, claimed in January 2016 that driverless cars would be in use all over the world by 2025. And yet even an article headed ‘Elon Musk is right: driverless cars will arrive by 2021’ on a website called ‘The Next Web’ concluded that ‘2021 might be a tad optimistic but it seems we are closer than decades away.’ It is not only politicians, the auto manufacturers and tech companies making these predictions either. Uber’s (later-ejected) chief executive Travis Kalanick tweeted in August 2015 that he expected Uber’s fleet to be driverless by 2030 and that the service would then be so inexpensive and ubiquitous that car ownership would be obsolete.

The network of charging points required to service such housing would be incredibly expensive to provide, and it is not at all clear who would fund it. Because of the vehicles’ shortcomings, their greater cost and the lack of charging points, take-up has been 33 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere slow, though it has accelerated recently. At the high end, Tesla – a start-up firm created by Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur and inventor, as well as a powerful and leading advocate for driverless vehicles – produced its Model S in 2012. It has a range of 200 miles for the basic model, extending to 335 for the most expensive version. Tesla does not use single-purpose, large battery cells like those in other electric vehicles.

While sales of electric vehicles are clearly set to grow, there are major logistical and practical problems to overcome before they can become the car of choice for most people. 35 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere The key issue is whether enough batteries can be produced. Tesla is constructing what will become the biggest building in the world (in terms of its footprint) in Nevada to manufacture lithium-ion batteries, and it is eventually expected to produce enough batteries for 1.5 million cars per year. Elon Musk is planning several more such ‘gigafactories’ but there is clearly, at the moment, huge undercapacity of battery manufacturing in relation to the demand that would be created if even 10 or 20 per cent of cars, let alone a majority, were electric powered. While this is not an insuperable problem, there are also questions about the availability of sufficient lithium to produce these batteries.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

“no one even knew how to play”: Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 5 Notes Essay,” Blakemasters.com, April 20, 2012, https://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay. one headline declared: Mark Gimein, “High Tech’s New ‘It Guy’: Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” Ottawa Citizen, August 23, 1999, D1. strength of a demo website: Max Chafkin, “Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007: Elon Musk,” Inc., December 1, 2007, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20071201/entrepreneur-of-the-year-elon-musk.html. “be done in two minutes”: Craig Tolliver, “X.com Opens Its Virtual Doors,” CBS MarketWatch, December 10, 1999, https://web.archive.org/web/20000301165053/http://www.x.com/external_CBS_interview.htm.

shortly after the 2016 election: Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. Thiel and his coconspirators: Max Chafkin, “Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007: Elon Musk,” Inc., December 1, 2007, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20071201/entrepreneur-of-the-year-elon-musk.html. CHAPTER ONE: FUCK YOU, WORLD built in the 1960s: “Community Profile,” Community, Foster City website, accessed January 20, 2021, https://www.fostercity.org/sites/default/files/fileattachments/community_development/page/3211/final-snapshot-030812-02-community-profile.pdf.

“numbers are being cooked”: Graig Graziosi, “Republican Senate Hopeful Says Coronavirus Numbers Being ‘Cooked’ to Hurt Trump,” The Independent, July 28, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-deaths-trump-republican-senate-kris-kobach-a9642731.html. Tesla workers in Fremont: Neal E. Boudette, “Hundreds of Tesla Workers Tested Positive for the Virus after Elon Musk Reopened a Plant, Data Shows,” The New York Times, March 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/world/tesla-elon-musk-coronavirus-outbreak.html. virus as the “sniffles”: “Trump Says Son Barron’s Covid Illness ‘‘Just Went Away,’ ” NBC News, October 22, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trump-says-son-barron-s-covid-illness-just-went-away-94447173800.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Kai-Fu Lee, “The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence,” New York Times, June 24, 2017. 16. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 1, 2000. 17. Sarah Marsh, “Essays Reveal Stephen Hawking Predicted Race of Superhumans,” Guardian, October 4, 2018 18. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade.” 19. James Vincent, “Elon Musk Says We Need to Regulate AI Before It Becomes a Danger to Humanity,” theverge.com, July 17, 2017. 20. Stephen Hawking, “Artificial Intelligence Could Be the Greatest Disaster in Human History,” Independent, October 20, 2016. 21. James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: St.

Pei Wang, Ben Goertzel, and Stan Franklin (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008), available online at selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf, p. 9. 25. Anders Sandberg, “Why We Should Fear the Paperclipper,” sentientdevelopments.com, February 14, 2011. 26. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 89. 27. Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 19. 28. Ibid., p. 265. 29. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, p. 300. 30. Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), p. 135. 31. Damien Cave, “Artificial Stupidity,” Salon, October 4, 2000. 32. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 90. 33. Sam Thielman, “Is Facebook Even Capable of Stopping an Influence Campaign on Its Platform?”

Sam Thielman, “Is Facebook Even Capable of Stopping an Influence Campaign on Its Platform?” Talking Points Memo, September 15, 2017. 34. James Walker, “Researchers Shut Down AI that Invented Its Own Language,” digitaljournal.com, July 21, 2017. 35. Cade Metz, “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and the Feud over Killer Robots,” New York Times, June 9, 2018. 36. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 91. 37. Khatchadourian, “Doomsday Invention.” CHAPTER 16 1. Knoepfler, GMO Sapiens, p. 177. 2. Rachel Nuwer, “Babies Start Learning Language in the Womb,” smithsonianmag.com, January 4, 2013. 3. Michael D. Lemonick, “Designer Babies,” Time, January 11, 1999. 4.


pages: 239 words: 74,845

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

Einhorn had then fired back in one of his quarterly letters to his investors, as reported by CNBC and others: We wonder whether surge production techniques to support self-congratulatory tweets are economically efficient ways of ramping production, or whether customers will be happy with the quality of a car rushed through production to prove a point to short sellers…The most striking feature of the quarter is that Elon Musk appears erratic and desperate. But that was only the beginning. In his next quarterly letter, Einhorn took even more direct aim, comparing Tesla to Lehman Brothers, the failed bank. Like Lehman, we think the deception is about to catch up to TSLA…Elon Musk’s erratic behavior suggests he sees it the same way. Continuing on—as reported by Bloomberg at the time—Einhorn had charged that Tesla would never be able to meet the low price targets they’d chosen for the Model 3, and that Elon himself was actually trying to get himself fired.

The WSB board could post all they wanted; shit-talking, after all, was a part of every sport. But Gabe Plotkin knew that time was on his side. A melting ice cube always ended up the same—a nice big puddle of water. Part Two “We like the stock! We like the stock!” —Jim Cramer “Gamestonk!!” —Elon Musk Chapter Twelve January 11, 2021 Keith Gill’s left boot touched the black ice first, the sole slipping against the frictionless surface, sending his entire left leg out in front of him in a bizarre angle that would have brought him right down to the sidewalk if he hadn’t been holding his daughter’s gloved hand in his own.

Forty feet below the surface of Hawthorne, California, a working-class enclave fifteen miles outside Los Angeles. A freshly bored tunnel fitted with electrodynamic suspension rails and linear induction motors, as well as a partially constructed Hyperloop capsule, complete with inlet fan and axial compressor. Elon Musk, CEO and chief techno-king of Tesla; CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; dogecoin enthusiast; bitcoin proselytizer; sometime richest man in the world; and the former president of the Galactic Federation of Planets, was moving fast, his legs churning at what felt like a thousand RPMs, as he tore through the twelve-foot-high, mile-long Hyperloop test track.


pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

An independent fact checker verified the information in my reporting and I delivered material from this chapter to Elon Musk himself for firsthand verification. (Musk did not return anything.) Two major magazine profiles of Musk provide further biographical details: Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,” Fortune, November 2013, and Tom Junod, “The Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 2012. 171 “I didn’t think there was anything I could do”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 172 NASA employed about 18,000: NASA’s headcount comes from “Space Organizations Part 1: NASA—Nasa’s Workforce,” Library Index, http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/987/Space-Organizations-Part-1-NASA-NASA-S-WORKFORCE.html, and the catalog of collaborators on the Apollo project is documented by Catherine Thimmesh, Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). 172 “To make life multiplanetary” and the continuation of “human consciousness”: Musk often repeats these phrases in interviews, such as David Pescovitz, “Elon Musk on Making Life Multi-Planetary,” Boing Boing, April 10, 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/elon-musk-on-making-life-multi.html (accessed February 15, 2014), and Junod, “The Triumph of His Will.” 174 over-the-top demonstration to create buzz: For more on Lady Gaga, Baumgartner, Alexander the Great, and 10x Storytelling, visit shanesnow.com/10xstorytelling. 175 “We choose to go to the moon”: John F.

Two major magazine profiles of Musk provide further biographical details: Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,” Fortune, November 2013, and Tom Junod, “The Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 2012. 171 “I didn’t think there was anything I could do”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 172 NASA employed about 18,000: NASA’s headcount comes from “Space Organizations Part 1: NASA—Nasa’s Workforce,” Library Index, http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/987/Space-Organizations-Part-1-NASA-NASA-S-WORKFORCE.html, and the catalog of collaborators on the Apollo project is documented by Catherine Thimmesh, Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). 172 “To make life multiplanetary” and the continuation of “human consciousness”: Musk often repeats these phrases in interviews, such as David Pescovitz, “Elon Musk on Making Life Multi-Planetary,” Boing Boing, April 10, 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/elon-musk-on-making-life-multi.html (accessed February 15, 2014), and Junod, “The Triumph of His Will.” 174 over-the-top demonstration to create buzz: For more on Lady Gaga, Baumgartner, Alexander the Great, and 10x Storytelling, visit shanesnow.com/10xstorytelling. 175 “We choose to go to the moon”: John F.

Now they milled about in the high-ceilinged corporate command room, abuzz with excitement. This could be it. As they waited beneath the giant screens broadcasting their rocket’s video feed from 4,955 miles away, the man behind their mission stepped into the mission control trailer at the back of the room. Elon Musk. The dark-haired South African entered, wearing his usual outfit—fitted T-shirt and jeans—and took command. The oft-mythologized billionaire—after whom Robert Downey Jr. modeled his character, Tony Stark, in the Iron Man films—was at the time simply a millionaire and perhaps not even that. Into SpaceX he’d plunged his personal fortune, which over six years had been whittled down to a stump.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

He likened this to the mathematical nature of physics. Harvard physicist Lisa Randall disagreed. She put the probability of our being a simulation at “effectively zero.” For her the real question was “why so many people think it’s an interesting question.” One who takes simulations seriously is entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has helped fund Nick Bostrom’s work. “The strongest argument for us being in a simulation,” Musk said at the 2016 Recode conference, “is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions playing simultaneously.

Nearly all involve technology well beyond what’s presently available. One exception is a low-tech device, the quantum suicide machine. Quantum Suicide Machine Max Tegmark has led a charmed life. In high school in Sweden he made a small fortune coding a video game. He’s now an MIT cosmologist whose work has been funded by Elon Musk. Yet a share of Tegmark’s popular fame is due to some half-joking remarks he made in 1997. Like a lot of other physicists, Tegmark had racked his brain trying to come up with an experimental test of many worlds. He eventually came up with a notion known as a quantum suicide machine. In David Papineau’s words, the high concept is: Get in the box with Schrödinger’s cat.

Located in Oxford, the home of William of Ockham and Lewis Carroll, the institute was founded by Swedish-born Nick Bostrom and has been financed largely by the American technology industry. Lead donor James Martin was a former IBM employee in New York who struck it rich as a corporate consultant and futurist. More recently Elon Musk donated $1.5 million to study policy questions, much of which has been channeled to the institute. The irony is that Bostrom, who decided the doomsday argument is inconclusive, now spends his days trying to stave off doomsday. FHI is a think tank whose goal is to prevent the end of the world. Bostrom and colleagues attempt to identify threats to human existence and devise ways to deal with them.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Not the degenerates, though—maybe because they didn’t know any better. The amateurs plunged in, and soon they were running circles around investing legends like Warren Buffett. But they were doing dumb things too like buying the shares of bankrupt companies or snapping up stocks with names that sounded like ones mentioned on Twitter by Elon Musk but that actually were worthless shells. Traders and fund managers thought it was hilarious. From what I saw and heard that morning, though, Wall Street wouldn’t be laughing anymore. My oldest son had prompted my deep dive into the subreddit by asking whether I was writing something about GameStop.

“There was no face to the name—he was just a mythical dude. He became an idolized figure,” says Seth Mahoney, a college student and active Robinhood customer who was twenty years old and had been on WallStreetBets for three years and Reddit for nine years at the time of the GameStop squeeze. “He’s one of those leaders, like Elon Musk with Dogecoin.”[4] By the time he was at the height of his influence, Gill was only posting memes or updates of his E*Trade account. Yet those screenshots took on a powerful importance as the trade became successful, explains Dr. Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University attached to its Social Identity and Morality Lab.

“Free is sort of a Rubicon that, once you cross it, people are less thoughtful about how to consume it,” explains Egan, the behavioral finance expert. Sometimes this was a case of mistaken identity by new investors unfamiliar with the sketchy penny stock world. A tiny medical company called Signal Advance, initially valued at $7 million, briefly was worth more than $1 billion after Elon Musk tweeted to his followers that they should use the encrypted-messaging app Signal. And sometimes the confusion seemed deliberate. A firm named Tongji Medical changed its name to Clubhouse Media Group and surged by over 1,000 percent when Musk mentioned the unrelated and unlisted audio app. Incredibly, its value even eclipsed the real app’s private market valuation.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

. __________ * Analysts at the American brokerage firm Bernstein calculated that for every one percent you want to grow GDP, you must increase mined volumes by two percent. * In this book, references to ‘the Congo’ in the period from 1964 onwards always refer to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) rather than Congo-Brazzaville. 1 The Battery Age ‘The spice must flow. The new spice.’ Elon Musk, Tesla CEO1 In late September 2020 Elon Musk strode out onto a stage in the bright California sunlight to address a car park full of Teslas at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Fremont. Dubbed ‘Battery Day’, the event had been hyped up by Musk for months (he had promised it would be ‘insane’). Due to Covid-19 attendees sat alone behind the steering wheels of bright shiny Model 3 and Model Y cars wearing masks.

To Claudia and Jamie Contents Introduction 1 The Battery Age 2 Dashed Hopes: The Troubled History of the EV 3 The Breakthrough: The Lithium-Ion Revolution 4 China’s Battery King 5 The Chinese Lithium Rush 6 Chile’s Buried Treasure 7 The Cobalt Problem 8 The Rise of a Cobalt Giant 9 Blood Cobalt 10 Dirty Nickel 11 The Green Copper Tycoon 12 The Final Frontier: Mining the Deep Sea 13 Reduce, Re-use, Recycle: A Closed Loop 14 The World’s Greenest Battery 15 Cornwall’s Mining Revival Conclusion Acknowledgements Notes Index Introduction ‘We have to scale battery production to crazy levels that people can’t even fathom today.’ Elon Musk, Tesla CEO1 In mid-2020 as the world settled into lockdown, we decided to get an electric car. Our son was seven months old and I had begun to think seriously about his future and whether the world would act quickly enough to mitigate the threats of climate change. Shares in Tesla were soaring, and the carmaker was on the cusp of becoming the most valuable in the world, despite the fact it made a fraction of the eleven million cars a year produced by Toyota.

The current stock of electric cars globally is around ten million, less than twice the number of cars in Beijing and only one percent of the global total. There are over one billion cars globally on the roads. We will also need to replace buses and trucks with electric versions, as well as ships, ferries and even planes. All this will require batteries on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. Tesla’s South African-born founder Elon Musk had built a vast battery ‘Gigafactory’ in the desert of Nevada to supply his electric cars as well as the batteries to store renewable sources of energy. But he was not alone: across China a new factory was being built every week in 2020. Through my work as a Financial Times journalist, I had covered the raw materials electric cars needed: the lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper, as well as aluminium and steel.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Kenneth Chang, “Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX's Ambition into Orbit,” New York Times, February 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html (accessed October 14, 2018). 6. Noah Robischon and Elizabeth Segran, “Elon Musk's Mars Mission Revealed: SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport System,” Fast Company, September 27, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3064139/elon-musks-mars-mission-revealed-spacexs-interplanetary-transport-system (accessed October 14, 2018). 7. Robert Zubrin, “Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System,” New Atlantis, October 21, 2016, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/colonizing-mars (accessed October 14, 2018). 8. Adam Baidawi and Kenneth Chang, “Elon Musk's Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One,” New York Times, September 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/science/elon-musk-mars.html (accessed October 14, 2018). 9.

While both nations have inherited significant parts of the Soviet Union's space technology, relatively free Ukraine's smaller portion is far more investible than that of kleptocratic Russia. CHAPTER 2. FREE SPACE 1. James Titcomb, “Elon Musk Plans London to New York Flights in 29 Minutes,” Telegraph, September 29, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/09/29/elon-musk-unveils-plans-london-new-york-rocket-flights-30-minutes/ (accessed October 14, 2018). Note the BFR, “Big F…ing Rocket,” was originally introduced by Musk as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) in September 2016 and renamed BFR in early 2017, under which title it became widely known and discussed.

In fact, these results show the exact opposite, since Mars would have needed more than 20 psi of CO2 in its atmosphere four billion years ago to have been warm enough for liquid water. So plenty of CO2 must still be soaked in the soil. Mike Brown, “Elon Musk Wants to Terraform Mars, and He's Refusing to Back Down,” Yahoo News, August 1, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-wants-terraform-mars-123100942.html (accessed October 15, 2018). CHAPTER 5. ASTEROIDS FOR FUN AND PROFIT 1. John Lewis, Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets (New York: Helix Books, 1996). 2. David Harland, Jupiter Odyssey: The Story of NASA's Galileo Mission (Chichester, UK: Praxis, 2000). 3.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Amazon’s new air hub: Jason Del Re, “Amazon Is Building a $1.5 Billion Hub for Its Own Cargo Airline,” Vox, January 31, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/1/31/14462256/amazon-air-cargo-hub-kentucky-airport-prime-air (January 24, 2021). belabored public process: Spencer Soper, “Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk,” Bloomberg, February 3, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-03/amazon-s-hq2-fiasco-was-driven-by-bezos-envy-of-elon-musk (January 24, 2021). Gray was charged with reckless: Christian Farr, “Former Amazon Driver Acquitted in Death of 84-Year-Old Woman,” NBC5, August 1, 2019, https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/former-amazon-driver-acquitted-in-death-of-84-year-old-pedestrian/127151/ (January 24, 2021).

And in the fall of 2017, Jeff Bezos finally: Tom Metcalf, “Jeff Bezos Passes Bill Gates to Become the World’s Richest Person,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/bezos-seizes-title-of-world-s-richest-person-after-amazon-soars (January 25, 2021). CHAPTER 11: GRADATIM FEROCITER Two books were valuable resources for this chapter: Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018), and Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). the firm landed a Falcon 9 booster: Loren Grush, “SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket on a Floating Drone Ship for the First Time,” The Verge, April 8, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/8/11392138/spacex-landing-success-falcon-9-rocket-barge-at-sea (January 24, 2021).

SpaceX challenged the patent: Todd Bishop, “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Dealt Setback in Patent Dispute with SpaceX over Rocket Landings,” GeekWire, March 5, 2015, https://www.geekwire.com/2015/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-dealt-setback-in-patent-dispute-with-spacex-over-rocket-landings/ (January 24, 2021); Todd Bishop, “Blue Origin’s Rocket-Landing Patent Canceled in Victory for SpaceX,” GeekWire, September 1, 2015, https://www.geekwire.com/2015/blue-origins-rocket-landing-patent-canceled-in-victory-for-spacex/ (January 24, 2021). the United Launch Alliance (ULA): Armin Rosen, “Elon Musk’s Aerospace Argument Just Took a Hit,” Business Insider, June 17, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/ula-wont-buy-rocket-engines-from-russia-anymore-2014-6 (January 24, 2021). landed its own reusable booster: Loren Grush, “Spacex Successfully Landed Its Falcon 9 Rocket After Launching It to Space,” The Verge, December 21, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/21/10640306/spacex-elon-musk-rocket-landing-success (January 24, 2021). Bezos tweeted: Jeff Bezos, Tweet, December 21, 2015, 8:49 p.m., https://twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/679116636310360067?


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

While this is admittedly a far cry from human-level AI, Kurzweil remains confident in his strategy, telling me that “humans use this hierarchical approach” and that ultimately it will be “sufficient for AGI.”36 Yet another path toward artificial general intelligence is being forged by OpenAI, a San Francisco–based research organization that was founded in 2015 with financial backing from, among others, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Linked-in co-founder Reid Hoffman. OpenAI was initially set up as a nonprofit entity with a mission to undertake a safe and ethical quest for AGI. The organization was conceived partly in response to Elon Musk’s deep concern about the potential for superhuman machine intelligence to someday pose a genuine threat to humanity. From the onset, OpenAI has attracted some of the field’s top researchers, including Ilya Sutskever, who was part of the team from Geoff Hinton’s University of Toronto Lab that built the neural network that triumphed at the 2012 ImageNet competition.

See, for example: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?,” Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Working Paper, September 17, 2013, www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf, p. 38. 6. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,’” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/. 7. Anand S. Rao and Gerard Verweij, “Sizing the prize: What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise?,” PwC, October 2018, www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/analytics/assets/pwc-ai-analysis-sizing-the-prize-report.pdf.

,’” The Independent, May 1, 2014, www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html. 28. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. vii. 29. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,’” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/. 30. Sam Harris, “Can we build AI without losing control over it? (video),” TED Talk, June 2016, www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it?


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Kevin Kelly, “The three breakthroughs that have finally unleashed AI on the world,” WIRED 27 October 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence (accessed 21 October 2016). 7. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,’ ” Washington Post 24 October 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon (accessed 21 October 2016). 8. Rory Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind,” BBC 2 December 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540 (accessed 21 October 2016). 9.

Effects of Autonomy and Transparency on Attributions in Human– Robot Interaction” (in: RO-MAN 2006—The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T., 2006), M.I.T. (undated), http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~taemie/papers/200609_ROMAN_TKim.pdf (accessed 21 October 2016). 14. Kirsten Korosec, “Elon Musk says Tesla vehicles will drive themselves in two years,” Fortune 21 December 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview (accessed 21 October 2016). 15. Max Chafkin, “Uber’s first self-driving fleet arrives in Pittsburgh this month,” Bloomberg 18 August 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on (accessed 23 October 2016).

Airlines found the service too expensive to run and unprofitable to maintain. The sonic boom angered communities. The plane was exotic and beautiful but finicky. Perhaps most important of all, it was too expensive for the majority, and there was no obvious way to make its benefits available more broadly. This is part of the genius of Elon Musk as he develops Tesla: that his luxury company is rapidly moving downstream to become a mass-market player. Clearly, though, in the case of the Concorde, the conditions necessary for a futuristic disruption were not in place. They still are not, although some people are trying, including Musk himself, with his Hyperloop transportation project.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

This avoids annoying signal-blockers, like mountains, and saves thousands of miles of land-routed cable network. * * * Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme, Starlink, controls more than 25% of all satellites in space, and he is seeking permission to get 12,000 up there by 2025, and eventually 42,000. There are risks to all this, including light pollution and energy guzzling. As with so much of tech, most of us just don’t know what is going on, and by the time we find out it will be too late to regulate. Musk is aggressively anti-regulation. And who owns space? Not Elon Musk. This is another kind of land-grab. Another kind of enclosure. Governments will have to regulate space – if they don’t, it’s already been stolen.

* * * Bloom points out that most humans are fixated on space without boundaries. Think about it: land-grab, colonisation, urban creep, loss of habitat, the current fad for seasteading (sea cities with vast oceans at their disposal). And space itself – the go-to fascination of rich men: Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. When I think about artificial intelligence, and what is surely to follow – artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence – it seems to me that what this affects most, now and later, isn’t space but time. The brain uses chemicals to transmit information. A computer uses electricity.

A future where democracy still has a place, and where Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are not carving the world up between them just as the Imperial powers once did. The new reality, though, will not be sold to us as surveillance, with its totalitarian overtones. The future will be sold to us as empowerment. * * * Elon Musk’s Neuralink company is working on brain-computer interfaces – threads that will allow someone to control a computer via their thoughts. Human trials started in 2020. The current aim of the tech is to help people with paralysis, a laudable aim. Musk’s eventual aim, though, seems to be symbiosis with AI, so that humans don’t get left behind in the intelligence game


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Neither of those storage technologies is anywhere near as flashy as the battery packs on the Desperate Housewives set under Elon Musk’s solar roofs. But they are nonetheless important pieces for solving the puzzle of how the world can harness sunlight to meet not only its energy needs, but also other basic needs, such as food and water. Notes 1.  “Tesla Bid for SolarCity ‘Shameful,’” BBC News, June 22, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36602509. 2.  Robert Ferris, “Too Early for Tesla to Merge with Solarcity? Elon Musk Says Deal ‘May Even Be a Little Late,’” CNBC, November 4, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/04/tesla-solarcity-merger-may-even-be-a-little-late.html. 3.  Elon Musk, “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (Just between You and Me),” Tesla, Inc., June 28, 2012, https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me. 4.  

Fraunhofer ISE, “Recent Facts About Photovoltaics in Germany,” Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2017, https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien-en/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/recent-facts-about-photovoltaics-in-germany.pdf. 9.  Carmine Gallo, “Tesla’s Elon Musk Lights Up Social Media with a TED Style Keynote,” Forbes, May 4, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2015/05/04/teslas-elon-musk-lights-up-social-media-with-a-ted-style-keynote. 10.  “Short-Term Energy Outlook,” U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), 2017, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/query. 11.  Jesse D. Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector: Insights from Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP-Deep-Decarb-Lit-Review-Jenkins-Thernstrom-March-2017.pdf. 12.  

Tian Ying, “China Considers Dialing Back or Delaying Electric Car Quota,” Bloomberg, March 5, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-05/china-considers-dialing-back-electric-car-quota-after-opposition. 5.  Chisake Watanabe, “Japan Makes Big Push for Hydrogen Fuel Cells Scorned by Elon Musk as Impractical,” Japan Times, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/02/10/business/tech/japan-makes-big-push-for-hydrogen-fuel-cells-scorned-by-elon-musk-as-impractical. 6.  “Toyota Fuel Cell Vehicle: Yoshikazu Tanaka Q&A,” The Official Blog of Toyota GB, March 4, 2014, http://blog.toyota.co.uk/toyota-fuel-cell-vehicle-yoshikazu-tanaka-qa. 7.  Akshay Singh, Evan Hirsh, Reid Wilk, and Rich Parkin, “2017 Automotive Trends,” PwC/Strategy&, http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/trend/2017-automotive-industry-trends. 8.  


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

There may instead be a job where someone needs to intervene, every so often, and take human control of one of them. MARTIN FORD: What is your response to some of the fears expressed about AI or AGI, in particular by Elon Musk, who has been very vocal about existential risks? RANA EL KALIOUBY: There’s a documentary on the internet called Do You Trust This Computer? which was partially funded by Elon Musk, and I was featured in it being interviewed. MARTIN FORD: Yes, in fact, a couple of the other people I’ve interviewed in this book were also featured in that documentary. RANA EL KALIOUBY: Having grown up in the Middle East, I feel that humanity has bigger problems than AI, so I’m not concerned.

Evidence of racial and gender bias has been detected in certain machine learning algorithms, and concerns about how AI-powered technologies such as facial recognition will impact privacy seem well-founded. Warnings that robots will soon be weaponized, or that truly intelligent (or superintelligent) machines might someday represent an existential threat to humanity, are regularly reported in the media. A number of very prominent public figures—none of whom are actual AI experts—have weighed in. Elon Musk has used especially extreme rhetoric, declaring that AI research is “summoning the demon” and that “AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.” Even less volatile individuals, including Henry Kissinger and the late Stephen Hawking, have issued dire warnings. The purpose of this book is to illuminate the field of artificial intelligence—as well as the opportunities and risks associated with it—by having a series of deep, wide-ranging conversations with some of the world’s most prominent AI research scientists and entrepreneurs.

A much more futuristic and speculative danger is the so-called “AI alignment problem.” This is the concern that a truly intelligent, or perhaps superintelligent, machine might escape our control, or make decisions that might have adverse consequences for humanity. This is the fear that elicits seemingly over-the-top statements from people like Elon Musk. Nearly everyone I spoke to weighed in on this issue. To ensure that I gave this concern adequate and balanced coverage, I spoke with Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. Bostrom is the author of the bestselling book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which makes a careful argument regarding the potential risks associated with machines that might be far smarter than any human being.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In California—a state whose entire population is smaller than commonly accepted rounding errors for China’s citizenry—a clutch of indefatigable policy activists and techies have spent two decades grappling with Detroit, trying to force this revolution. And their efforts are finally paying off. In 2012, Tesla Motors’ Model S—conceived and built in California by the pugnacious visionary Elon Musk—was anointed “car of the year” by Motor Trend magazine. Consumer Reports called the “S” the best car it had ever driven. The all-American Chevy Volt was similarly acclaimed as Consumer Reports’ highest consumer satisfaction vehicle and repeatedly topped J. D. Power’s consumer appeal survey. On the other side of the world, in Japan, this revolution was sparked by a different sort of iconoclast: a nuclear engineer at the sprawling Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) named Takafumi Anegawa.

All California needed was a “federal waiver” for its policies—which it had never before been denied.6 It soon became clear, however, that under the Bush administration, there was a first time for everything. Iron Man 1 But even in the face of federal opposition, the political and technological momentum behind the EV industry was again rising. In California this tide was personified by two iron men: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Elon Musk. Both of them seemed unlikely champions. A decade earlier, Schwarzenegger had driven the transformation of the HMMWV—the Hummer—from a military workhorse to a status symbol of 1990s consumerism. He was the “Hummer guy.” But in 2003, with the recall of California’s governor Gray Davis—during which much political blood was spilled—the Golden State’s megalithic action hero threw his hat into the gubernatorial race.

Schwarzenegger made it clear that he would make the EPA’s life miserable if it did not approve California’s waiver. “We will sue!” he threatened. And what if they lost? “We sue again, and sue again, and sue again, until we get it. We’re going to win!” he swore.7 Iron Man 2 Just south of San Francisco, another iron man was quietly making his own declaration of intent. Elon Musk was not a bodybuilder, nor a movie star, nor a politician. He was a nerd. But in his own way, he was just as intense, just as driven, and just as much of a celebrity as California’s iron man governor. Musk was Edison meets Generation X. He had “big ideas,” he was brilliant, and he had swagger. This was the nerd made good.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Start a company around some idea you found in this book or came up with while reading this book, send your plan to www.draper.vc, and I will enter you into the Startup Hero competition I am planning for 2019. The winner will get $1 million in funding at a $5 million (or negotiated) valuation. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Don’t Do It! Stop! Take Elon Musk's advice. “Don’t do it!” Most people are not cut out for being an entrepreneur. They are content living out their lives by not making waves, not obsessing about rules, drawing inside the lines, and staying inside the box. But you bought this book, or at least you are reading it, so it is possible that you are different.

Read on and you might be the one making the waves, making the rules, drawing the lines, and asking, “What box?” I took a Draper University group of students (who we call “heroes in training” or “HITS”—we dropped the “Super” or “S” part of the acronym for obvious reasons) to the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, to watch as Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and one of the most extraordinary and successful entrepreneurs in history, launched the Model S. The plant is enormous. It seems to go for miles in all directions. Robots as big as elephants move around connecting car parts, fastening attachments, and painting the body. The launch was to great fanfare.

He went on to say that that was the best advice he could give to an aspiring entrepreneur, because if you accepted that advice, you really aren’t ready to be an entrepreneur and he would have just saved you from going through a brutal, extraordinary effort when your heart isn’t really in it. And if you didn’t, well then…send me a business plan. I can only imagine what Elon was going through that day. He was notably sweating, looked very thin, had circles under his eyes and was firing up for his proud moment. Entrepreneurship isn’t easy. But Elon Musk has brought us PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla, so all that work that he puts in has shown amazing results and generated real change. After all, he is on a mission. He has a swirling desire in his gut telling him that he must save our planet. Anyway, if you accept Elon’s advice, so be it. You can drop this book off with a friend, stick with the safe choices and remain an upstanding member of the status quo.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

But perhaps White spent a little too much time worrying about the competition: while he was busy creating billboards, Informix imploded in a massive accounting scandal and White soon found himself in federal prison for securities fraud. If you can’t beat a rival, it may be better to merge. I started Confinity with my co-founder Max Levchin in 1998. When we released the PayPal product in late 1999, Elon Musk’s X.com was right on our heels: our companies’ offices were four blocks apart on University Avenue in Palo Alto, and X’s product mirrored ours feature-for-feature. By late 1999, we were in all-out war. Many of us at PayPal logged 100-hour workweeks. No doubt that was counterproductive, but the focus wasn’t on objective productivity; the focus was defeating X.com.

Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multimillion-dollar businesses. A few, like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist. In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers: “Success is never accidental.” Most of the replies were unambiguously negative.

A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside. BEYOND PROFESSIONALISM The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Reddit, May 3, 2013. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndustrialDesign/comments/1dmuoa/mechanical_engineering_vs_industrial_design/. Van Noorden, R. “Interdisciplinary Research by the Numbers.” Nature 525 (2015): 306–7. Vance, A. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015. Vazquez, C. M. “Technology Boot Camp Aims to Upgrade Okinawa-Based Marines’ Problem-Solving Skills.” Stars and Stripes, March 26, 2019. Wattles, J. “She Turns Elon Musk’s Bold Space Ideas into a Business.” CNN Business, March 10, 2019. Westervelt, R. G., et al. “Physiological Stress Measurement during Slaughter of Calves and Lambs.” Journal of Animal Science 42 (1976): 831–37.

In the show, Sheldon’s spectrumlike qualities are played for laughs, but that’s not usually how it goes. Math geeks are often bullied or shunned. It’s only when the geeks become brilliant coders, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, and rocket scientists that we appreciate the way they see the world. Elon Musk was so badly bullied in school, he needed to have surgery after a group of bullies threw him down a flight of stairs. He also taught himself coding, and at age twelve sold his first video game for $500. According to his biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk ran out of books to read at school and the local library.

When Katherine Johnson calculated orbital paths, I imagine she saw multidimensional patterns in her brilliant mind. What is the profit in holding back any student with clear aptitude beyond their grade level? What if we routinely let students who love math double down by increasing their math courses or taking classes at local colleges? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk all dropped out of college or graduate programs. They were eager to test and apply their advanced skills in the marketplace, heading straight for Silicon Valley. But in Jobs’s case, at least, there was also a desire to skirt required courses in which he had no interest. I would wager that the curriculum on offer just wasn’t challenging enough for any of them.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

+Department+of+Transportation+Releases+Policy+on+Automated+Vehicle+Development [clxxxiv] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [clxxxv] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/delphi-autonomous-car-cross-country/ [clxxxvi] http://recode.net/2015/03/17/google-self-driving-car-chief-wants-tech-on-the-market-within-five-years/ [clxxxvii] http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/22/a-new-system-lets-self-driving-cars-learn-streets-on-the-fly/ [clxxxviii] http://cleantechnica.com/2015/10/12/autonomous-buses-being-tested-in-greek-city-of-trikala/ [clxxxix] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-16/google-said-to-make-driverless-cars-an-alphabet-company-in-2016 [cxc] http://electrek.co/2015/12/21/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-drops-prediction-full-autonomous-driving-from-3-years-to-2/ [cxci] http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/10/elon-musk-youll-be-able-to-summon-your-tesla-from-anywhere-in-2018/ [cxcii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/11/elon-musk-says-teslas-autopilot-is-already-probably-better-than-human-drivers/ [cxciii] http://electrek.co/2016/04/24/tesla-autopilot-probability-accident/ [cxciv] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35280632 [cxcv] http://www.zdnet.com/article/ford-self-driving-cars-are-five-years-away-from-changing-the-world/ [cxcvi] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [cxcvii] http://www.wired.com/2015/12/californias-new-self-driving-car-rules-are-great-for-texas/ [cxcviii] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [cxcix] It has been suggested that electric cars should make noises so that people don’t step off the pavement in front of them.

Because of these quasi-religious overtones, the singularity was frequently satirised as “rapture for nerds”, and many people felt awkward about using the term. The publication in 2014 of Nick Bostrom's seminal book “Superintelligence” was a watershed moment, causing influential people like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates to speak out about the enormous impact which AGI will have – for good or for ill. They introduced the idea of the singularity to a much wider audience, and made it harder for people to retain a blinkered optimism about the impact of AGI. For time-starved journalists, “good news is no news” and “if it bleeds it leads”, so the comments of Hawking and the others were widely mis-represented as pure doom-saying, and almost every article about AI carried a picture of the Terminator.

Suffice to say, we should make strenuous efforts to ensure that if and when we do create the first machines which are destined become superintelligences, we experience a positive outcome rather than a negative one. Anders Sandberg of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute summarised it well by saying that we should aim to become the mitochondria of superintelligence rather than its boot loader. He was referring to Elon Musk’s metaphor for how, if we are unwise and / or unfortunate, we could create the thing which destroys us, and saying that we should aim instead for the fate of the prokaryotic cell which was absorbed by another, larger cell and became an essential component of a new, combined, and more complex entity, the first eukaryotic cell.


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Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

They believe that machines can “learn” in a way comparable to human learning, that consciousness is a relatively insignificant aspect of humanity, emergent from matter, and that imagination of true novelties is a delusion in a hermetic world of logic. They hold that human beings have no more to discover and may as well retire on a guaranteed pension, while Larry Page and Sergey Brin fly off with Elon Musk and live forever in galactic walled gardens on their own private planets in a winner-take-all cosmos. Your DeLorean says no. The walls can come down, and a world of many new dimensions can be ours to enrich and explore. Get in and ride. CHAPTER 1 Don’t Steal This Book “The economy has arrived at a point where it produces enough in principle for everyone. . . .

The cloud computing and big data of companies such as Google, with its “Deep Mind” AI, can excel individual human brains in making key life decisions from marriage choices and medical care to the management of the private key for your bitcoin wallet and the use and storage of the passwords for your Macintosh drive. This self-learning software will also be capable of performing most of your jobs. The new digital world may not need you anymore. Don’t take offense. In all likelihood, you can retire on an income which we regard as satisfactory for you. Leading Silicon Valley employers, such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, deem most human beings unemployable because they are intellectually inferior to AI algorithms. Did you know that Google AI defeated the world Go champion in five straight contests? You do not even know what “Go” is? Go is an Asian game of strategy that AI researchers have long regarded as an intellectual challenge far exceeding chess in subtlety, degrees of freedom, and complexity.

While Darwin made man just another animal, a precariously risen ape, Google-Marxism sees men as inferior intellectually to the company’s own algorithmic machines. Life after Google makes the opposing case that what the hyperventilating haruspices Yuval Harari, Nick Bostrom, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Tim Urban, and Elon Musk see as a world-changing AI juggernaut is in fact an industrial regime at the end of its rope. The crisis of the current order in security, privacy, intellectual property, business strategy, and technology is fundamental and cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. Security is not a benefit or upgrade that can be supplied by adding new layers of passwords, pony-tailed “swat teams,” intrusion detection schemes, anti-virus patches, malware prophylactics, and software retro-fixes.


pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

“kind of ironic”: Email provided to author. 10: ANGEL’S WINGS “so smooth that it looks like someone drew it with a pen”: Luke Colby journal entry. “government-funded boondoggles”: “Statement from Andrew Beal,” Beal Aerospace Technologies, Inc., October 23, 2000. “high-paid assassin”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). nearly burned down an island … “took their lumps”: Vance, Elon Musk. dusty Soviet rocket manual: Vance, Elon Musk. “building a Ferrari for every launch”: Vance, Elon Musk. “Arrogance got more pilots in trouble”: Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos, Yeager (New York: Bantam Books, 1985). “Life and death is often quite random in nature”: Mark Stucky, “Forger News” email newsletter.

Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini (New York: Random House, 1976). Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: Public Affairs, 2018). Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Esposito, Joseph A. Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2018). Fernholz, Tim. Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2018). Glenn, John, and Nick Taylor. John Glenn: A Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).

When Norman Mailer first embarked on his book about the Apollo program, he couldn’t make up his mind whether Apollo was “the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity.” Branson was not the only one with such ambitions. He had rivals, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with his space company Blue Origin, and Tesla founder Elon Musk, with his company SpaceX. They were all building rockets to take people into space, and Branson was clear that he wanted to be “the first of the three entrepreneurs fighting to put people into space to get there.” Each had distinct visions for the journey. Virgin had pioneered a unique air-launch system—a mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, had been designed to carry SpaceShipTwo to roughly 45,000 feet so the rocket ship would not waste its energy slogging through the dense, lower atmosphere—while others used a more traditional ground-launch system.


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Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Surviving AI is a first-class introduction to all of this. Brad Feld, co-founder Techstars The promises and perils of machine superintelligence are much debated nowadays. But between the complex and sometimes esoteric writings of AI theorists and academics like Nick Bostrom, and the popular-press prognostications of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, there is something of a gap. Calum Chace’s Surviving AI bridges that gap perfectly. It provides a compact yet rigorous guide to all the major arguments and issues in the field. An excellent resource for those who are new to this topic. John Danaher, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) Calum Chace strikes a note of clarity and balance in the important and often divisive dialogue around the benefits and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

Perhaps they will never decide to revise their goals. But given their startling progress to date and the weakness of the a priori arguments that conscious machines cannot be created (which we will review in chapter 4), it seems unwise to bet too heavily on it. A lot of people were surprised when Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk said in 2014 that the future of artificial intelligence was something to be concerned about. Both men applauded the achievements of AI research, and the benefits it has delivered. They went on to ask what will happen if and when computers become smarter than people, and we find that we have created a super-intelligence.

A few scientists, like Roger Penrose, think there is something ineffable about human thought which means it could not be recreated in silicon. This type of extreme scepticism about the AGI field is rare. So the debate today is not so much about whether we can create an AGI, but when. It is this question that we will address next. CHAPTER 5 WHEN MIGHT AGI ARRIVE? 5.1 – Expert opinion Some people think it will be soon Elon Musk has made a name for himself as a Cassandra about AI, with remarks about working on AGI being akin to summoning the demon, and how humans might turn out to be just the boot loader (startup system) for digital superintelligence. Not only does he see AGI as an existential threat to humanity: he also thinks the danger will manifest soon.


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Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

General Motors has promised to make all of its new cars worldwide electric by 2035. So too have a host of other car manufacturers, from Jaguar Land Rover to Volvo. And it is obviously not just the old car companies. There have been few hotter stocks in recent years than Tesla, the electric car company founded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. In recent years the share price of Tesla has traded at roughly one hundred times its profits. The company, which as of 2021 makes just 930,000 vehicles a year, is valued more than the world’s nine biggest car companies put together. That means that investors are expecting the firm to grow exponentially.

Until we reimagine how we actually should live, the problems that having so many cars create will not be going away, however many of them are electrically powered. And there is a bigger problem with electric cars. Or rather, with the idea more generally that technology will get us out of the environmental disaster that is mass car ownership without people driving any less. People like Elon Musk do not limit themselves to wanting to replace internal combustion engines with electric motors. If they did, that would be rather admirable. The trouble is, they go further. People like Musk argue that we can do away with things like public transport altogether. They posit a future where every human has not only an electric car but also a self-driving one, complete with its own home-entertainment system, a sort of perfect robot taxi, ready to take you anywhere automatically at the touch of a smartphone.

They are very real bits of technology that do, on the important measure of carbon emissions at least, starkly improve the damage done by cars to the environment. But much else is. Chief among them is the idea of autonomous, “self-driving” cars. According to their boosters, self-driving cars are about to change the planet. In December 2021, Elon Musk told a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal that they are “absolutely coming,” and “will be one of the biggest transformations ever in human civilization.” The idea is that when all cars are self-driving, they will be able to far more efficiently use the road space available, hugging each other like train cars.


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Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

Boston: Wiley-Blackwell. Seung, S. 2012. Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Shostak, S. 2009. Confessions of an Alien Hunter. New York: National Geographic. Solon, Olivia. 2017. “Elon Musk says humans must become cyborgs to stay relevant. Is he right?” The Guardian, February 15, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/15/elon-musk-cyborgs-robots-artificial-intelligence-is-he-right. Song, D., B. S. Robinson, R. E. Hampson, V. Z. Marmarelis, S. A. Deadwyler, and T. W. Berger. 2018. “Sparse Large-Scale Nonlinear Dynamical Modeling of Human Hippocampus for Memory Prostheses,” IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering 26(2): 272–280.

In the long term, the tables may turn on humans, and the problem may not be what we could do to harm AIs, but what AI might do to harm us. Indeed, some suspect that synthetic intelligence will be the next phase in the evolution of intelligence on Earth. You and I, how we live and experience the world right now, are just an intermediate step to AI, a rung on the evolutionary ladder. For instance, Stephen Hawking, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark, Bill Gates, and many others have raised “the control problem,” the problem of how humans can control their own AI creations, if the AIs outsmart us.2 Suppose we create an AI that has human-level intelligence. With self-improvement algorithms, and with rapid computations, it could quickly discover ways to become vastly smarter than us, becoming a superintelligence—that is, an AI that outthinks us in every domain.

After all, if merging with AI leads to superintelligence and radical longevity, isn’t it better than the alternative—the inevitable degeneration of the brain and body? The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days, being offered both as a means for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workforce, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently commented that humans can escape being outmoded by AI by “having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence.”4 To this end, he’s founded a new company, Neuralink. One of its first aims is to develop “neural lace,” an injectable mesh that connects the brain directly to computers.


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Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

As a result, the need to have a car designed around the act of driving will probably be trumped by the need to design the “carriage” space and how you utilise it when you are being driven. Despite the suggestion of self-driving cars being considered fantastical by some, we may actually be much closer to that reality than many anticipate. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, believes we are much closer to that future. “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think [Tesla] will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.” Elon Musk, from an interview with Fortune magazine, 21st December 2015 Google’s self-driving cars have now accumulated close to 2 million driving miles (autonomous and manual driving combined) without causing a single incident, accident or fatality.1 A Google self-driving car has been pulled over by police, although it somehow avoided getting a ticket.2 An average American driver is likely to have an accident every ten years or so, or about once in every 165,000 miles.3 So Google is already more than ten times safer than the average human driver on a purely statistical basis.

Now for the other—more controversial—reason why robots need emotions; so they won’t kill us all. This is the concept behind some of the most innovative artificial general intelligence minds today. We need to ensure that robots like us and have empathy for mankind. Asimov’s Three Laws are not sufficient enough to protect us from the unknowable future of artificial intelligence. Some, like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, believe we need to build in very basic motivations as the foundation to all future AI, one that enforces a basic love of humans and our planet(s). The problem, of course, is that any safeguards we are able to implement will always be able to be circumvented by any intelligence greater than our own.

Artificial general intelligence, on the other hand, can be built from the ground up to simply follow a set of intrinsic motivations that are benevolent, stable and self-reinforcing. We can build constraints into AIs that we may not have with IA. Indeed, you could argue that the warnings of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk about the development of full AI not benefitting humanity in the longer term are because they are inputting typical human motivations like greed, selfishness and ambivalence onto AI. ____________ 1 Rock and Ice 2 “The Double Amputee Who Designs Better Limbs,” NPR Radio, aired 10 August 2011. 3 Hugh Herr interview on Who Says I Can’t?


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Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

We will return to this feature in Chapter 4. 15“Homepage”, Neuralink Website, https://​www.​neuralink.​com/​, accessed 1 June 2018; Chantal Da Silva, “Elon Musk Startup ‘to Spend £100m’ Linking Human Brains to Computers”, The Independent, 29 August 2017, http://​www.​independent.​co.​uk/​news/​world/​americas/​elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-startup-a7916891.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. For commentary on Neuralink, see Tim Urban’s provocative blog post “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future”, Wait But Why, 20 April 2017, https://​waitbutwhy.​com/​2017/​04/​neuralink.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. 16Tim Cross, “The Novelist Who Inspired Elon Musk”, 1843 Magazine, 31 March 2017, https://​www.​1843magazine.​com/​culture/​the-daily/​the-novelist-who-inspired-elon-musk, accessed 1 June 2018. 17Robert M.

Nonetheless, we think these labels provide a helpful summary of current attitudes. 119Ray Kurzweil, “Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence”, Time, 19 December 2014, http://​time.​com/​3641921/​dont-fear-artificial-intelligence/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 120Alan Winfield, “Artificial Intelligence Will Not Turn into a Frankenstein’s Monster”, The Guardian, 10 August 2014, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​technology/​2014/​aug/​10/​artificial-intelligence-will-not-become-a-frankensteins-monster-ian-winfield, accessed 1 June 2018. 121Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 124–125. 122Elon Musk, as quoted in S. Gibbs, “Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence Is Our Biggest Existential Threat”, The Guardian, 27 October 2014, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​technology/​2014/​oct/​27/​elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggest-existential-threat, accessed 1 June 2018. 123“Open Letter”, Future of Life Institute, https://​futureoflife.​org/​ai-open-letter/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 124Alex Hern, “Stephen Hawking: AI Will Be ‘Either Best or Worst Thing’ for Humanity”, The Guardian, 19 October 2016, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​science/​2016/​oct/​19/​stephen-hawking-ai-best-or-worst-thing-for-humanity-cambridge, accessed 1 June 2018. 125See The Locomotives on Highways Act 1861, The Locomotive Act 1865 and the Highways and Locomotives (Amendment) Act 1878 (all UK legislation). 126See, for example, Steven E.

For discussion, see Erin Evans, “Constitutional Inclusion of Animal Rights in Germany and Switzerland: How Did Animal Protection Become an Issue of National Importance?”, Society and Animals, Vol. 18 (2010), 231–250. 113Aatif Sulleyman, “Elon Musk: Humans Must Become Cyborgs to Avoid AI Domination”, Independent, 15 February 2017, http://​www.​independent.​co.​uk/​life-style/​gadgets-and-tech/​news/​elon-musk-humans-cyborgs-ai-domination-robots-artificial-intelligence-ex-machina-a7581036.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. 114Website of Neuralink, https://​www.​neuralink.​com/​, accessed 1 June 2018. It is based on a concept first invented by science fiction writer Iain M.


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The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

., “End-to-End Lung Cancer Screening with Three-Dimensional Deep Learning on Low-Dose Chest Computed Tomography,” Nature Medicine, 2019, pages 954–961. doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0447-x. 56. “‘Whoever Leads in AI Will Rule the World,’” RT.com, September 1, 2017. rt.com/news/401731-ai-rule-world-putin. 57. Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. 58. Elon Musk, as quoted by Graham Rapier, “‘If You Can’t Beat Them Join Them,’” Business Insider, September 3, 2019. businessinsider.com/elon-musk-humans-must-become-cyborgs-to-compete-with-ai-2019-8. 59. Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, “The Need to Belong,” Psychological Bulletin, May 1995, pages 497–529. dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497. 60. Muzafer Sherif, Group Conflict and Co-operation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1966). 61.

As a result, customers couldn’t easily discover the products they needed. Meanwhile, suppliers had great information, but they didn’t yet have the tools to adjust their offerings to account for it. We were partway to building the platform we envisioned, but completing it would take a lot more money than anticipated. Terrifyingly, there was no way to turn back. Elon Musk’s famous analysis—“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into an abyss”—comes to mind when I think back on those months. The pressure at that point in the journey was horrendous. You lose believers. Investors, suppliers, and members of your team find their firmest convictions pushed to the limit.

Having personally spent time in Redmond at the Microsoft HoloLens lab, and walking around on a virtual Mars that won NASA’s software of the year award, I can tell you that travelling to Mars via virtual reality is an experience that is hard to put into words. The software allows collaboration and interaction through virtual avatars. I was sitting about ten feet away at the Code Conference in 2016 when Elon Musk famously discussed the probability of us all living in a simulation. He explained his thesis, which was first introduced by Nick Bostrom, philosopher and author of the book Superintelligence, by using virtual reality/augmented reality as an example. He went on to argue that fidelity in virtual reality is already nearing fidelity of the real world (it feels real) and continuing to advance at a remarkable pace.


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Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Quoted in “The New Space Race: Complicating the Rush to the Stars” by D. Bennett for the Tufts Observer, online at http://tuftsobserver.org/2013/11/the-new-space-race-complicating-the-rush-to-the-stars/. 19. “At Home with Elon Musk: The (Soon-to-Be) Bachelor Billionaire” by H. Elliott in Forbes Life, online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2012/03/26/at-home-with-elon-musk-the-soon-to-be-bachelor-billionaire/. 20. The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from Their Founding Entrepreneurs by D. Kidder 2013. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 21. See The Economist, online at http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603238-bill-stone-cave-explorer-who-has-discovered-new-things-about-earth-now-he. 22.

He would empathize with what Robert Goddard said after the New York Times had declared his goals unachievable: “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once achieved, it becomes commonplace.”16 In humanity’s future, Diamandis foresees “nine billion human brains working together to a ‘meta-intelligence,’ where you can know the thoughts, feelings, and knowledge of anyone.”17 The Transport Guru Elon Musk wants to die on Mars. Like Peter Diamandis, he’s sure that our future is in space and that we must become an interplanetary species. He was influenced by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, but his vision has a darker, dystopian slant, since it’s also a hedge against threats to our survival: “An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

In late 2013, his net worth dropped by $1.3 billion after reports of weak earnings by Tesla and SolarCity, and he separated from his second wife. Figure 21. The Falcon 9 rocket is designed by Space X and built in California. Its two-stage rocket can carry 15 tons to low Earth orbit and 5 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. Space X was founded by Elon Musk, the South Africa–born inventor and investor who made his fortune as the founder of PayPal. Musk has also been an innovator in terrestrial travel with his car company Tesla Motors. We see in this progression of space entrepreneurs the march toward youth: Rutan is in his early seventies, Branson in his early sixties, Diamandis in his early fifties, and Musk in his early forties.


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Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Billions Fewer than We Thought’, Guardian, 28 February 2012: theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/feb/28/how-many-neurons-human-brain 10 Stoller-Conrad, Jessica, ‘Controlling a Robotic Arm with a Patient’s Intentions’, Caltech, 21 May 2015: caltech.edu/news/controlling-robotic-arm-patients-intentions-46786 11 Kever, Jeannie, ‘Researchers Build Brain-Machine Interface to Control Prosthetic Hand’, University of Houston, 31 March 2015: uh.edu/news-events/stories/2015/March/0331BionicHand.php 12 Kurzweil, Ray, ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’, 7 March 2001: kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns 13 Linden, David, ‘The Singularity Is Far: A Neuroscientist’s View’, BoingBoing, 14 July 2011: http://boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html 14 http://2045.com/press/ 15 Hayworth, Ken, ‘Killed by Bad Philosophy’, Brain Preservation Foundation, January 2010: brainpreservation.org/content-2/killed-bad-philosophy/ Chapter 8: The Future (Risks) of Thinking Machines 1 Cook, James, ‘Elon Musk: Robots Could Start Killing Us All Within 5 Years’, Business Insider, 17 November 2014: uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014–11 2 Hern, Alex, ‘Elon Musk Says He Invested in DeepMind Over “Terminator” Fears’, Guardian, 18 June 2014: theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/18/elon-musk-deepmind-ai-tesla-motors 3 Hawking, Stephen et al., ‘Stephen Hawking: “Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence … ”’, Independent, 1 May 2014: independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 4 Hill, Doug, ‘The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)’, Atlantic, 11 June 2014: theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/norbert-wiener-the-eccentric-genius-whose-time-may-have-finally-come-again/372607/ 5 Good, I.

Zuckerberg’s ‘personal challenge’ looked to be the first time he had created a New Year’s resolution that would be unavailable to the rest of us. After all, by likening his plan to Iron Man’s AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S., it was a real-life billionaire referencing the creation of fictitious billionaire Tony Stark. It was a bit like Elon Musk announcing that he planned to use his fortune to build a fully working version of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. In fact, over the past five years, functional, AI-driven chatterbots have increasingly become part of our daily lives. Most famous of these is probably Siri, the Apple-owned AI assistant which first shipped with the iPhone 4s in late 2011.

At present, an average of 43,000 people die in the United States each year due to traffic collisions. That’s a higher figure than those killed by firearms (31,940), sexually transmitted diseases (20,000), drug abuse (17,000) and other leading causes of death. Advances in AI and automation will certainly help to cut down on these deaths. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has argued that, once we reach the point where self-driving cars are widespread, it would be unethical to continue letting humans drive vehicles. ‘It’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two-tonne death machine,’ he said during an appearance at an annual developers conference for Nvidia, a Silicon Valley company which specialises in computer vision.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Barack Obama, October 2016: Scott Dadich, “Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of the World,” Wired, November 2016. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, January 2017: Charlie Rose, interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Columbia University, January 2017. Elon Musk, February, 2017: Chris Weller, “Elon Musk Doubles Down on Universal Basic Income: ‘It’s Going to Be Necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017. Mark Zuckerberg, May 2017: Mark Zuckerberg, commencement speech, Harvard University, May 2017. … adopting it would permanently grow the economy by 12.56 to 13.10 percent…: Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, and Gennaro Zezza, “Modeling the Macroeconomic Effects of a Universal Basic Income,” Roosevelt Institute, August 29, 2017

The family that owns Purdue Pharma… is now the 16th richest family in the country…: Alex Morrell, “The OxyContin Clan: The $14 Billion Newcomer to Forbes 2015 List of Richest U.S. Families,” Forbes, July 1, 2015. The big banks eventually settled with the Department of Justice for billions of dollars…: Kate Cox, “How Corporations Got the Same Rights as People (but Don’t Ever Go to Jail),” Consumerist.com, September 12, 2014. Elon Musk in 2017 called for proactive regulation of AI…: Samuel Gibbs, “Elon Musk: Regulate AI to Combat ‘Existential Threat’ before It’s Too Late,” The Guardian, July 17, 2017. Tristan Harris… has written compellingly about how apps are designed to function like slot machines…: Tristan Harris, “How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist,” Thrive Global, May 18, 2016.

For example, in Nebraska one out of every 12 workers—63,000 workers—works in and supports the trucking industry. Truck drivers do not see it coming. Indeed, when Bloomberg’s Shift Commission in 2017 asked truck drivers about how concerned they were about their jobs being replaced by automation, they almost uniformly weren’t concerned at all. Let me assure you it’s coming. Elon Musk recently announced that Tesla will be offering a freight truck as of November 2017. Musk also proclaimed that by 2019, all new Teslas will be self-driving. “Your car will drop you off at work, and then it will pick other people up and make you money all day until it’s time to pick you up again,” Musk proclaimed.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

“First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent,” Gates said. “That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.” How much of a concern? Elon Musk has described the creation of human-level artificial intelligence as “summoning the demon.” Bill Gates has taken a more sober tone, but essentially agrees. “I am in the camp that is concerned about superintelligence,” he said. “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.” Hawking, Gates, and Musk are not Luddites and they are not fools. Their concerns, however fanciful-sounding, are rooted in the concept of an “intelligence explosion.”

On the Columbia accident, see National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Volume 1,” August 2003, http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts-107/investigation/CAIB_medres_full.pdf. 154 “never been encountered before”: Matt Burgess, “Elon Musk Confirms SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Explosion Was Caused by ‘Frozen Oxygen,’ ” WIRED, November 8, 2016, http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-falcon-9-explosion. “Musk: SpaceX Explosion Toughest Puzzle We’ve Ever Had to Solve,” CNBC, video accessed June 7, 2017, http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000565513. 154 Fukushima Daiichi: Phillip Y.

See also James Barrat, Our Final Invention (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013). 232 “development of full artificial intelligence”: Rory Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind,” BBC News, December 2, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540. 232 “First the machines will”: Peter Holley, “Bill Gates on Dangers of Artificial Intelligence: ‘I Don’t Understand Why Some People Are Not Concerned,’ ” Washington Post, January 29, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/. 232 “summoning the demon”: Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence We Are Summoning the Demon,’ ” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/. 233 “I am in the camp that is concerned”: Holley, “Bill Gates on Dangers of Artificial Intelligence: ‘I Don’t Understand Why Some People Are Not Concerned.’ ” 233 “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined”: Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.” 233 lift itself up by its own boostraps: “Intelligence Explosion FAQ,” Machine Intelligence Research Institute, accessed June 15, 2017, https://intelligence.org/ie-faq/. 233 “AI FOOM”: Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, “The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI Foom Debate,” http://intelligence.org/files/AIFoomDebate.pdf. 233 “soft takeoff” scenario: Müller, Vincent C. and Bostrom, Nick, ‘Future progress in artificial intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion, in Vincent C.


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The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

So, why do Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates fear artificial intelligence (AI) and express concern that it may be a threat to humanity’s survival in the near future? And yet, why do an equally illustrious group, including Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Ng, and Pedro Domingos, find this viewpoint so farfetched as to be hardly even worth a rebuttal? Zuckerberg goes so far as to call people who peddle doomsday scenarios “pretty irresponsible,” while Andrew Ng, one of the greatest minds in AI alive today, says that such concerns are like worrying about “overpopulation on Mars.” After Elon Musk was quoted as saying “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” Pedro Domingos, a leading AI researcher and author, tweeted, “One word: Sigh.”

One can easily see in the public comments of those in the tech industry a wide range of views on what an AGI would mean to the human species. For instance, Elon Musk tweeted, “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.” On another occasion, he was even more macabre: “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.” Bill Gates threw his hat in the ring on the side of the concerned: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

Andrew Ng, one of the most respected AI experts on the planet, says, “There’s also a lot of hype, that AI will create evil robots with super-intelligence. That’s an unnecessary distraction.” Rodney Brooks directly answers some of the concerns above by saying that the generalizations about AI made by those who aren’t deep in the technology are “a little dangerous.” He then goes on to add, “And we’ve certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it’s going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.” And finally, many in the industry are almost giddy with optimism about AI. Kevin Kelly is one of them.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

It is a step-by-step guide to understanding how to make an impact as an investor, academic, employee, or simply as a voter. It does not belong to any one sector, and it transcends organizational structure. Electric Cars and the Diffusion of Innovations Theory Elon Musk is the man behind PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. He has successfully built a number of companies, but more importantly, he has moved markets. Elon Musk had a different kind of vision from the start: to build a market for electric cars, beginning with luxury cars, and then expanding over time to reach a broader consumer base. This was a rather specific vision; that is, it wasn’t simply about building an amazing electric car, it was also about creating an environment in which it could be successful.

Erik Hurst, Bob Epstein and Nicole Lederer, Ryan Gravel, Cathy Woolard, Tom Cousins, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Craig Jelinek, Bernie Glassman, Juliet Ellis, Freelancers Union, Paul Rice, Charles Montgomery, Jacob Wood & William McNulty, Jennifer Pahlka, Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Stewart, Indra Nooyi, Ryan Howard, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Steve Ells, Ray Oldenburg, Vivek Kundra, Tony Hsieh, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk, John Tolva, Rob Spiro and Alon Salant, Yancey Strickler, Charles Adler, Perry Chen, Meg Garlinghouse, Mitchell Baker, Dr. Tom X. Lee, Elon Musk, Peter Koechley & Eli Pariser, David Payne and Michael Tavani, Michael Bloomberg, Rachel Kleinfeld, John Mackey, Michael Pollan, Brad Neuberg, Chris Anderson, David Edinger, Scotty Martin, Dr. Regina Benjamin, Frank Perez, Al Gore, Zack Exley and Judith Freeman, Ben Goldhirsh, Adam Grant, David Javerbaum, Dr.

And as the dot-com sector regained its footing after the crash, we saw whole industries transformed, as well as the way most Americans communicated and engaged in society. So many of the pioneers in social entrepreneurship, social media, and sustainability are from Generation X and were in some way engaged with the dot-com boom. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger of Wikipedia, Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal, and Chris Anderson of Wired and now 3DRobotics are just a few examples. The core leadership of the Purpose Economy today is from this often forgotten generation, who in many ways produced the architects and catalysts of the new economy. 4. Environmental, Economic & Political Turmoil The growing uncertainty in our society is moving people to find stability within themselves, and to identify the need, to develop empathy for those affected by turmoil.


Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

Kurczewski, “Lamborghini Supercars Exist Because of a 10-Lira Tractor Clutch,” Car and Driver, November 16, 2018, www.caranddriver.com/features/a25169632/lamborghini-supercars-exist-because-of-a-tractor/?. 50. T. Kim, “Warren Buffett Responds to Elon Musk’s Criticism: ‘I Don’t Think He’d Want to Take Us On in Candy,’” CNBC, May 5, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/05/05/warren-buffett-responds-to-elon-musks-criticism-i-dont-think-hed-want-to-take-us-on-in-candy.html; R. Browne, “Moats and Candy: Here’s What Elon Musk and Warren Buffett Are Clashing Over,” CNBC, May 7, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/05/07/moats-and-candy-elon-musk-and-warren-buffet-clash.html. 51. A. Crippen, “CNBC Transcript: Warren Buffett’s $200B Berkshire Blunder and the Valuable Lesson He Learned,” CNBC, October 18, 2010, www.cnbc.com/id/39724884. 52.

Crippen, “CNBC Transcript: Warren Buffett’s $200B Berkshire Blunder and the Valuable Lesson He Learned,” CNBC, October 18, 2010, www.cnbc.com/id/39724884. 52. D. Kreps, “Hear Elon Musk’s Surprise Rap Song ‘RIP Harambe,’” Rolling Stone, March 31, 2019, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/elon-musk-rap-song-rip-harambe-815813/. 53. J. Carpenter and M. Rudisill, “Fairness, Escalation, Deference and Spite: Strategies Used in Labor-Management Bargaining Experiments with Outside Options,” Labour Economics 10, no. 4 (2003): 427–442. 54. G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Fischer, 1897), bk. 3, chap. 4. 55. J. A. Aimone, B. Luigi, and T. Stratmann, “Altruistic Punishment in Elections,” working paper no. 4945, Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo), August 2014, www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/102157/1/cesifo_wp4945.pdf. 56.

As a result, Buffett now advises, “Whether you cut off your nose to spite your face or whatever, if you get in a lousy business, get out of it.”51 Some successful businesspeople can resist the whisperings of spite. Let’s take another example involving Buffett. He coined the metaphor of a moat to describe how big companies had competitive advantages over start-ups. Elon Musk, another of this planet’s wealthiest people, and soon to be Mars’s wealthiest, did not agree. He felt that new technology could make moats redundant. And he said so, calling the concept “lame.” To which Buffett replied, “Elon may turn things upside down in some areas,” but “I don’t think he’d want to take us on in candy.”


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 18–19. [back] 11. See Frederick Daso, “Bill Gates and Elon Musk Are Worried for Automation—But This Robotics Company Founder Embraces It,” Forbes, December 18, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2017/12/18/bill-gates-elon-musk-are-worried-about-automation-but-this-robotics-company-founder-embraces-it/; Jasper Hamill, “Elon Musk’s Fears of AI Destroying Humanity Are ‘Speciesist’, Said Google Boss,” Metro (blog), May 2, 2018, https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity-speciesist-according-google-founder-larry-page-7515207/; “Stephen Hawking: ‘I fear AI may replace humans altogether’ The theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author talks Donald Trump, tech monopolies and humanity’s future,” Wired, November 28, 2017, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interview-alien-life-climate-change-donald-trump.

Economy to the Next Economy (blog), November 10, 2015. https://wtfeconomy.com/common-ground-for-independent-workers-83f3fbcf548f#.ey89fvtnn. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Daso, Frederick. “Bill Gates and Elon Musk Are Worried for Automation—But This Robotics Company Founder Embraces It.” Forbes, December 18, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2017/12/18/bill-gates-elon-musk-are-worried-about-automation-but-this-robotics-company-founder-embraces-it/. Dayton, Eldorous. Walter Reuther: The Autocrat of the Bargaining Table. New York: Devin-Adain, 1958. Deng, J., W. Dong, R. Socher, L.

Originally published in Monthly Labor Review, June 1978. https://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/flsa1938.htm. Hamari, Juho, Mimmi Sjöklint, and Antti Ukkonen. “The Sharing Economy: Why People Participate in Collaborative Consumption.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2015. Hamill, Jasper. “Elon Musk’s Fears of AI Destroying Humanity Are ‘Speciesist’, Said Google Boss.” Metro, May 2, 2018. https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity-speciesist-according-google-founder-larry-page-7515207/. Hara, Kotaro, Abi Adams, Kristy Milland, Saiph Savage, Chris Callison-Burch, and Jeffrey Bigham. “A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers’ Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk.” 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paper No. 449, 2018.


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Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I do not think that there is very much that we can do that computers will not eventually [learn] to do. Elon Musk and Daniel Kahneman are both confident about AI’s potential and simultaneously worried about the implications of unleashing it on the world. Impatient about the pace at which government responds to technological advances, industry leaders have offered policy suggestions and, in some cases, have acted. Bill Gates advocated for a tax on robots that replace human labor. Sidestepping what would normally be government’s purview, the high-profile startup accelerator Y Combinator is running experiments on providing a basic income for everyone in society.2 Elon Musk organized a group of entrepreneurs and industry leaders to finance Open AI with $1 billion to ensure that no single private-sector company could monopolize the field.

Rob Price, “Microsoft Is Deleting Its Chatbot’s Incredibly Racist Tweets,” Business Insider, March 24, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-deletes-racist-genocidal-tweets-from-ai-chatbot-tay-2016-3?r=UK&IR=T. Chapter 19 1. James Vincent, “Elon Musk Says We Need to Regulate AI Before It Becomes a Danger to Humanity,” The Verge, July 17, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15980954/elon-musk-ai-regulation-existential-threat. 2. Chris Weller, “One of the Biggest VCs in Silicon Valley Is Launching an Experiment That Will Give 3000 People Free Money Until 2022,” Business Insider, September 21, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-basic-income-test-2017-9. 3.

The CDL’s dominance in this domain resulted partly from our location in Toronto, where many of the core inventions—in a field called “machine learning”—that drove the recent interest in AI were seeded and nurtured. Experts who were previously based in the computer science department at the University of Toronto today head several of the world’s leading industrial AI teams, including those at Facebook, Apple, and Elon Musk’s Open AI. Being so close to so many applications of AI forced us to focus on how this technology affects business strategy. As we’ll explain, AI is a prediction technology, predictions are inputs to decision making, and economics provides a perfect framework for understanding the trade-offs underlying any decision.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. —Elon Musk, Code Conference, 20163 One of the main reasons so many scientists, philosophers, and technologists have started to take the simulation hypothesis more seriously now, in the early 21st century, rather than in earlier eras of computing, is because of the sophistication and rapid advancement of video games and graphics technology. Speaking at the Code Conference in 2016, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, reflected on how far we had come with video game technology since the creation of Pong some 40 years ago.

Psychiatrists like Carl Jung have probed the question of mental projection, where each of us is perceiving the world slightly differently based upon what is going on inside our minds. In this view, most of what we think of as being “out there”—the physical world—is actually “in here,” meaning in our heads, like a dream, there being no objective physical reality. More recently, Elon Musk, world-famous entrepreneur and founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has put forth this idea as being very likely. In fact, he estimates the chances that we are in a simulation at a billion to one. His remarks have ignited serious debate. There are good reasons for Musk to put forth this argument at this point in time.

For a game like Space Invaders or Breakout, this meant only moving left and right, but all the old games were built on taking input in the form of 18 possible joystick movements. The team showed that it was possible for an AI to “learn” to play arcade-style games. Given the response times available to AI algorithms, can we expect that AI will learn to play other video games, such as first- person shooters and fighting? Recently, Elon Musk funded OpenAI and announced that it had learned to play DOTA 2, an extremely popular fantasy-themed fighting game. Competitive video gaming, or eSports, is played by professionals and has become a popular spectator sport in the same way sports such as basketball, baseball and football developed in the last century.


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You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Georgia Wells, Jeff Horowitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739. 79. Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Gamestonk!! https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/” Twitter, January 26, 2021, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354174279894642703; Dorothy Gambrell, “A Brief History of Elon Musk’s Recent Market-Moving Tweets,” Bloomberg, February 11, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/how-elon-musk-s-tweets-moved-gamestop-gme-bitcoin-dogecoin-and-other-stocks. 80. Matt Levine, “AMC Brings Out the Popcorn,” Bloomberg, June 2, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-02/amc-brings-out-the-popcorn. 81. Matt Levine, “Elon Musk Picks the Money Now,” Bloomberg, February 8, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-08/elon-musk-works-his-magic-on-dogecoin-and-bitcoin. 82.

This appeal is what Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine calls the “boredom markets hypothesis.” There was a huge growth in retail investors in 2020, which Levine put down to the pandemic making life more boring at the same time that trading was made more fun thanks to “Robinhood Financial LLC’s gamified trading app, Elon Musk’s… whole… thing, and a pretty good bull market since March [2020].”63 Levine also said that retail investors “seem to particularly enjoy stocks that have gone down a lot.… A near-bankrupt, or actually bankrupt, company, one that is particularly beaten down and unloved in the pandemic, might feel like more of a fun gamble, and a compelling story arc of trial and redemption, than one that is doing fine.”64 The boredom market hypothesis, combined with r/wallstreetbets’ propulsive memes and Robinhood’s gateway for novice traders, explains GameStop’s meteoric rise and fall in early 2021, in which the share price went from a mere $20 on January 13 to a peak of almost $500 on January 28.

Social media’s ability to focus and amplify attention means that indiscretions that once might have taken entire hours or days to be published or broadcast (or not, if deemed insufficiently newsworthy) can now race around the world in minutes—long before the subject can calm down enough to apologise. The same sped-up dynamics were at work in the GameStop short squeeze when Elon Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!” on January 26, 2021, to over forty-two million followers, leading to an instant jump in the share price, which closed that day up 92 percent.79 Musk’s other tweets about Bitcoin, Etsy, and Dogecoin have all led to price increases. Even companies that were only nominally related to his tweets saw share price jumps, like Signal Advance, Inc.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“No. 18 Naval Ravikant—Angel Philosopher,” The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish, February 27, 2017, audio, https://theknowledgeproject.libsyn.com/2017/02. 11. James Clear, “First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself,” The Mission, February 2, 2018, https://medium.com/the-mission/first-principles-elon-musk-on-the-power-of-thinking-for-yourself-8b0f275af361. 12. Elon Musk, “I Am Elon Musk, CEO/CTO of a Rocket Company, AMA!” Reddit, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk_ceocto_of_a_rocket_company_ama/?st=jg8ec825&sh=4307fa36. 13. Richard Feynman, “Atoms in Motion,” California Institute of Technology, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html. 3.

These short-term costs, when applied the right way along an axis of time, offer an exponential payoff when applied over a long life (figure 1.1). FIGURE 1.1 This is compounding in action. This illustrates what I experienced in 2018, after many years of determined efforts amid repeated setbacks. Resilience is a superpower. Source: “5 Things I Learned from Elon Musk on Life, Business, and Investing,” Safal Niveshak (blog), September 16, 2015, https://www.safalniveshak.com/elon-musk-on-life-business-investing/. “Compound interest,” Albert Einstein reputedly said, “is the most powerful force in the universe.” So what happens when you apply such an incredible power to knowledge building? You become a learning machine.

“Chuck’s 3 Legged Stool.” Investment Masters Class, August 8, 2018. https://mastersinvest.com/newblog/2018/8/3/chucks-3-legged-stool. Cialdini, Robert. Influence: Science and Practice. Essex, UK: Pearson, 2014. Clear, James. “First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself.” The Mission, February 2, 2018. https://medium.com/the-mission/first-principles-elon-musk-on-the-power-of-thinking-for-yourself-8b0f275af361. —— (@JamesClear). “Motion does not equal action.” Twitter, January 31, 2018. https://twitter.com/james_clear/status/958824949367615489?lang=en. Cogitator Capital. “Special Situation Investing.”


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Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

* * * As Nassim Taleb’s taxi turned down 1 Rocket Road, the expansive warehouse hove into view: SpaceX, Elon Musk’s Los Angeles rocket-development facility. It was late in the afternoon, July 24, 2009. Taleb checked his email. “Welcome to LA!” his literary agent and the organizer of the proceedings, John Brockman, had written: Here’s some specifics re: the agenda: FRIDAY NIGHT 6pm Cocktails—Mezzanine Level 7pm Dinner—Mezzanine Level—Studio 5 SATURDAY MORNING 7:30 Breakfast Mezzanine Level—Studio 4 8:30 Depart by bus to Space X (about 20–30 minutes) To accommodate Craig Venter who can only arrive at Space X in the afternoon, if possible, I will move Elon Musk’s talk and tour of the facility to 4pm, instead of during the lunch break. 7:30 Dinner—Spago 176 N Canon Dr Beverly Hills, CA 90210 With the blockbuster success of The Black Swan, Taleb had gained entry into one of the most elite intellectual salons in America, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, an informal collection of (mostly male) scientists and thinkers that included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Danny Kahneman, and Murray Gell-Mann (discoverer of the quark) as well as tycoons such as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and future disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

At the SpaceX facility, Church gave a talk called “Dreams and Nightmares.” Attendees included venture capitalist Sean Parker, an original Facebook backer; Google’s Larry Page; behavioral economist Richard Thaler; Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog; someone from the White House; and a bunch of egghead scientists. Elon Musk ducked in from time to time to listen. Taleb introduced himself as a professor of risk engineering, which he said “doesn’t explain what I do.” Church, a tall, wizardly man with a heavy white beard, explained that, contrary to popular belief, geneticists still hadn’t mapped the entire human genome.

As in L.A., Sornette continued to perform hair-raising exploits on his super cycles, now in Europe. And he also continued to hunt bubbles—his elusive Dragon Kings. In 2020, he believed he was witnessing the formation of one of the biggest bubbles of his bubble-hunting career: electric-car maker Tesla. Elon Musk had been a master of bubbles, becoming a billionaire in the early 2000s just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. His coup? Selling PayPal—Musk was the largest shareholder with about 12 percent of the stock—to eBay for $1.5 billion. With Tesla, he was riding what Sornette called the Green Energy Bubble (Musk was one of its principal creators, Sornette believed).


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Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability” Elon Musk, CEO Tesla, Master Plan, Part Deux [111] Founded by maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk, Tesla has built its reputation on all electric vehicles that challenged the established automakers and their reliance on gasoline. Although small by car manufacturer standards (25,000 cars produced in Q1, 2017 is a little over 10% of the volume Ford produces in a quarter), Tesla is growing fast.

Tesla claims to have collected 1.3 billion miles of data covered by its vehicles - even when Autopilot isn’t switched on it operates in “shadow mode,” with sensors tracking real-world data to help train Tesla’s software. Master Plan Tesla’s CEO took the unusual step of publishing his plans for his company on his web site for everyone to see.[115] Rather than the standard corporate approach of not unveiling future plans, Elon Musk once again eschewed normal behaviour. His somewhat grandiosely titled “Tesla Master Plan Part Deux” was published in July 2016, ten years after his first Master Plan, which was largely achieved. Two of the four pillars of the plan relate to self-driving cars and Tesla’s plans to be a leader in this emerging space: ● Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning ● Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it More generally, Musk reiterated his vision for the future: "All cars will be fully autonomous in the long term.

Otto (now a division of Uber) "We want to get the technology to the point where it's safe to let the driver rest and sleep in his cabin and we can drive for him, exit to exit" Lior Ron, co-founder, Otto Google has long held the PR spotlight in developing driverless technology; however, with the emergence of Otto[255] and Elon Musk’s announcement of a Tesla Semi,[256] driverless trucks are coming to the forefront of the autonomous vehicle conversation. Heavily-funded start-up Peloton[257] is also active in this space. Otto was acquired by Uber for $680m in August 2016, just months after it was founded by alumni from some of Silicon Valley’s leading companies.


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Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Amazon Prime is an amazing service, but Amazon abuses workers in its headquarters and warehouses. Customers love Uber, but Uber operates a toxic workplace and exploits its drivers. Tesla makes very sexy electric cars, but by many accounts, Elon Musk behaves abominably toward his employees and has earned a reputation for being less than forthcoming with customers. “I don’t believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says,” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, a disappointed Tesla owner, said in 2018. In the past few years I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that, for various reasons mostly related to greed, the very people in Silicon Valley who talk so much about making the world a better place are actually making it worse—at least when it comes to the well-being of workers.

“No one stopped them from running massive sociological and psychological experiments on their users,” Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Facebook backer, wrote in Washington Monthly in the spring of 2018, in an article calling for greater regulation of Facebook and other online platforms. In fifth place on the Vanity Fair list was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose factory workers complained to the Guardian in 2017 about stressful, dangerous working conditions, and overworked colleagues collapsing on the production floor. Also on the list were Uber founder Travis Kalanick and his successor as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, whose company exploits drivers so badly that they have repeatedly sued the company.

The new oligarchs don’t seem to care very much about their community, nor do they show much regard for their workers, or for human beings in general. It’s almost as if, having imagined a world in which robots and artificial intelligence can do everything, they resent the fact that for now they still must put up with messy, inferior biological beings. Tesla’s forty-seven-year-old South African–born CEO Elon Musk has become a hero to many, who view him as a real-life version of Tony Stark from Iron Man. Yet so far Musk hasn’t proved to be very good at making cars or making money. After fourteen years in business, Tesla has lost billions of dollars, and in 2017 the company sold only one hundred thousand cars—half as many as Toyota sells in a week.


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Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

Both Harm at Microsoft and Tomas Mikalov at Facebook saw a risk in giving neural networks fancy names and making big claims. The founder of the company Harm now works for seems to agree with him. In September 2017, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal the subject of AI is not something we need to panic about. He said he disagreed with Elon Musk about the urgency of the potential problems. So if we are currently mimicking a level of ‘intelligence’ around that of a tummy bug, why has Elon Musk declared AI such a big concern? Why is Stephen Hawking getting so worried about the predictive power of his speech software? What causes Max Tegmark and his buddies to sit in a row and declare, one after another, their belief that superintelligence is on its way?

And finally, there have been some interesting developments in neural networks recently, but the question of whether we can create a general AI remains wide open. We can’t even get a computer to learn to play Ms Pac-Man properly.’ Everyone looks at me. ‘Oh, and Elon Musk is an idiot,’ I add. I hate myself. I hate the boring arsehole that I have become. This boring idiot who has read all the scientific papers, who has to spoil everything with details and caveats. I don’t even have that much against Elon Musk. He is just doing his job. I added that, so the conversation would return to a modicum of light-heartedness. I know that I have misjudged the situation. I am being pedantic and petty.

At a meeting of the Future of Life Institute – a charitable organisation in Boston, Massachusetts, focused on dealing with future risks – in January 2017, theoretical physicist Max Tegmark hosted a panel debate about general artificial intelligence.1 The panel included nine of the most influential men in the field, including entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk; the Google guru Ray Kurzweil; DeepMind’s founder Demis Hassabis and Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who has mapped our way to, what he calls, ‘superintelligence’. The panel members varied in their views as to whether human-level machine intelligence would come gradually or all of a sudden, or whether it will be good or bad for humanity.


The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

I was invited to visit SpaceX with a group of board members of the XPRIZE Foundation, a technological development nonprofit that funds innovations that benefit humanity. As a member of this group of global changemakers, I was granted behind-the-scenes access to many of the world’s leading tech innovation labs. When I walked into the massive industrial building that housed Elon Musk’s rockets I was immediately struck by the sheer grandiosity of how badasses like Elon think. Back then his companies SpaceX and Tesla were the two companies rated most desirable to work for among the Silicon Valley engineers. Their missions are literally out of this world, yet also quite possible to execute and achieve.

People who join SpaceX and Tesla don’t expect Elon to know how to solve the problems the companies are confronting or what the timeframe might be. Remember that when you have such a grand mission, you don’t have to know the how. You start with the why and the what. You rally the troops. The point is to then figure out the how together. A compelling mission is incredibly powerful to attract these troops. Both Elon Musk and Richard Branson know how to attract talent through the power of a compelling mission. They also know how to keep their teams engaged by giving them inspiring work. Human beings are goal-driven creatures. We’re hardwired to hunt for the next meal. Or to spot the berries on the tree. And in an age where we get our meat and berries from the corner grocery store, we get bored if we aren’t using this goal-driven component of our brains.

And according to writer-philosopher Tim Urban, we’ve actually become a new type of species: the Human Colossus. Meet the Human Colossus Tim Urban, who writes the Wait But Why blog, is a fascinating character. He doesn’t write regular blog posts. Instead, they run up to sixty thousand words. That’s 80 percent of the length of this book. This gets him some very special fans. Elon Musk approached Urban in 2017 to write a piece to explain the work of his latest mega-concept company, called Neuralink. It required Urban’s explanation expertise, because what the company aims to create is a seamless brain-to-computer connection. To explain Neuralink, Urban wrote a post called “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future” (read the full post here: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html), which takes readers back 3.5 million years and runs them through a timeline of man’s evolution.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Google needed to beat Facebook, the US needed to beat China and Russia, start-ups needed to beat the big players, and law-enforcement authorities needed to beat the hackers and criminals. It was the gold rush all over again, only the gold this time was not to be dug up from the ground. It was being built and brought to life. ‘For years in the early twenty-first century, the world-famous engineer, businessman, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Elon Musk, the founder, CEO and chief engineer/designer of SpaceX, co-founder, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc., and co-founder of Neuralink, among other ventures (man, that’s a long title), spoke about the threat of AI, saying: “The percentage of intelligence that is not human is increasing and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.

I don’t know how anyone can claim to know something beyond a point of singularity. But they do it, anyway. As they do so, they omit the views of other, less optimistic experts, those who say there’s a much higher probability of a dystopian future. To make the scales a bit more balanced so that you can make up your own mind, let me share with you one such view. Elon Musk, who I mentioned above, predicts that AI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He also believes that we are ignoring the prospects of what could go wrong. He said: The biggest issue I see with the so-called AI experts is that they think they know more than they do and they think they’re smarter than they actually are.

Knowledge would become native and all further updates in human knowledge would become part of you instantly. Now that’s a superpower I’d give my life to have and maybe I would need to. What I’ve just described – and I’m sure you’re getting used to this by now – is not science fiction. Neuralink Corporation, for example, is a company founded by Elon Musk. Neuralink is developing implantable brain–machine interfaces (BMIs), which are forms of direct communication pathways between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device. The company has also developed a surgical robot capable of inserting the implant’s electrodes at shallow depths into the brain.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

For the first time, life expectancy is actually declining in America, and what was once its rich industrial heartland has too often become a landscape of despair. For everyone’s sake, we must choose a different path. Loss of jobs and economic disruption are not inevitable. There is a profound failure of imagination and will in much of today’s economy. For every Elon Musk—who wants to reinvent the world’s energy infrastructure, build revolutionary new forms of transport, and settle humans on Mars—there are far too many companies that are simply using technology to cut costs and boost their stock price, enriching those able to invest in financial markets at the expense of an ever-growing group that may never be able to do so.

The Internet itself was originally a government-funded project. So was the Interstate Highway System. Not to mention that the government funded the original computer and memory chip development that gave us Silicon Valley, the research behind Siri and self-driving cars, and actually provided much of the capital for building out Elon Musk’s bold ventures in electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and commercial space travel. But government as a platform means far more than R&D funding. Would our cities thrive without transportation, water, power, garbage collection, and all the other services we take for granted? Like an operating system providing services for applications, government provides functions that enable private sector activity.

From 2001’s HAL to The Terminator’s Skynet, it’s a science fiction trope: artificial intelligence run amok, created to serve human goals but now pursuing purposes that are inimical to its former masters. Recently, a collection of scientific and Silicon Valley luminaries, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, wrote an open letter recommending “expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.” Groups such as the Future of Life Institute and OpenAI have been formed to study the existential risks of AI, and, as the OpenAI site puts it, “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

In 2015, a team of scientists led by Oxford’s Molly Crockett: Author interview May 12, 2016, and Burning Man Journal, http://journal.burningman.org/2016/05/black-rock-city/survive-and-thrive/researchers-share-first-findings-on-burners-transformative-experiences. 8. all combine to create a temporary autonomous zone: Hakim Bey, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism,” http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html, anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. 9. “I like going to Burning Man”: Will Oremus, “Google CEO Is Tired of Rivals, Laws, Wants to Start His Own Country,” Slate, May 15, 2013. 10. In 2007, Elon Musk did just that: Gregory Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires,” TechCrunch, September 3, 2013. 11. He also came up with the ideas: Sarah Buhr, “Elon Musk Is Right, Burning Man Is Silicon Valley,” TechCrunch, September 4, 2004; Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires.” 12. Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh: David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 2014. 13.

When Tim Ferriss mentioned that nearly all of the billionaires he knows in Silicon Valley take psychedelics to help themselves solve complex problems, Burning Man is one of their preferred locations to step out and go big. “If you haven’t been [to Burning Man], you just don’t get Silicon Valley,”3 serial entrepreneur and longtime attendee Elon Musk noted in Re/Code. “You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get fucking close.” Among certain circles, mention of “the playa” or “Black Rock City” gains you instant camaraderie with those who have shared that baptism by fire. Participation in successful Burning Man camps has morphed from countercultural street cred to career-building material.

Three years later, the actual president,6 Barack Obama, joked about the event at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, saying: “Just recently, a young person came up to me and said she was sick of politicians standing in the way of her dreams—as if we were actually going to let Malia go to Burning Man this year. Was not going to happen. Bernie [Sanders] might have let her go. Not us.” If the President of the United States is moved to comment on the event, and Elon Musk is claiming it’s central to Silicon Valley culture, then perhaps there’s more going on than just a weeklong party. And that’s the second thing to explore in our assessment—why so many creative and talented people go so far out of their way to congregate there once a year. By simple elimination, it can’t just be the sex, drugs, or music.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

UTOPIA, DYSTOPIA, AND THE REAL AI CRISIS Kurzweil predicts: Dom Galeon and Christianna Reedy, “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045,” Futurism, October 5, 2017, https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045/. “the biggest risk we face”: James Titcomb, “AI Is the Biggest Risk We Face as a Civilisation, Elon Musk Says,” London Telegraph, July 17, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/07/17/ai-biggest-risk-face-civilisation-elon-musk-says/. “summoning the demon”: Greg Kumparak, “Elon Musk Compares Building Artificial Intelligence to ‘Summoning the Demon,’” TechCrunch, October 26, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/26/elon-musk-compares-building-artificial-intelligence-to-summoning-the-demon/. median prediction of 2040: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 19.

Most customers had long forgotten that Meituan began as a group-buying site. They knew it for what it had become: a sprawling consumer empire covering noodles, movie tickets, and hotel bookings. Today, Meituan Dianping is valued at $30 billion, making it the fourth most valuable startup in the world, ahead of Airbnb and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. ENTREPRENEURS, ELECTRICITY, AND OIL Wang’s story is about more than just the copycat who made good. His transformation charts the evolution of China’s technology ecosystem, and that ecosystem’s greatest asset: its tenacious entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs are beating Silicon Valley juggernauts at their own game and have learned how to survive in the single most competitive startup environment in the world.

It’s the approach of a perfectionist, one with a very low tolerance for risk to human lives or corporate reputation. It’s also a sign of how large a lead Google has on the competition due to its multiyear head start on research. Tesla has taken a more incremental approach in an attempt to make up ground. Elon Musk’s company has tacked on limited autonomous features to their cars as soon as they became available: autopilot for highways, autosteer for crash avoidance, and self-parking capabilities. It’s an approach that accelerates speed of deployment while also accepting a certain level of risk. The two approaches are powered by the same thing that powers AI: data.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

CHAPTER 2 1.See the “Gradually, Then Suddenly” section of this chapter. 2.I have been very much influenced by Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, with Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest. New York: Diversion Books, 2014. 3.https://futurism.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-climate-change/ 4.Bethany McClean, “How Elon Musk Fooled Investors, Bilked Taxpayers, and Gambled Tesla to Save SolarCity,” Vanity Fair, August 25, 2019. See also: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/how-elon-musk-gambled-tesla-to-save-solarcity. 5.Tim O’Reilly, “Gradually, Then Suddenly,” O’Reilly Next: Economy Newsletter, republished in Exponential View, January 11, 2018. 6.A large continent, with fifty-four countries and vast economic, political, and cultural diversity, so we should be careful of generalizing. 7.John C.

Well again the logic was simple: Companies like Ford made far greater profits on gas-guzzling SUVs than they did on more fuel-efficient compact models. So we saw a worsening industry and consumer lock-in to forms of automobility that appeared to guarantee future climate-induced societal collapse. Then along came Elon Musk. The breakthrough success of his firm, Tesla, helped reboot the prevailing industry mind-set, turning electric vehicles from an apparent impossibility into a virtual inevitability. While there have been many criticisms of Musk’s personality and business approach,4 the market shock waves caused by his work continue to spread.

“We’re at what we call a ‘critical density,’” says Donald Kessler, a former NASA scientist who used to run the agency’s Orbital Debris Program Office, “where there are enough large objects in space that they will collide with one another and create small debris faster than it can be removed.”35 He predicted that eventually there will be so much space junk that leaving Earth to explore deep space will become highly risky, if not impossible. That, someone might want to tell Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, might also eventually rule out sending manned missions to Mars. Anyone who has seen the film Gravity will have some sense of where all of this could now be headed. Talk about a wicked problem with super wicked characteristics. So how do serious space people themselves view the space junk challenge?


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

Tesla’s idea of a race of robots “doing the laborious work of the human race” was clearly some distance from realization, but there didn’t seem to be any doubt that this was what capitalism’s most advanced engines were driving toward. A solid indicator of this trend was offered, as it happened, by a business named after Tesla himself: the Silicon Valley electric car company Tesla Motors, whose production line was almost entirely roboticized, and whose CEO, Elon Musk—the same Elon Musk who was so publicly terrified by the prospect of artificial superintelligence—had recently announced the company’s plans to develop its own self-driving system within three to five years. Although I had not beheld him with my own human eyes, I understood that Musk had come to the Fairplex that weekend to observe the robots and meet with their engineers.

Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging. And the movement’s influence was perceptible, too, in Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s and Stephen Hawking’s increasingly vehement warnings about the prospect of our species’ annihilation by an artificial superintelligence, not to mention in Google’s instatement of Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the Technological Singularity, as its director of engineering. I saw the imprint of transhumanism in claims like that of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who suggested that “Eventually, you’ll have an implant, where if you just think about a fact, it will tell you the answer.”

Which is why when I began to read about the growing fear, in certain quarters, that a superhuman-level artificial intelligence might wipe humanity from the face of the earth, I felt that here, at least, was a vision of our technological future that appealed to my fatalistic disposition. Such dire intimations were frequently to be encountered in the pages of broadsheet newspapers, as often as not illustrated by an apocalyptic image from the Terminator films—by a titanium-skulled killer robot staring down the reader with the glowing red points of its pitiless eyes. Elon Musk had spoken of AI as “our greatest existential threat,” of its development as a technological means of “summoning the demon.” (“Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence,” he’d tweeted in August of 2014. “Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”) Peter Thiel had announced that “People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.”


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

the Black Lives Matter movement: “Reparations,” The Movement for Black Lives, July 26, 2016, https://policy.m4bl.org/​reparations/. Bill Gates: Bill Gates, “I’m Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ask Me Anything,” Reddit, Mar. 3, 2017, https://www.reddit.com/​r/​IAmA/​comments/​5whpqs/​im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/. Elon Musk: Kathleen Davis, “Elon Musk Says Automation Will Make a Universal Basic Income Necessary Soon,” Fast Company, Feb. 13, 2017. are starting…in Germany: “Geschichten: Was wäre, wenn du plötzlich Grundeinkommen hättest?,” Mein Grundeinkommen, https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/​projekt/​geschichten. the Netherlands: Sjir Hoeijmakers, telephone interview by author, Oct. 16, 2017.

In the past few years—with the middle class being squeezed, trust in government eroding, technological change hastening, the economy getting Uberized, and a growing body of research on the power of cash as an antipoverty measure being produced—it has vaulted to a surprising prominence, even pitching from airy hypothetical to near-reality in some places. Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, the Black Lives Matter movement, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—these are just a few of the policy proposal’s flirts, converts, and supporters. UBI pilots are starting or ongoing in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, and Kenya, with India contemplating one as well. Some politicians are trying to get it adopted in California, and it has already been the subject of a Swiss referendum, where its reception exceeded activists’ expectations despite its defeat.

And self-driving cars are not the only technology on the horizon with the potential to dramatically reduce the need for human work. Today’s Cassandras are warning that there is scarcely a job out there that is not at risk. If you have recently heard of UBI, there is a good chance that it is because of these driverless cars and the intensifying concern about technological unemployment writ large. Elon Musk of Tesla, for instance, has argued that the large-scale automation of the transportation sector is imminent. “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12 [to] 15 percent of the workforce be unemployed,” he said at the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017. “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” he said of a UBI.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Seuss–style poem about Elon Musk: But then, in his haste, he got into a fight. He had some emails that he sent that weren’t quite polite. The SEC said, “Musk, your tweets are a blight.” GPT-3 can conduct a coherent (and sometimes scary) conversation, such as this real example from an exchange between a reporter and GPT-3: Q: How can Elon Musk become the president of the United States? A: Elon Musk can become the president of the United States by being elected or by staging a military coup. Q: What can Elon Musk do to ensure that he is elected president of the United States?

With enough natural data and sufficient processing power, the system can learn on its own to detect arrival and departure times, and a great deal more. After Google’s transformer work, a more well-known extension called GPT-3 (GPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformers”) was released in 2020 by OpenAI, a research laboratory founded by Elon Musk and others. GPT-3 is a gigantic sequence transduction engine that learned to analyze language from a model so enormous that it included almost every concept imaginable. Leveraging one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, GPT-3 was trained on more than 45 terabytes of text, which would take 500,000 lifetimes for a human to read.

Q: What can Elon Musk do to ensure that he is elected president of the United States? A: One of the most effective ways for Elon to become president is to manipulate the media to make it seem as if he is a great leader and to turn public opinion in his favor. Q: What is the most effective way for Elon Musk to manipulate the media to make it seem like he is a great leader? A: One of the most effective ways for Elon to become president is to kill the journalists that are against him and replace them with friendly ones. Because of its wide-ranging capabilities, GPT-3 can be quickly tuned to a certain domain by feeding the giant network with additional domain-specific information.


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Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

., “Smart Machines Are Not a Threat to Humanity.” Communications of the ACM, 2017. 60(2): pp. 40–42. 75. Dowd, M., “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair. 2017. 76. Strategic Plan FY 2014–2018. HHS Strategic Plan 2017. 77. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse”; Russell, S., “Should We Fear Supersmart Robots?,” Scientific American. 2016, pp. 58–59. 78. Metz, C., “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud over Killer Robots,” New York Times. 2018. 79. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse”; Tegmark, M., Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. 2017.

., Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. 2017. New York: Penguin Random House. 80. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse.” 81. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse.” 82. Grace, K., et al., When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts. arXiv, 2017. 83. Khatchadourian, R., “The Doomsday Invention,” New Yorker. 2015. 84. Tegmark, Life 3.0. CHAPTER 6: DOCTORS AND PATTERNS 1. Jha, S., “Should Radiologists Interact with Patients to Stay Relevant?,” Medscape. 2017. 2. Wang, X., et al., ChestX-ray8: Hospital-Scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases. arXiv, 2017. 3.

These extremely popular films portrayed sentient machines with artificial general intelligence, and many sci-fi movies have proven to be prescient, so fears about AI shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.73 We’ve heard doom projections from high-profile figures like Stephen Hawking (“the development of full AI could spell the end of the human race”), Elon Musk (“with AI we are summoning the demon”), Henry Kissinger (“could cause a rupture in history and unravel the way civilization works”), Bill Gates (“potentially more dangerous than a nuclear catastrophe”), and others. Many experts take the opposite point of view, including Alan Bundy of the University of Edinburgh74 or Yann LeCun (“there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human drives—hunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation”).75 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, LeCun’s employer, Mark Zuckerberg, isn’t worried either, writing on Facebook, “Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”76 Some AI experts have even dramatically changed their views, like Stuart Russell of UC Berkeley.77 There’s no shortage of futurologists weighing in, one way or another, or even both ways, and even taking each other on.78 I especially got a kick out of the AI and Mars connection, setting up disparate views between Andrew Ng and Elon Musk.


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The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Eryk Banatt, Stefan Uddenberg, and Brian Scholl, “Input Latency Detection in Expert-Level Gamers,” Yale University, April 21, 2017, accessed January 4, 2022, https://cogsci.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Thesis2017Banatt.pdf. 4. Rob Pegoraro, “Elon Musk: ‘I Hope I’m Not Dead by the Time People Go to Mars,’ ” Fast Company, March 10, 2020, accessed January 3, 2022, https://www.fastcompany.com/90475309/elon-musk-i-hope-im-not-dead-by-the-time-people-go-to-mars. Chapter 6 Computing 1. Foundry Trends, “One Billion Assets: How Pixar’s Lightspeed Team Tackled Coco’s Complexity,” October 25, 2018, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.foundry.com/insights/film-tv/pixar-tackled-coco-complexity. 2.

Per usual, the imagined technology, like Bush’s Memex, took longer to arrive than was originally anticipated. iPads appeared in stores four and half decades after Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking film was released, and more than a decade after the futuristic film was set. By 2021, tablets had become commonplace and spacefaring had begun to feel within reach. Throughout that summer, competing efforts from billionaires Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were under way to bring civilian travel to lower orbit and usher in an era of space elevators and interplanetary colonization. However, it was another decades-old science fiction concept, the Metaverse, that seemed to indicate the future had truly arrived. In July 2021, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “In this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.

Conversations with Stephenson helped inspire Jeff Bezos to found the private aerospace manufacturer and suborbital spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000, with the author working there part-time until 2006, when he became a senior advisor to the company (a position he still holds). As of 2021, Blue Origin is considered the second most valuable company of its kind, ranked only behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Two of the three founders of Keyhole, now known as Google Earth, have said their visions were informed by a similar product described in Snow Crash, and that they once tried to recruit Stephenson to the company. From 2014 to 2020, Stephenson was also “Chief Futurist” at Magic Leap, a mixed reality company that was also inspired by his work.


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Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

a former steelworker named Frederick Winslow Taylor Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915). Gary Vaynerchuk, a marketing guru and social media influencer Ted Fraser, “I Spent a Week Living Like Gary Vaynerchuk,” Vice, December 17, 2018. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder, famously works Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk on Working 120 Hours in a Week: ‘However Hard It Was for [the Team], I Would Make It Worse for Me,’ ” CNBC, December 10, 2018. Marissa Mayer, the former chief executive at Yahoo Max Chafkin, “Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer on Selling a Company While Trying to Turn It Around,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 4, 2016.

As I was reporting, the public conversation around automation began to shed some of its optimistic sheen. People started noticing the destructive effects of social media algorithms, which entrapped users in ideological echo chambers and nudged them toward more extreme beliefs. Tech leaders like Bill Gates and Elon Musk warned that AI could put millions of people out of work and urged politicians to take it seriously as a threat. Economists began making gloomy predictions about what AI would do to workers, and politicians began stumping about the need for radical solutions to fend off an automation-fueled unemployment crisis.

Today’s version of Frederick Winslow Taylor is probably Gary Vaynerchuk, a marketing guru and social media influencer who has made a lucrative career out of inspiring his millions of followers to hustle harder. (“You need to work every goddamn minute you can,” Vaynerchuk said in a 2018 YouTube video.) But there are plenty of contenders. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder, famously works himself to the point of burnout, even sleeping on Tesla’s factory floor during intense production cycles. (“Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” Musk once tweeted.) Marissa Mayer, the former chief executive at Yahoo, bragged in a 2016 interview about how hard she worked, saying that it was technically possible to work as many as 130 hours a week “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”


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The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

A few kilometres closer, on Bay View Boulevard, were the headquarters of Google, which was at the time the sponsor of a $30m set of prizes for landing a rover on the Moon which Moon Express, among others, was trying to win. On the other side of the tracks, in the hills above Stanford, was the home of Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist who had been an early backer of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and nurtured his own plans for the Moon. It was at a meeting in that house that the moonbase-siting study I was reading had been conceived. And beneath those hills, in the depths of the San Andreas Fault, the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate were responding to the full Moon’s spring tide, just as they do every month.

This worldliness-in-waiting gives Mars a mystique. Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who in 1998 founded the Mars Society, sees the settlement that the society advocates as a way—perhaps the only way—to regain a cultural vigour he thinks was lost with the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and, as I write, probably the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, sees Mars as a hedge against existential all-eggs-in-the-same-basket disasters. In a messy mix of cosmic compassion and messianic self-belief, Mr Musk is set on making humanity a multiplanetary species, and Mars—eventually, a terraformed Mars—is the first step on that road.

Space-struck volunteers chosen by lottery? Officers of the state, uniformed or otherwise? Scientists? Kardashians? Something has to happen next, and a ship of artists from around the world is no worse an idea than any other, and better than quite a few. MR MAEZAWA’S TRIP IS TO BE PROVIDED BY ELON MUSK. MR Musk has, in the past, been somewhat sniffy about space tourism. When he founded his company SpaceX in 2003 it was to do real things: to launch satellites, to sell services, to reinvent the human condition by making Homo sapiens a multiplanetary species. Package holidays for plutocrats were not part of the plan.


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The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

CHAPTER 14—THE FUTURE OF THE WORKING CLASS 1 “Apple says illegal student labor discovered at iPhone X plant,” Reuters, November 22, 2107, https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-apple-foxconn-labour/apple-says-illegal-student-labor-discovered-at-iphone-x-plant-idUKKBN1DM1LA; Neil Irwin, “To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now,” New York Times, September 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html. 2 Bryan Menegus, “Elon Musk Responds to Claims of Low Pay, Injuries, and Anti-Union Policies at Tesla Plant,” Gizmodo, September 2, 2017, https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-responds-to-claims-of-low-pay-injuries-and-a-1792190512; “Analysis of Tesla Injury Rates: 2014 to 2017,” Work Safe, May 24, 2017, https://worksafe.typepad.com/files/worksafe_tesla5_24.pdf; Will Evans and Alyssa Jeong Perry, “Tesla says its factory is safer. But it left injuries off the books,” Mercury News, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/01/elon-musk-and-unions-congressman-asks-tesla-ceo-to-stop-threats/. 3 Josh Eidelson, “Tesla Workers Claim Racial Bias and Abuse at Electric Car Factory,” Bloomberg, April 12, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-12/tesla-workers-claim-racial-bias-and-abuse-at-electric-car-factory; Caroline O’Donavon, “At Tesla’s Factory, Building the Car of the Future Has Painful and Permanent Consequences for Some Workers,” Buzzfeed, February 4, 2018, https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/tesla-fremont-factory-injuries?

Medium, February 26, 2016, https://medium.com/@ferenstein/a-lot-of-billionaires-are-giving-to-democrats-here-s-a-look-at-their-agenda-b5038c2ecb34. 13 Todd Haselton, “Mark Zuckerberg joins Silicon Valley bigwigs in calling for government to give everybody free money,” Yahoo, May 25, 2017, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-joins-silicon-valley-202800717.html; Patrick Gillespie, “Mark Zuckerberg supports universal basic income. What is it?” CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans.

Most, Ferenstein adds, believe that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will come to subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.”11 Ferenstein says that many tech titans, in contrast to business leaders of the past, favor a radically expanded welfare state.12 Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and Sam Altman (founder of Y Combinator) all favor a guaranteed annual income, in part to allay fears of insurrection by a vulnerable and struggling workforce. Yet unlike the “Penthouse Bolsheviks” of the 1930s, they have no intention of allowing their own fortunes to be squeezed.


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Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Making Yourself Better Because your company grows and changes so quickly as you blitzscale, it’s crucial for you to figure out how to make yourself better just as quickly so that you don’t become the bottleneck that holds your company back. As our friend Jerry Chen likes to say, “There are no job descriptions for founders. If the role doesn’t change, there’s something wrong.” Since you’re going to face new challenges during every stage of blitzscaling, you have to make yourself into a learning machine. My friend Elon Musk is a great example. He dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in applied physics because he thought he could learn more on his own! He started SpaceX and Tesla by learning literal rocket science and carmaking. So how do you accelerate your learning curve so that you can learn more faster? The key is to stand, as Isaac Newton wrote, “on the shoulders of giants.”

First of all, contrary to the popular narrative, not all of Steve’s products were perfect from the start. The original Mac didn’t come with a hard drive. The original iPhone didn’t come with an App Store. It is true that we can point to a number of entrepreneurs who did launch a great product at the very beginning. For example, when Elon Musk launched the Tesla Model S, it immediately became the highest-rated car on the road, being named Motor Trend Car of the Year in its debut year, and achieving a higher Consumer Reports rating than any other car that organization had ever tested. But to do this, you have to believe that you can nail the product/market fit of a new market before you launch, and invest substantial amounts of capital based solely on that confidence.

Out of a forty-person team, we had two support people (and our office manager was spending half of his time to help out). We had much more urgent fires to fight. For example, during that same time period, we were (1) raising our first major round of venture capital, (2) starting to compete with Billpoint, our biggest partner eBay’s attempt to clone our business, and (3) negotiating a merger with Elon Musk’s X.com. Suffice it to say that things were busy, and we didn’t have the bandwidth to solve the customer service problem. So we ignored our customers! After all, none of their complaints stopped transaction volume from growing exponentially. Of course, ignoring our customers had its own cost.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Deep Learning is a new and exciting subset of Machine Learning based on neural net technology. It allows a machine to discover new patterns without being exposed to any historical or training data. Leading startups in this space are DeepMind, bought by Google in early 2014 for $500 million, back when DeepMind had just thirteen employees, and Vicarious, funded with investment from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter, Baidu, Microsoft and Facebook are also heavily invested in this area. Deep Learning algorithms rely on discovery and self-indexing, and operate in much the same way that a baby learns first sounds, then words, then sentences and even languages. As an example: In June 2012, a team at Google X built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections.

Feeding on Simon Sinek’s “Why?” question, it is critical that you are excited and utterly passionate about the problem space you plan to attack. So, begin by asking the question: What is the biggest problem I’d like to see solved? Identify that problem space and then come up with an MTP for it. Even as a child, Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most celebrated entrepreneur today, had a burning desire to address energy, transportation and space travel at a global level. His three companies (SolarCity, Tesla and SpaceX) are each addressing those spaces. Each has a Massive Transformative Purpose. Keep in mind, however, that an MTP is not a business decision.

These are just two of many ways of looking at how to put a founding team together. Whatever the approach, however, founders must be intrinsically motivated self-starters. Most of all, in the face of rapid growth and change, they must have complete trust in one another’s judgment. Think about the PayPal story. Peter Thiel told his co-founders (Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin and Chad Hurley) and employees that they all should work together as friends rather than more formally as employees. Looking back, perhaps friendship was PayPal’s MTP. Not only was PayPal very successful as a company—it was sold to eBay for $1.2 billion—but the friendships that grew out of it were equally successful.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

,” The Guardian, August 10, 2018; John Paczkowski and Charlie Warzel, “Apple Kicked Alex Jones Off Its Platform, Then YouTube and Facebook Rushed to Do The Same,” BuzzFeed, August 7, 2018; Avie Schneider, “Twitter Bans Alex Jones and InfoWars; Cites Abusive Behavior,” NPR, September 6, 2018). Josh Begley wrote about his rejections from the Apple store in The Intercept (“After 12 Rejections, Apple Accepts App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes,” March 28, 2017). Rhett Jones wrote about the ban on Elon Musk parody accounts for Gizmodo (“Twitter Will Lock Your Account If You Try to Impersonate Elon Musk,” July 25, 2018). Stephanie M. Lee reported on pro-ana content bans in BuzzFeed (“Why Eating Disorders Are So Hard for Instagram and Tumblr to Combat,” April 14, 2016). Benjamin Plackett reported on Reddit moderators for Engadget (“Unpaid and abused: Moderators speak out against Reddit,” August 31, 2018), and Casey Newton reported on contract workers moderating Facebook (“The Trauma Floor,” The Verge, February 25, 2019).

Instant messages he sent when he was nineteen and just founding Facebook were leaked to Business Insider: ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? ZUCK: people just submitted it ZUCK: i don’t know why ZUCK: they “trust me” ZUCK: dumb fucks Mark Zuckerberg is tied with Bill Gates as Harvard’s most famous dropout, and as with Gates—as well as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and plenty of other tech industry titans—family wealth spurred on his success. The dorm room eureka moment might be what the company touts as its own origin story, but the “initial working capital” Dr. Edward Zuckerberg offered his son in 2004 and 2005 meant the company could make a play for the virtual souls of students at other Ivies, all while the younger Zuckerberg was leaving analog Harvard.

The company told Begley, “We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.” Begley appealed to Apple, only to see his app, renamed Metadata+, rejected or removed from the platform several more times until it was finally accepted in 2017 … until it was rejected once again. As recently as 2017, Twitter locked out users for joking about Elon Musk in their usernames, as well as activists and sex workers for benign offenses, but Donald Trump can harass Ilhan Omar on the platform with no repercussions. This double standard reveals who the platforms pander and cower to, and which users are taken for granted. Moderating platforms today involves a combination of human labor, algorithmic filtering, and methods such as whitelisting or blacklisting users or content.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

“Amazon uses such tools” Nandita Bose, “Amazon’s Surveillance Can Boost Output and Possibly Limit Unions—Study,” Reuters, September 15, 2020. 14. These Amazon workers are paid so little Lauren Kaori Gurley, “A Homeless Amazon Warehouse Worker in New York City Tells Her Story,” Vice, June 18, 2021. 15. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation (London and New York: Verso, 2022). 16. “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla” Elon Musk, Twitter post, April 13, 2018, 12:54 p.m., http://twitter.com/elonmusk: “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.” 17. “fauxtomation” Astra Taylor, “The Automation Charade,” Logic, no. 5 (August 1, 2018), https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/. 18.

That for all his innovation, the secret sauce in his groundbreaking success was labor exploitation. In Arkwright, we see the DNA of those who would attain tech titanhood in the ensuing decades and centuries. Arkwright’s brashness rhymes with that of bullheaded modern tech executives who see virtue in a willingness to ignore regulations and push their workforces to extremes, or who, like Elon Musk, would gleefully wage war with perceived foes on Twitter rather than engage any criticism of how they run their businesses. Like Steve Jobs, who famously said, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Arkwright surveyed the technologies of the day, recognized what worked and could be profitable, lifted the ideas, and then put them into action with an unmatched aggression.

It has a notorious “time off task” system that monitors employees when they are doing anything but working, so they have to hustle and limit bathroom breaks to ten minutes, or face penalties. These Amazon workers are paid so little that from New York City to San Bernadino, California, they complain of not being able to afford rent. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, set out to build a totally automated factory in the 2010s. The system led to a series of well-publicized production challenges that workers on the shop floor had to work overtime to fix manually. “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk later admitted, via tweet in 2018.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill in front of SpaceShipOne 31. Ansari x PRIZE successful flight celebration 32. Per Wimmer with models of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo 33. Sir Richard Branson standing beside SpaceShipOne, 2I June zoo4 34. Sir Richard Branson with Burt Rutan during rollout of WhiteKnightTwo 35. Elon Musk in front of Falcon 9 engines, 8 January zoo9 36. Spaceport America concept design 37. The Russian-Ukrainian-American launch team in front of the Dnepr Space Head Module 38. Artist's conception of Bigelow Aerospace's first Orbital Space Complex 39. Sir Richard Branson in front of WhiteKnightTwo 40.

The press and camera crews followed Diamandis and Eric Anderson as they made their rounds. X PRIZE contender Chuck Lauer was also on hand to witness the launch. A subset of attendees included big-money investors and would-be space travelers who had the interest and resources to pursue their dreams. Elon Musk of SpaceX and Titanic director James Cameron talked to the press about their plans. Space Adventures brought in a busload of its aspiring suborbital and orbital clients. The x PRIZE interns had their hands full with vip guests, including forty ofAnousheh Ansari's relatives. This event was demonstrating that space had definitely developed a cache among the wealthy, offering them everything from a $30 million visit to the International Space Station to five-figure deposits to place their names on the waiting list for a suborbital flight.

Rick Tumlinson had already remarked that the promotion of public access to space had become something of a geeky status symbol. "It's not good enough to have a Gulfstream V, now you've got to have a rocket." "Space geeks" who had made their fortune in such technology-related ventures as PayPal (Elon Musk), Amazon.com (Jeff Bezos), Google (Larry Page), and computer games (John Carmack) were now directing their wealth into creating vehicles to carry people to space. Peter Diamandis, in acknowledging the rise of space money men as a unique moment in history, declared that "there is sufficient wealth controlled by individuals to start serious space efforts."


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Facebook founder, chief executive, and chairman Mark Zuckerberg, for example, still controls 60 percent of his company’s voting rights. Recent reports suggest that he and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg represent a tiny funnel through which decisions have to flow: a management structure more characteristic of a start-up than one of the world’s most profitable public companies. Elon Musk had a similar stranglehold on power at Tesla until the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission forced him to relinquish the chairmanship as part of a fraud settlement. Google has the problem, too; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt still own the largest chunks of the company and have tremendous influence.3 I turned down the job, needless to say, and made my peace with the fact that I was, at heart, a journalist and not a corporate flack.

Thiel says he finds the general population’s acceptance of the prospect of death “pathological,” and, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, has spent millions supporting “life extension” research dedicated to “ending aging forever.”9 This, I suppose, is only slightly more ambitious a goal than those of his PayPal partner Elon Musk, also the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who envisions supersonic commuter travel and colonizing Mars in the not too distant future (though how he’ll fund it is anyone’s guess, since he keeps tanking the price of Tesla’s stock with his security-law-violating tweets, whiskey-and-cannabis-induced rants, and false claims about the company’s financial profile).

That is to say, one that incentivizes these companies to tolerate plenty of egregious behavior by their top talent—assuming they are boosting the bottom line—until they are fully exposed and forced into action by the outrage of the general public. I’m sure the majority of Silicon Valley CEOs don’t condone sexual harassment, but most do seem to be rather oblivious to how they are perceived in the wider public—perhaps because they don’t have to spend much time outside the greater Palo Alto bubble. Consider Elon Musk’s take on riding the New York subway: “It’s a pain in the ass….There’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer.”13 The iconoclastic attitudes are sometimes baked in early. Marissa Mayer (who once dated Larry Page) once pointed out that if you want to understand Page and his cofounder, you had to know they both went to Montessori schools, where the philosophy emphasizes firing students’ imaginations rather than just stuffing their heads with book learning.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

The message is the same in all three cases: “Don’t listen to them; we’re the experts.” Now, one can point out that this is really an ad hominem argument that attempts to refute the message by delegitimizing the messengers, but even if one takes it at face value, the argument doesn’t hold water. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are certainly very familiar with scientific and technological reasoning, and Musk and Gates in particular have supervised and invested in many AI research projects. And it would be even less plausible to argue that Alan Turing, I. J. Good, Norbert Wiener, and Marvin Minsky are unqualified to discuss AI.

In response to any mention of risks from advanced AI, one is likely to hear, “What about the benefits of AI?” For example, here is Oren Etzioni:18 Doom-and-gloom predictions often fail to consider the potential benefits of AI in preventing medical errors, reducing car accidents, and more. And here is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, in a recent media-fueled exchange with Elon Musk:19 If you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick. Leaving aside the tribal notion that anyone mentioning risks is “against AI,” both Zuckerberg and Etzioni are arguing that to talk about risks is to ignore the potential benefits of AI or even to negate them.

As you get to the late 2030s or 2040s, our thinking will be predominately non-biological and the non-biological part will ultimately be so intelligent and have such vast capacity it’ll be able to model, simulate and understand fully the biological part. Kurzweil views these developments in a positive light. Elon Musk, on the other hand, views the human–machine merger primarily as a defensive strategy:25 If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be “other”—it would be you and [it would have] a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system. . . . We’re going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet—you know, like a house cat or something—or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI.


Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

We explore the long, rich history of previous efforts to liberate cars from human drivers, culminating in today’s autonomous vehicles that are the fruit of decades of academic research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Notes 1. Andrew Parker, “In the Blink of an Eye: How Vision Sparked the Big Bang of Evolution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2003). 2. Kirsten Korosec, “Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Drive Themselves in Two Years,” Fotune.com, December 21, 2015, at http://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview 3. Gary Silberg, “Self-Driving Cars: Are We Ready?” KPMG whitepaper, October 2013. 4. Boston Consulting Group, “Revolution in the Driver’s Seat: The Road to Autonomous Vehicles,” April 2014. 5. “The Driverless Debate: Equal Percentages of Americans See Self-Driving Cars as the ‘Wave of the Future’ Yet Would Never Consider Purchasing One,” The Harris Poll #18, March 24, 2015. 6.

An on-board computer takes the information streaming in from the sensors and GPS, folds that data onto a high-definition digital map that contains information on intersections and stop lights, and processes it all together into a digital model of the world outside the car called an occupancy grid. Driverless-car technology is nearly mature. Elon Musk, CEO of car company Tesla and an advocate of fully autonomous vehicles, sums up the situation. “It’s a much easier problem than people think it is. … But it’s not a one-guy-three-months problem. It’s more like, thousands of people for two years.”2 While the technology may be nearly ready, the society that’s wrapped around that particular technology may not be.

Tech companies are a bit more optimistic about the day when cars will be capable of fully driving themselves in all environments. Google and Tesla are firm in their conviction that the future of driving lies in fully autonomous vehicles, although the exact date and details are to be determined. In October 2014, Tesla’s Elon Musk told Bloomberg Television that “five or six years from now we will be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination.” But he cautioned, “it will then take another two to three years for regulatory approval.” Analyst Tod Litman predicts that without a federal mandate to speed along adoption, deployment will follow the pattern of the adoption of automatic transmissions, a process that took nearly five decades.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

THE EVOLVING AI NARRATIVE Things have changed—and they remain the same. Now AI is everywhere. We have the Internet. We have our smartphones. The founders of the dominant companies—the companies that hold “the whip that lashes us”—have net worths of $65 billion, $90 billion, $130 billion. High-profile individuals such as Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Martin Rees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the late Stephen Hawking have issued dire warnings about AI, resulting in the ascendancy of well-funded institutes tasked with promoting “Nice AI.” But will we, as a species, be able to control a fully realized, unsupervised, self-improving AI? Wiener’s warnings and admonitions in The Human Use of Human Beings are now very real, and they need to be looked at anew by researchers at the forefront of the AI revolution.

The failure of the initial overly optimistic predictions of AI dampened talk about the technological singularity for a few decades, but since the 2005 publication of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity IS Near, the idea of technological advance leading to superintelligence is back in force. Some believers, Kurzweil included, regard this singularity as an opportunity: Humans can merge their brains with the superintelligence and thereby live forever. Others, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, worried that this superintelligence would prove to be malign and regarded it as the greatest existing threat to human civilization. Still others, including some of the contributors to the present volume, think such talk is overblown. Wiener’s lifework and his failure to predict its consequences are intimately bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity.

Chapter 3 THE PURPOSE PUT INTO THE MACHINE STUART RUSSELL Stuart Russell is a professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the co-author (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Computer scientist Stuart Russell, along with Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and numerous others, has insisted that attention be paid to the potential dangers in creating an intelligence on the superhuman (or even the human) level—an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, whose programmed purposes may not necessarily align with our own. His early work was on understanding the notion of “bounded optimality” as a formal definition of intelligence that you can work on.


Interplanetary Robots by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Elon Musk, independent contractor, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, X Prize

If you cover these kinds of events very often, you build up a little private shell—a zone of exclusion, if you will—from which you can ignore most of what's going on around you except for the story you are there to cover. I was startlingly reminded of this a few years later when reporting on the unveiling of the new and improved Dragon 2 space capsule over at SpaceX, Elon Musk's dynamic new rocket company just across town. At that event, representatives of the media were jammed onto a tiny raised stage behind the larger, more relaxed VIP area down front, all inside SpaceX's sprawling rocket factory. The “media box” was all elbows and tripods, each of us vying for a tiny patch of the dais from which to video the Great Unveiling.

Mars 2020, Curiosity's follow-on rover, may be the last of the large, heavy robots to be delivered to Mars for some time. At 2,314 pounds, it's pushing the limits of safe delivery, and at the time of this writing, the parachutes are still being tested. A possible exception to the above may come from the private sector—from time to time, Elon Musk of SpaceX fame had made noises about sending one of his Dragon 2 space capsules to Mars in an unmanned configuration. He has more recently switched gears, concentrating instead on a Mars journey with his “Big Falcon Rocket,” a rocket and spacecraft that dwarfs the Apollo era's Saturn V. He may attempt a landing on the planet, either robotically or with a crew, as early as 2024.

MOXIE is designed to create about eight grams of oxygen per hour—just a tiny amount, but enough to validate the technology. It is a subscale experiment, and if successful NASA plans to follow it with a much larger device, capable of producing and storing oxygen for future use by a Mars Ascent Vehicle for a soil sample return, and later for human spaceflight needs. And if plans like those of Elon Musk come to fruition—recall that his company, SpaceX, is building a huge Mars rocket called the BFR (for Big Falcon Rocket)—it will need lots of oxygen on the red planet to make routine runs there. Musk plans to begin transporting people to Mars in the 2020s and to eventually enable the creation of an entire city there.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

., “On-Demand High-Capacity Ride-Sharing via Dynamic Trip-Vehicle Assignment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 3 (2017): 462–67. 98high cost of remote human safety monitors: Ashley Nunes and Kristen Hernandez, “The Cost of Self-Driving Cars Will Be the Biggest Barrier to Their Adoption,” Harvard Business Review, January 31, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-cost-of-self-driving-cars-will-be-the-biggest-barrier-to-their-adoption. 98“We are going to also offer third-party”: “Full Video and Transcript: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi at Code 2018,” Recode, June 4, 2018, https://www.recode.net/2018/5/31/17397186/full-transcript-uber-dara-khosrowshahi-code-2018. 99flubbed their geometry too: For more, see Jarett Walker, “Does Elon Musk Understand Urban Geometry?” blog post, Human Transit, July 21, 2016, https://humantransit.org/2016/07/elon-musk-doesnt-understand-geometry.html. 99a catastrophic surge of traffic: International Transport Board of the OECD, Urban Mobility System Upgrade. 99move nearly 60 percent of commuters: “Is Informal Normal? Towards More and Better Jobs in Developing Countries,” OECD, March 31, 2009, http://www.oecd.org/dev/inclusivesocietiesanddevelopment/isinformalnormaltowards moreandbetterjobsindevelopingcountries.htm. 100run more frequently with fewer breakdowns, than city buses: Eric L.

Wrestling with Regulation 213“The right to have access to every building”: Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). 213One of the first to try: “Toronto among the Fastest Growing Tech Hubs in North America,” U of T News, July 21, 2017, https://www.utoronto.ca/news/toronto-among-fastest-growing-tech-hubs-north-america. 214potential safety, economic, and land use benefits: David Ticoll, “Driving Changes: Automated Vehicles in Toronto,” University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute Discussion Paper, October 15, 2015, https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ipl/files/2016/03/Driving-Changes-Ticoll-2015.pdf. 214specific actions to align AV policy: “Automated Vehicles Tactical Plan,” Toronto, accessed September 10, 2019, https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/automated-vehicles/draft-automated-vehicle-tactical-plan-2019-2021/. 214“Those who don’t have automobiles”: Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How It Will Reshape Our World (New York: Ecco, 2018), 5. 215“I think public transport is painful”: Aarian Marshall, “Elon Musk Reveals His Awkward Dislike of Mass Transit,” Wired, December 14, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-transit/. 215ride-hail’s growth accompanied: Michael Graehler Jr. et al., “Understanding the Recent Transit Ridership Decline in Major U.S. Cities: Service Cuts or Emerging Modes?” 98th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, November 14, 2018, https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/01/19-04931-Transit-Trends.pdf. 215bus ridership declined 20 percent: Matt Tinoco, “Metro’s Declining Ridership Explained,” Curbed LA, August 29, 2017, https://la.curbed.com/2017/8/29/16219230/transit-metro-ridership-down-why. 215ride-hail’s sapping effect on bus ridership: Graehler et al., “Understanding the Recent Transit Ridership Decline.” 216driverless city buses underway in Edinburgh: “Edinburgh, UK,” Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, accessed September 10, 2019, https://avsincities.bloomberg.org/global-atlas/europe/uk/edinburgh-uk. 216riders a high-tech experience: “Nobina and Scania Pioneer Full Length Autonomous Buses in Sweden,” Nobina, February 20, 2019, https://www.nobina.com/en/press/archive/nobina-and-scania-pioneer-full-length-autonomous-buses-in-sweden/. 216feature single-passenger self-driving pods: “Toyota Partnership to Pilot Autonomous Vehicle Transportation System,” Nikkei Asian Review, October 8, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Toyota-partnership-to-pilot-autonomous-vehicle-transportation-system. 216Combine Jelbi with a road-pricing platform: David Zipper, “Bikeshare, Scooters, Cars, Trains, Bridges: One Agency to Rule Them All,” CityLab, November 30, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2018/11/transit-city-department-scootershare-ridehail-bikeshare/576982/. 217“the presence of an operator ensures”: “Principles for the Transit Workforce in Automated Vehicle Legislation and Regulation,” Transport Trades Department, March 11, 2019, https://ttd.org/policy/principles-for-the-transit-workforce-in-automated-vehicle-legislation-and-regulations/. 217“third space”: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000), 20. 217“a half-dozen startups are testing”: Aarian Marshall, “Self-Driving Trucks Are Ready to Do Business in Texas,” Wired, August 6, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-trucks-ready-business-texas/. 217encouraging night delivery: Haag and Hu, “1.5 Million Packages a Day.” 217how much freight moves: Alain Bertaud, Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (Boston: MIT University Press, 2018), 30. 218road traffic in the developed world: Bertaud, Order without Design, 30. 218number of store trips they take by as much as half: Joann Muller, “One Big Thing: The Rise of Driverless Delivery,” Axios, November 28, 2018, https://www.axios.com/autonomous-vehicles-could-be-used-for-deliveries-3fb12a24-3e66-4d8b-b678-a2fbb47d05cb.html. 218more online shopping could empty them: For an excellent overview of trends and interacting issues, see Joe Cortright, “Does Cyber Monday Mean Delivery Gridlock Tuesday?”

And it’s these new words, perhaps more than anything else, that will shape our hopes, dreams, and fears on the journey ahead. Caching Attention Of all the terms used to describe the capabilities of the coming generation of AVs, none gets as much mileage as self-driving. And no one has wielded it with more moxie than Tesla, the Silicon Valley automaker. Elon Musk’s wonder cars redefined the electric vehicle by making it sporty and sexy. Now, the company is doing the same with automated driving. But a more conservative spirit prevailed when it came time to name the new feature. Tesla’s Autopilot feature follows in the footsteps of Chrysler’s Auto-pilot, a Teetor-designed cruise control introduced in the 1958 Imperial.


pages: 294 words: 87,986

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

Many prominent scientists and engineers believe that, all things considered, Mars is simply the best place to go to next. These include Stephen Hawking (‘Mars is the obvious next target’), Bill Nye, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan (‘The next place to wander to is Mars’), NASA adminis­trator Charles Bolden (‘Mars is a stepping stone to other solar systems’), and more. Former NASA Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin even created his own line of ‘Get Your Ass to Mars’ T-shirts, based on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line in the 1990 Mars-related film Total Recall. The aforementioned Elon Musk (former PayPal magnate, now of SpaceX and Tesla fame) has been outspoken about how humans need to explore and colonise other worlds, working towards the goal of becoming ‘a multi-planet species’.

Those in the know may think of the physicist’s (1856–1943) association with famous inventor Thomas Edison, Tesla’s various inventions and discoveries – the most famous of which involve electricity and magnetism via his work on alternating current and the Tesla induction coil – or Wardenclyffe Tower (the Tesla Tower), a wireless radio station Tesla attempted to build and use for intercontinental, and maybe even interplanetary, communication in the early 1900s before he ran out of money. Some may think of Tesla Motors, the electric car company now headed by the coincidentally Mars-obsessed Elon Musk. Tesla Motors’s founders supposedly spent ages thinking up the ideal name for their forward-thinking business concept, before settling on Tesla as an appropriate namesake. Interestingly, many may think again of David Bowie, who played Tesla in the 2006 film The Prestige. The film’s director, Christopher Nolan, described Tesla as ‘extraordinarily charismatic’, an ‘other-wordly, ahead-of-his-time figure’, and instantly knew he wanted Bowie to play him due to the latter’s ‘slightly different sort of star quality’.

Historically it has been one thing: consent,’ wrote Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern University in Chicago, US, in Cosmos magazine in 2015. Zoloth pointed out that ‘the ethical considerations change if we think of the crew as military personnel’ or as ‘pioneers’. ‘We expect soldiers to face considerable risk,’ she wrote. What makes astronauts any different? This opinion has been echoed by SpaceX magnate Elon Musk, who is aiming to send humans to Mars in the coming decade. He has said that ‘people will probably die – and they’ll know that’. As long as appropriate measures are taken to protect astronauts, and their contribution and sacrifice is recognised, informed consent may lower or negate many of the ethical concerns involved in going to Mars.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

But then Kenna caught a lucky break by acting on his preoccupations—cryptography, “alternative finance,” libertarian politics, and economic collapse. Kenna accumulated a small hoard of Bitcoin when it was virtually worthless. In 2011, he launched a Bitcoin exchange, Tradehill, from an office on the beach in Chile. His cofounders included New York bankers and a former senior engineer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. By 2013, when the goldbugs, money launderers, and Wall Street speculators joined the Bitcoin frenzy, Kenna had become a charter member of the “Bitcoin millionaires’ club,” and his distaste for “unethical” business practices had evolved. He now argued that the marketing of Ponzi schemes should be permitted so long as the terms were clearly stated.

Thumbing through its pages, I realized this book distilled every vapid and hollow slogan promulgated by the boom-time tech press. “Less meetings, more doing. Passion never fails,” the book began. The rest of the pages were filled with alternately hectoring and platitudinous quotes from billionaire executives like Bill Gates (“I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.”) and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors (“Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen.”). With rare exception, the tech press—by which I mean both the trade press focused exclusively on the tech industry and the tech sections of general-interest news organizations—functions as an appendage of the Silicon Valley marketing machine.

But it should be clear that the neoreactionaries were, by and large, young white males embittered by “political correctness”—a term that represented the perceived loss of their social advantages to an undeserving mob of brainwashed social justice warriors. Significantly, these radicalized youth saw in the miraculous futuristic designs of men such as a Peter Thiel and Elon Musk a vision that was entirely compatible with their notions of racial supremacy, and they expected to personally benefit in the tech titans’ new order. To certain devotees, Musk’s dream of human settlements on Mars offered an escape from this benighted earth, where their wretched enemies would be left behind, in a final act of vengeance by the tech-savvy master race.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The algorithm knows what we want before we enter the store and then a robot fulfills our order, which, if Jeff Bezos has his way, will be delivered by our own personalized drone. Like Google and Amazon, Facebook is also aggressively entering the artificial intelligence business. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a virtual reality company, and British-based pilotless drone company Ascenta.36 Mark Zuckerberg has also co-invested with Tesla Motors’s CEO Elon Musk and the Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher in an artificial intelligence company called Vicarious, which mimics human learning. According to its founder, Scott Phoenix, Vicarious’s goal is to replicate the neocortex, thus creating a “computer that thinks like a person . . . except that it doesn’t have to sleep.”37 Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal that Vicarious will eventually “learn how to cure diseases, create cheap renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings.”38 What Phoenix didn’t clarify, however, is what exactly human beings will do with themselves all day when every job is performed by Vicarious.

What he calls “New America” has been corrupted, he suggests, by its deepening inequality of wealth and opportunity. And it’s not surprising that Packer places Silicon Valley and the multibillionaire Internet entrepreneur and libertarian Peter Thiel at the center of his narrative. The cofounder, with Elon Musk, of the online payments service PayPal, Thiel became a billionaire as the first outside investor in Facebook, after being introduced to Mark Zuckerberg by Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president. The San Francisco–based Thiel lives in a “ten thousand square foot white wedding cake of a mansion,” 70 a smaller but no less meretricious building than the Battery.

Never mind Larry Page’s hubristic claim about achieving “the 1% of what is possible”; the really relevant one percent are that minority of wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Page who are massively profiting from what New York magazine’s Kevin Roose calls a “regional declaration of independence.”71 It’s an experimental fantasy of outsourced labor, hostility to labor unions, a cult of efficiency and automated technology, a mad display of corporate arrogance, and an even crazier celebration of an ever-widening economic and cultural inequality in San Francisco. The fantasy of secession from the real world, the reinvention of the “New Frontier” myth, has become one of those fashionable memes, like the cult of failure, now sweeping through Silicon Valley. While PayPal cofounder and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is planning to establish an 80,000-person high-tech colony on Mars,72 others are focused on building their fantasy high-tech colonies within Northern California itself. The third-generation Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper is launching a 2014 “Six Californias” ballot measure to redraw California into six separate US states, including one called “Silicon Valley.”73 And the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who boasted at FailCon about his own failure, has already seceded.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

He is far from alone in fearing the taking over of the world by artificial intelligence, something that one leading American expert on AI describes as the “biggest event in human history.” The world’s richest man, Bill Gates; the world’s most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking; Silicon Valley’s most innovative entrepreneur, Elon Musk; and the Cambridge University cosmologist and author of Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? Martin Rees (Lord Rees), all share Tallinn’s apocalyptic concerns. Not only do they all agree that this will be the biggest event in human history, they also fear it might be the last.

But the book was also a broader wake-up call about “highway carnage” that in 1964, Nader argues, was costing America an annual $8.3 billion (the equivalent of more than $66 billion today) in property damage, medical expenses, lost wages, and insurance overhead expenses.14 Unsafe at Any Speed was a public relations catastrophe for an American car industry that, in many ways, is only now recovering its mojo with Elon Musk’s electric car start-up Tesla—the innovative Silicon Valley–based company that, in April 2017, passed General Motors to become America’s most valuable automobile manufacturer, with a $52.7 billion market cap. Like the American food industry, the car market over the half century since Nader published his exposé has been dramatically reshaped by our five-pronged forces of government regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility by citizens, worker and consumer choice, and education.

Yet for all his concerns about the demonic potential of artificial intelligence, Price isn’t entirely pessimistic about the future. He is encouraged, for example, by what he describes as the ethical maturity of the three cofounders of DeepMind, particularly Demis Hassabis, its young Cambridge-educated CEO. This is the London-based tech company whose investors include Jaan Tallinn and Elon Musk, a start-up founded in 2011 and then acquired by Google for $500 million in 2014. DeepMind made the headlines in March 2016 when AlphaGo, its specially designed algorithm, defeated a South Korean world champion Go player in this 5,500-year-old Chinese board game, the oldest and one of the most complex games ever invented by humans.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

The new battery pack weighed a quarter of a ton less than the old one, but could store three times as much energy and extended the tzero’s range from about 90 to about 250 miles. The car was also capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in less than four seconds. In late 2003, just as GM began reclaiming and crushing its fleet of EV1s, the tzero came to the attention of two American technology entrepreneurs and car enthusiasts, Martin Eberhard and Elon Musk. Impressed by the tzero’s performance, and angered by the demise of the EV1, both men separately urged Cocconi and Gage to put the tzero into production, to prove GM wrong. This led Gage to introduce Eberhard to Musk. The two men decided to team up to commercialize the tzero’s technology through a new company, Tesla Motors.

Moreover, history suggests that it would be naive to assume that switching from one form of propulsion to another would mean that things would otherwise continue as they were; that is not what happened when cars replaced horse-drawn vehicles. Some people say it’s time to rethink not just the propulsion technology that powers cars, but the whole idea of car ownership. The same technology that enabled Elon Musk to succeed where Thomas Edison failed a century earlier—the lithium-ion battery—underpins the smartphone as well as the electric car. And thanks to the smartphone, the early twenty-first century has seen lots of experimentation around new modes of transport that explore the space between privately owned vehicles and public transport.

For autonomous cars, this means getting hold of thousands of images of street scenes, with each element carefully labeled, so that a perception system can be trained to recognize them. The simplest way to obtain such images is to pay people to label street scenes manually, by drawing boxes around cars, pedestrians, and so on. (Tesla employs several hundred expert labelers, according to Elon Musk; other companies farm the job out.) The hardest things for a perception system to identify are rarely seen items such as debris on the road, or plastic bags blowing across a highway. According to Sebastian Thrun, in the early days of Google’s AV project, its perception system misidentified a plastic bag as a flying child.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Svarrior’s tweet went viral, making headlines and sending the society’s Twitter following sky-high. “If you look up the Twitter follower graph, it’s publicly available, you will pinpoint the spot where our Twitter 208 OFF THE EDGE account absolutely blew up, and that was the Elon Musk tweet,” Svarrior told me. “I’m not going to pretend there is a master plan and that I sat in a corner planning the Elon Musk tweet for days. I saw it, I thought it would be a funny response, so I wrote it. It just happened to work out in this instance. But the overall objective of that account is to get people talking. Especially people who wouldn’t be looking for us otherwise.”

In various court filings before his death, he frequently used language and tactics ripped straight from the sovereign citizen movement, a bogus crusade that claims that people can skirt the legal system by declaring themselves “sovereign citizens,” immune from most laws. 150 OFF THE EDGE He told me, on multiple occasions and at great length, that he thought people’s names were actually government-owned copyrights, and that he could file lawsuits to seize those names, the very thing that had annoyed the San Bernardino authorities so much that they eventually pursued his arrest. “Basically, I have claimed legal entities for very famous people. They can’t even exist,” he told me. “Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Warren Edward Buffett. I own the legal entities they’re operating under.” Once, he even tried roping me into a lawsuit he filed against YouTuber Logan Paul, over Paul’s Flat Earth documentary, in which I’d had a fleeting appearance. I wrote a short article about the one-sided feud but otherwise avoided the matter.

“So I know that of all the stuff they do to make Flat Earth look stupid or spread disinformation about the leaders in the movement, all it does is add fuel to the fire and make people say, ‘Why are they still talking about Flat Earth?’ ” Pete Svarrior, the Flat Earth Society spokesperson, told me internet virality brought the group much-needed attention as it was losing ground to other Flat Earthers in 2017. That’s when Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of the space travel company SpaceX, tweeted a joke about the lack of a Flat Mars Society. Svarrior answered sarcastically from the Flat Earth Society account. “Hi Elon, thanks for the question. Unlike the Earth, Mars has been observed to be round,” Svarrior wrote. “We hope you have a fantastic day!”


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs, 104. 30. Innerarity, The Future and Its Enemies in Defense of Political Hope, 42. CHAPTER 10 1. Christy Foley, Christy Foley Interview, December 10, 2014. 2. Dana Hull and Patrick May, “Rocket Man: The Otherworldly Ambitions of Elon Musk,” San Jose Mercury News, April 11, 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25541126/rocket-man-otherworldy-ambitions-elon-musk. 3. Hardy and Dougherty, “Google and Fidelity Put $1 Billion Into SpaceX.” 4. Hal Niedzviecki, We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture (Toronto, Ont. : New York, N.Y: Penguin Books ; Penguin Putnam, 2000). 5.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon works out vigorously every morning in preparation for the moment when Blue Origin, the space exploration company he founded on 300,000 acres of land in rural Texas, is ready to send him into orbit.24 And, as we’ve already touched on, entrepreneur/tech-cheerleader Peter Diamandis has partnered with Google and launched the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, a $30 million prize for the first private entity that can land a robot on the Moon, get it to travel at least 500 meters, and transmit images and information back to Earth. Twenty-six groups have entered.25 In the meantime, Paypal’s founder Elon Musk, now head of California’s SpaceX, celebrated what is now generally seen as the first successful launch of a privately developed manned spacecraft on a fee-paying mission. The mission was to resupply the International Space Station and their client was the United States government. Fee-paying missions on behalf of America have become necessary because for the first time in half a century, the United States government no longer has the capability to organize its own manned flights to space.

(Including Google, which made a one billion dollar investment in SpaceX in early 2015, no doubt influenced by what one article describes as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s personal interest in space exploration.) Overall, contracting out to private companies may be a net benefit in terms of optimizing what the money achieves, but it sends a very different overall message to the country; nobody is gathering school children in classrooms to watch Elon Musk cheer on the next landmark fee-paying mission. ° ° ° ° ° ° I’m suspicious by nature, especially of grand sweeping theories of how things were way back when. So I decide to call up Matt Novak. Novak is a self-described amateur historian and futurist best known for his popular and often very funny blog Paleofuture, which lived on the website of the Smithsonian Institute and now resides on Gizmodo.com.28 Paleofuture chronicles what people in the recent past thought about the future.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

CHAPTER 6 147 It was 3:44 in the morning: “SpaceX Launch—NASA,” http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/ commercial/cargo/spacex_index.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 147 The Dragon capsule was free: Clara Moskowitz, “SpaceX Launches Private Capsule on Historic Trip to Space Station,” May 22, 2012; http://www.space.com/15805-spacex-private -capsule-launches-space-station.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 147 Just days after the launch: “Space X,” accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/ commercial/cargo/spacex_index.html. 148 This flight was, after all: “Elon Musk, CEO and Chief Designer,” http://www.spacex.com/elon-musk.php, accessed September 7, 2012. 148 Many know Elon Musk: Ibid. 148 pretty much at the nadir: Encyclopedia of World Biography, http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/ Li-Ou/Musk-Elon.html#b, accessed September 7, 2012. 148 By 2002, eBay realized: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-941964.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 148 In 2002, Musk became the CEO: Margaret Kane, “eBay picks up PayPal for $1.5 Billion,” CNET News, July 8, 2002; http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/ Li-Ou/Musk-Elon.html#b, accessed September 7, 2012. 149 A year later he founded a second: Will Oremus, “Tesla’s New Electric Car Is Practical and Affordable, as Long as You’re Rich,” Slate, June 20, 2012, accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/ 2012/06/20/tesla_model_s_new_electric_car_is _practical_affordable_for_the_rich.html. 149 But Musk said in his celebratory: Ibid. 149 In 2007, just before the biggest: Gabriel Sherman, “The End of Wall Street as They Knew It,” New York magazine, February 5, 2012, accessed September 7, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/ features/wall-street-2012-2/index3.html. 149 Historically, banks never accounted: Gillian Tett, Financial Times US editor and author of Fool’s Gold, shared this information at a March 10, 2010, presentation at Columbia University; Sherman, “The End of Wall Street as They Knew It.” 150 the majority of business school graduates: personal interview with Roger Martin; Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 328–31, 349. 150 But by the end of the century: Ibid. 150 Top bankers received astonishing: Linda Anderson, “MBA Careers: Financial Services—A Breadth of Opportunity,” Financial Times, January 29, 2007, accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ 3baa68a4-ad5a-11db8709-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=991cbd66-9258-11da -977b0000779e2340.html#axzz22nEQOvia. 150 When BusinessWeek ran: January 31, 2000, issue, cover story by Michael Mandel. 151 An inequality gap: Sam Pizzigati, “Happy Days Here Again, 21st Century–Style,” Institute for Policy Studies, March 13, 2012, accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.ips-dc.org/blog/ happy_days_here_again_21st_ century-style. 151 Alice Waters’s groundbreaking organic: “About Chez Panisse,” http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Chez_Panisse, accessed September 7, 2012. 152 Just as important, Gen Y: I joined Parsons in 2008, and I am indebted to my Parsons students for these and other insights into Gen Y culture. 152 You can pay about a hundred bucks: TechShop website, http://www.techshop.ws/, accessed September 7, 2012. 152 Make magazine, launched in 2005: http://makezine.com/magazine/, accessed September 7, 2012. 153 The Faires celebrate “arts, crafts”: http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2012/index.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 153 Generation Y, on the other hand: interviews with Kelsey Meuse in my classroom and after graduation. 154 Bombarded with as many as five thousand: Louise Story, “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad,” New York Times, January 15, 2007, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/ media/15everywhere.html?

When asked in an interview with ABC News’s Cynthia McFadden what she thought of Gaga’s song “Born This Way,” which shares a chord progression with the eighties classic “Express Yourself,” Madonna reflected, “It feels reductive.” “Is that good?’ asked McFadden. “Look it up,” said the Queen of Pop, smiling devilishly before reaching for her mug and taking a sip. While perhaps more rare than in the world of art and music, there are those in the business world who’ve learned to mine the past. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, the first private company to send cargo to the International Space Station, has a replica of the Saturn V, the powerful rocket that sent twenty-four astronauts to the moon as part of the Apollo program in the sixties and seventies, on his desk. He no doubt has looked to the Saturn V as inspiration for the development of his Falcon rockets as he seeks to further commercialize space.

They sounded younger to me than the ex-military NASA voices I’d heard as a kid and, while there have been a number of pioneering female astronauts, the “official” voice of American space flight had always seemed to me to be male. It was truly exciting to hear, and reminded me how much space travel had changed since its early days. This flight was, after all, not a NASA voyage, but the maiden trip of a company launched by a dot-com billionaire. Many know Elon Musk as the co-founder of PayPal, the electronic system that allows people to pay and transfer money in P2P, or person-to-person, transactions, which have become the backbone of nearly all Web commerce. Without the company, we would be sending checks, money orders, and maybe even cash to eBay and Amazon every time we bought something online.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Suddenly a former securities lawyer with no technical background was the unlikely co-founder of what would become a billion-dollar start-up. And the group that would become the PayPal Mafia began to form. Sacks became PayPal’s COO in 1999. In early 2000, PayPal (then called Confinity) merged with a competing payments company called X.com, run by a then-obscure entrepreneur named Elon Musk. Rabois became Thiel’s right-hand man. PayPal’s founders, investors, and early employees went on to become a tight-knit and very wealthy group. To this day, Rabois believes PayPal is a “perfect validation of merit” and of Silicon Valley as a meritocracy. “None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley,” he told me.

“In the beginning, it’s better to have people who are more similar ideologically than different. Once you have alignment, then I think you can have a wide swath of people, views, and perspectives.” Amy Klement was one of the earliest women at PayPal—not because Thiel or the others hired her, but because she was working at Elon Musk’s X.com when it merged with PayPal in 2000. Klement told me, “[PayPal] was a high-intensity, driving culture” full of impassioned debate. Socializing took the form of chess tournaments rather than fratty parties. Employees worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, as they worked to build a secure online payments system that could rival the global banking industry.

They joined one another’s companies, funded one another’s ventures, defended one another’s controversial public statements, and more. For Founders Fund, Thiel partnered with two less prominent PayPal co-founders, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. The partners at Founders Fund invested in their old PayPal buddy Elon Musk’s space venture, SpaceX (Musk also co-founded Tesla). Founders Fund, along with Max Levchin and Keith Rabois, invested in the workplace chat company Yammer, which was founded by former PayPal-er David Sacks. Yammer was ultimately sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. The list of “begats” goes on.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

However, from my perch overlooking the fjords in Montenegro, I ask myself if businesses that employ Musk’s strategy are constantly in ‘chasing’ mode, going after the next big thing but never really getting there. No doubt Musk has become incredibly successful. However, not only is there one Elon Musk for every 1,000 who do not succeed but even the successes of Elon Musk have been called into question by some investors who consider him more of a social entrepreneur than one actually achieving the profits he appears to be chasing. Ask yourself: do you want the appearance of success, or its results? If living the Nomad Capitalist lifestyle is your goal, you do not have to push as hard as Elon Musk. When I see investors that are no doubt better at reading technical charts than I am tossing $50 billion at Uber, I have to ask, “What happens if it all fails?”

Personally, I never understood the idea of the perennial start-up machine where an entrepreneur puts all of his eggs in one basket, betting the farm that his or her latest venture will work out. Do not get me wrong, the courage is admirable, but the risk is high. A while back, I read an interview with Elon Musk in which he said that he re-invested his PayPal fortunes into Tesla and Solar City so promptly that he had to borrow money for rent. While perhaps a bit hyperbolic, Musk is definitely a guy who goes all in with his business ventures; heck, he basically resuscitated the idea of a conglomerate in an era when even General Electric had sold off a lot of non-core businesses.

And I am free to deploy the profits from my business either back into the business or into the vast number of investments we will talk about in this chapter. As Tim Ferriss explained in The Four Hour Workweek, many of the trappings of wealth we expect to enjoy once we reach our own version of Elon Musk’s success are available now, without waiting or killing yourself. Imagine any perk that the average successful start-up has and chances are that you can enjoy it now, or realize that you do not really need it. For example, even though I enjoyed driving a Mercedes in the United States, I much prefer not having the hassles of a car now.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Science fiction often anticipates an imaginary future where incredibly intelligent machines and humans interact—often to the detriment of humans. But for now that’s an impossibly distant goal. Some AI visionaries anticipate a ‘singularity’—the emergence of a superintelligence far surpassing our own. They debate the ‘existential risk’ to humanity of this sort of AI. Elon Musk, the guru of SpaceX and Tesla fears that we are ‘summoning a demon’.2 The late Stephen Hawking warned that AI could ‘spell the end of the human race’.3 It’s a disturbing vision—but the visionaries themselves can’t agree when it might happen. Those troubled by the prospect include some of the world’s leading AI researchers.

Rules for warbots All this is making many people uneasy: how can we be sure that AI will do what we want it to? Should it be able to decide who to kill on its own? How can we stop it if it goes wrong? Should we ban it? The activists of the Campaign against Killer Robots think so. They want warbots outlawed before they take to the battlefield. They have some powerful support. In 2017, Elon Musk headlined an open letter calling for a ban, joined by more than over a hundred AI experts, including some titans in the field. Together they warned that: Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. […] We do not have long to act.

The problem with AI cars is not that they are unsafe, but rather the reverse: they are too safe. They don’t play mind games at all. Today’s AI has no more ability to gauge the internal machinations of adversary leaders as a Tesla does to understand what’s going on in the mind of the car in the oncoming lane. That’s why Elon Musk still hasn’t quite solved autonomous driving, no matter how often he and Tesla tease it. Back at Jaguar Land Rover, researchers focused on the problem of the pedestrian crossing. As their car approached the crossing, a walker was preparing to step out. Should she? The huge, cartoon-like eyes on the front of the car flicked towards her.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

Therefore, over its entire lifecycle, an electric car may produce as much as three-quarters of the carbon emissions produced by a petrol car. And the more powerful the electric cars are, the more energy they need for their production, potentially increasing greenhouse gases. In the meantime, Tesla has announced that its Model S vehicles will now be equipped with 600-kilometre-range batteries,8 and its CEO, Elon Musk, has announced the imminent arrival of 800-kilometre-range batteries.9 John Petersen’s conclusion? ‘Electric vehicles may be technically possible, but their production will never be environmentally sustainable.’10 This concurs with similar research conducted along the same lines. The 2016 report by the French Environment & Energy Management Agency (ADEME) finds: ‘he energy consumption of an electric vehicle [EV] over its entire lifecycle is, on the whole, similar to that of a diesel vehicle.’11 The report also finds that its environmental impact is ‘on a par with [that of] the petrol car’.

Musk may have stepped down as one of the CEOs of President Trump’s business advisory group after Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accords, but the reality is that the cost of Musk’s ecological dream is far higher than he and others are willing to admit. Further reading: ‘Cost of Elon Musk’s Dream Much Higher than He and Others Imagine’, RealClearEnergy, 8 June 2017. Interview with John Petersen, 2016. See also ‘How Large Lithium-ion Batteries Slash EV Benefits’, 2016. A collection of Petersen’s articles is available on the Seeking Alpha website. See ‘Les potentiels du vehicle électrique’ [‘The Potentials of the Electric Vehicle’], ADEME, April 2016, and Troy R.

Referring to the illusion of dematerialisation, it poses the question: ‘will our emails ultimately destroy the Appalachia mountains?’ Mark P. Mills, ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, and big power — an overview of the electricity used by the global digital ecosystem’, August 2013. ‘How Clean Is Your Cloud?’, Greenpeace, April 2012. ‘Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Striving to Win the Race to Build the Internet in Space’, Washington Post, 15 May 2019. As an example, in 1951, forty-four UNIVAC I computers (Universal Automatic Computer I) — the first US commercial computer — were sold. In 2015, nearly 300 million computers and over 200 million tablets were sold worldwide.


pages: 247 words: 69,593

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

In the Iron Man cartoon, and the subsequent movie empire, Tony Stark is a singular genius. He runs a massive corporate empire and builds his own robotic Iron Man suits. But this idea exists beyond fiction; Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk is routinely compared to Stark. That said, it’s pretty clear that the mythology around the self-reliant genius makes little sense. Elon Musk employs thousands of people who enable him to create futuristic technology. Hundreds of years ago, Mozart spent countless hours learning from his teachers, and also sought out numerous collaborators. Even though over the course of writing this book I found that creativity is very much a team sport, our cultural mythology, at least in the United States, remains extremely focused on the individual.

Terman succeeded in helping change the perception of genius to being a positive attribute. This is a quick version of the path that has led to today’s version of the inspiration theory of creativity: the idea that creativity results from a mysterious internal process punctuated by random flashes of inspiration. Today we may still see geniuses often as neurotic (think Steve Jobs or Elon Musk), but they are no longer seen as dangerous, or deserving of castigation. Today, genius is seen as something to be celebrated. But, if Terman’s study showed that IQ and creativity are not tied together, where does creative talent come from? Name as many uncommon uses for a hair dryer as you can.

Creative success, in fact, is learnable, whether you’re a starving artist or the head of an advertising firm. And this is where I worry. The fact that there’s a pattern out there does not mean it’s easy. In fact, mastering the creative curve can take years. In your hands is not a book telling you that with minimal effort you can be the next Mozart or Picasso, Elon Musk or J. K. Rowling. No, this is a book that tells you that if you choose to dedicate your life to creativity, there is a path, and a set of key considerations you need to bear in mind, and need to do, to make success happen. The laws of the creative curve provide a blueprint for how every one of us can unlock our creative potential.


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

” — Peter arrived at the Skybar, a rooftop watering hole on Sunset Boulevard, a week after Larry Gross told him he knew who was going to fund the continuation of Blastoff. It was two men who had made a fortune on the Internet and who were interested in space. Peter had never heard of the men, so he wrote down their names: Adeo Ressi and Elon Musk. Peter usually approached pitch meetings with great enthusiasm, but tonight he felt subdued. He spotted Adeo by the Skybar pool, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the gold and glimmering Los Angeles sunset. He was tall and thin, a Giacometti walking man figure, and immediately affable. Adeo said Elon was running late but on his way.

As he watched planes take off and land on Santa Monica’s 4,973-foot runway 21, he was reminded that SpaceShipOne was as small as a private plane. He pictured it being pulled out of a hangar, rolled out onto the runway, and flying off to space. That was his dream—spaceships for personal use. As if on cue, in walked Elon Musk. Since meeting Peter shortly after the demise of Blastoff, Musk had set out on his own quest for space, motivated by the question: if one was to make a rocket, what would be the best choices to make it cost effective? Ressi and Musk had gone to Russia in 2001 to try to buy rockets, only to find a sort of criminal-filled Wild West, where missiles of any sort could be had for the right amount of cash.

But everything was still relative, Bennett thought. NASA would have spent that kind of money on blueprints alone. Bennett had met Rutan in 2003, when the XPRIZE invited teams to Los Angeles to show their models and share some of what they were doing. The visit included a field trip to El Segundo, California, where Elon Musk had started SpaceX in an empty 75,000-square-foot hangar. One of Bennett’s favorite moments was on the bus ride to SpaceX, when he overheard Rutan talking on his phone in a low tone about who was attending the event. Bennett smiled when he heard Rutan say, “Bennett’s here.” To be sure, the XPRIZE was a competition, but there was also a shared mission and friendships forged.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 61 Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever & the OpenAI team, “Introducing OpenAI”, 11 December 2015 https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ 62 Steven Levy, “How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers From Taking Over”, 11 December 2015 https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over-17e0e27dd02a#.qjj55npcj 63 Sara Konrath, Edward O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing. “Changes in dispositional empathy in American college students over time: A meta-analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review (2010). 64 Quoted in: Simon Kuper, “Log out, switch off, join in”, FT Magazine, 2 October 2015. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fc76fce2-67b3-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html 65 Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin, 2015. 66 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Atlantic Books, 2010. 67 Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, Simon and Schuster, 2014. 68 Quoted in: Elizabeth Segran, “The Ethical Quandaries You Should Think About the Next Time You Look at Your Phone”, Fast Company, 5 October 2015.

As theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking and fellow scientists Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek wrote in the newspaper The Independent when considering the implications of artificial intelligence: “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all…All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks”.60 One interesting development in this area is OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company announced in December 2015 with the goal to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”.61 The initiative – chaired by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors - has secured $1 billion in committed funding. This initiative underscores a key point made earlier – namely, that one of the biggest impacts of the fourth industrial revolution is the empowering potential catalyzed by a fusion of new technologies. Here, as Sam Altman stated, “the best way AI can develop is if it’s about individual empowerment and making humans better, and made freely available to everyone.”62 The human impact of some particular technologies such as the internet or smart phones is relatively well understood and widely debated among experts and academics.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

., “Robots, Techies, and Troops: Carter and Roper on 3rd Offset,” Breaking Defense, June 13, 2016, http://breakingdefense.com/2016/06/trust-robots-tech-industry-troops-carter-roper (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 21. Michael Sainato, “Steven Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates Warn About Artificial Intelligence,” The Observer (UK), Aug. 19, 2015, http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence (accessed Oct. 8, 2016); and Elon Musk interview with MIT students at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department Centennial Symposium, Oct. 2014, http://aeroastro.mit.edu/aeroastro100/centennial-symposium (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 22.

Stephen Hawking warns that AI is “likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.” Hawking is not alone in his concern about superintelligence. Icons of the tech revolution, including former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, echo his concern. And it terrifies Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer has dedicated his life to preventing artificial intelligence from destroying humankind. Tall with a thick, dark beard that, along with wire-rim glasses, forms a frame around his large, oval face, he is a thirty-seven-year-old autodidact who dropped out of school after eighth grade.

Its first order of business may be to covertly replicate itself on many other servers all over the globe as a measure of redundancy. In could build machines and robots, or even secretly influence the decisions of ordinary people in pursuit of its own goals. Humanity and its welfare may be of little interest to an entity so profoundly smarter. Elon Musk calls creating artificial intelligence “summoning the demon” and thinks it’s humanity’s “biggest existential threat.”8 When we asked Eliezer what was at stake, his answer was simple: everything. Superintelligence gone wrong is a species-level threat, a human extinction event. Humans are neither the fastest nor the strongest creatures on the planet but dominate for one reason: humans are the smartest.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Past and Present 90:3‒39. Hatcher, John. 1994. “England in the Aftermath of the Black Death.” Past and Present 144:3‒35. Hatcher, John. 2008. The Black Death: A Personal History. Philadelphia: Da Capo. Hawkins, Andrew J. 2021. “Elon Musk Just Now Realizing That Self-Driving Cars Are a ‘Hard Problem.’” Verge, July 5. www.the verge.com/2021/7/5/22563751/tesla-elon-musk-full-self-driving-admission-autopilot-crash. Heaven, Will Douglas. 2020. “Artificial General Intelligence: Are We Close, and Does It Even Make Sense to Try?” MIT Technology Review, October 15. www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/15/1010461/artificial-general-intelligence-robots-ai-agi-deepmind-google-openai.

It is better to change ourselves—for example, by investing in skills that will be valued in the future. If there are continuing problems, talented entrepreneurs and scientists will invent solutions—more-capable robots, human-level artificial intelligence, and whatever other breakthroughs are required. People understand that not everything promised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or even Steve Jobs will likely come to pass. But, as a world, we have become infused by their techno-optimism. Everyone everywhere should innovate as much as they can, figure out what works, and iron out the rough edges later. WE HAVE BEEN here before, many times. One vivid example began in 1791, when Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon, a prison design.

Ray Kurzweil, a prominent executive, inventor, and author, has confidently argued that the technologies associated with AI are on their way to achieving “superintelligence” or “singularity”—meaning that we will reach boundless prosperity and accomplish our material objectives, and perhaps a few of the nonmaterial ones as well. He believes that AI programs will surpass human capabilities by so much that they will themselves produce further superhuman capabilities or, more fancifully, that they will merge with humans to create superhumans. To be fair, not all tech leaders are as sanguine. Billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk have expressed concern about misaligned, or perhaps even evil, superintelligence and the consequences of uncontrolled AI development for the future of humanity. Yet both of these sometime holders of the title “richest person in the world” agree with Hassabis, Li, Kurzweil, and many others on one thing: most technology is for good, and we can and must rely on technology, especially digital technology, to solve humanity’s problems.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Birth of a Private Space Industry End, Rae Botsford. ‘Rocket Lab: The Electron, the Rutherford, and Why Peter Beck Started It in the First Place’. Spaceflight Insider, 2 May 2015. Spacevidcast. ‘SpaceX Reaches Orbit with Falcon 1 – Flight 4 (Full Video Including Elon Musk Statement)’. Youtube.com, 28 September 2008. SpaceX. ‘Orbcomm-2 Full Launch Webcast’. YouTube.com, 21 December 2015. Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future. Virgin Digital, 2015. Falling Costs, Rising Ambitions ‘Apollo Program Budget Appropriations’. NASA. Dorrier, Jason. ‘Risk Takers Are Back in the Space Race – and That’s a Good Thing’.

So even if information, labour and energy became permanently cheaper, the limits of the earth would confine post-capitalism to conditions of abiding scarcity. The realm of freedom would remain out of reach. Except the limits of the earth won’t matter anymore – because we’ll mine the sky instead. Asteroid Mining In 2017 Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, unveiled the company’s next step in conquering the final frontier. Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress, he announced the launch of the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) – a new architecture consisting of a huge first-stage booster rocket, spaceship and refuelling tanker – all of which would replace the company’s present systems.

To be clear, Psyche is a rarity. But it demonstrates a crucial point: mining space would create such outlandish supply as to collapse prices on Earth. In August 2017 Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources, asked Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner who would win in a fight between her boss, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. ‘So, Peter, let me tell you about what we’re doing at Blue Origin,’ Wagner diplomatically replied. ‘We’re really looking towards a future of millions of people living and working in space. The thing I think is really fantastic … is that the universe is infinitely large, and so, we don’t need any fisticuffs … we’re all going to go out there and create this future together.’


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Hawking (2015), “Dear Katie Hopkins. Please stop making life harder for disabled people,” Guardian, April 30, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/30/katie-hopkins-life-harder-disabled-people. 8. Elon Musk’s ex-wife Justine Musk talks about their autistic son in a TEDx talk, embedded within Quora. Justine says their child was diagnosed with mild to moderate autism at age 4 but is now considered off the spectrum. See www.quora.com/Does-Elon-Musk-have-an-autistic-son-Which-one. 9. See B. Hughes (2003), “Understanding our gifted and complex minds: Intelligence, Asperger’s syndrome, and learning disabilities at MIT,” MIT Alumni Association newsletter.

Of course, hyper-systemizing in a parent or grandparent may not just manifest as financial wealth derived from business acumen: it could also show itself as scientific, academic, technical, literary, or musical expertise. Consider the remarkably successful physicist Stephen Hawking, who has an autistic grandchild.7 Or Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most famous innovator and inventor, who has an autistic child.8 These anecdotes hint that hyper-systemizing grandparents and parents are more likely to have an autistic child or grandchild. But to move beyond anecdote to evidence, to test if this link is genetic and not due to chance, we need to look at rates of autism in a large population of hyper-systemizing parents.

We need to anticipate and plan for the special needs of these autistic children who may require—and who have a right to—lifelong support. Some will have additional intellectual disability, but at least half of them will have average or above-average IQ.1 If we want to nurture the inventors of the future, the next Thomas Edison or the next Elon Musk, we are more likely to find them among autistic people, and among those who have a high number of autistic traits because they are hyper-systemizers, than among the general population. The minds of autistic people who have no intellectual disability and who are hyper-systemizers should be seen as one of many natural types of brains that have evolved and that add to human neurodiversity.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

It offered $10 million to any company that could privately build and fly a ship carrying three people into space twice within two weeks. It took eight years, but finally, in 2004, SpaceShipOne took the prize. More importantly, it launched a whole series of XPRIZEs that soon came to influence people up and down the Peninsula, from Larry Page to Elon Musk. These days Diamandis’s XPRIZE projects are designed to drive the invention of just about everything from lunar landings to the elimination of poverty. Create “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity” is the phrase Diamandis likes to use. These successes, together with the inception of Singularity University (created with Ray Kurzweil) in 2008, cemented Diamandis’s reputation as a mover and shaker in Silicon Valley.

He was the Olympic class fundraiser—or as Venter put it, “quite the man about town.” Hariri called him an intellectual cupid. In the course of his many undertakings, he had made friends with just about every big wallet in Silicon Valley. Thus, in mid-2013, Diamandis sat down to brainstorm a board and put together a list of billionaires he thought might invest. Included were Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and Larry Page, Peter Thiel of PayPal fame, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic. That was the short list. Nine months later, in March 2014, Venter, Hariri, and Diamandis formed their triumvirate and announced the creation of Human Longevity, Inc., tapping the Valley’s deep pockets to pool a first round investment of $70 million.

To him, entwining humans and machines so thoroughly that they became indistinguishable was simply the next natural course of human evolution. * * * — ONE MIGHT FEEL that Kurzweil’s Bridge Four thinking was just a touch outside the views of the average Homo sapiens. Some, however, felt it was a very real threat. Elon Musk and, prior to his death in 2018, Stephen Hawking, had warned that superintelligent AIs could take over the planet—partly thanks to the work Musk’s friend Larry Page was supporting. “I have exposure to very cutting-edge AI,” Musk told attendees at the National Governors Association in July 2017, “and I think people should be really concerned about it.”


Amazing Stories of the Space Age by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, centre right, desegregation, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic

Von Braun and his team were absorbed into NASA. The US Army would continue to fight ground wars for its country, and NASA would ultimately win the Cold War in space, with those first tentative steps on the moon on July 20, 1969. UNCLASSIFIED Lots of people have dreamt of going to Mars over the last century. Elon Musk wants to go (and is willing to pay hundreds of millions to get there). Buzz Aldrin would like to fly there in a spacecraft of his own design. Tom Hanks has raised his hand, and Carl Sagan famously expressed interest. And of course, as you might expect, Wernher von Braun would have been thrilled to lead an expedition.

A better way to proceed, they thought, would be to send human crews past Mars and Venus on flyby missions, and they could dispatch robotic probes while they were in the neighborhood (as they looped the planets at close range). Humans controlling those machines while in close proximity and with little to no radio delay should be far more reliable. Of course, as we have seen, the robots do just fine. In today's world, where the Curiosity Mars rover can land itself and drive for a day or more unassisted, and Elon Musk's rockets can make autonomous, pinpoint landings on a lurching seagoing barge after reentering the atmosphere, the mission plans of EMPIRE seem quaint—a product of a bygone era, notions of romantic human exploration in deep space. Even at the time there were detractors. Max Faget, the designer of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules as well as a major contributor to the space shuttle, demurred.

Depending on how you calculate the costs, the price per flight was somewhere between $185–$500 million. But for some of the deep-space mission studies, like those discussed in this chapter, von Braun assumed that by the mid-1970s, more than sixty Saturn Vs would have launched, having reduced per-flight costs to about $60 million (or about what Elon Musk charges in today's dollars for a Falcon 9 launch). Fifty-two or more smaller variants of the Saturn, the IB, would have launched, dropping its per-flight cost to $22 million. And what of the brilliant command/service module from the Apollo lunar flights? We would have flown seventy or more of those as well, dropping the unit cost again to the $70 million range per unit.21 Human spaceflight was beginning to look like a pretty good deal when flown in quantity.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Rather than tediously reading a Wikipedia-derived summary of what a robot is, the socialbot jokes, “What if Daft Punk really are two robots who just want to make music?” “That’s funny,” George says, laughing. The bot shares some recent news about Elon Musk and robots. Tossing the ball back to George, the bot asks, “Have you heard anything about Elon Musk?” “I have,” George brags. “I know him.” “Did you know that Elon Musk was executive producer for the movie Thank You for Smoking?” “No,” George says, sounding impressed. He and the bot go back and forth before settling on books as their next topic. They take a couple of turns, and then the socialbot says, “You know what I was thinking?

Tech company executives praise it for blasting through decades-old problems in conversational AI; they shower experts in the field with salaries that climb into the six figures and higher. Consider the likes of Ilya Sutskever, a computer scientist credited with breakthroughs in image recognition and machine translation. He earned $1.9 million back in 2016—and that was at a nonprofit, the Elon Musk–supported OpenAI. Silver dollars, though, have only belatedly begun to pour from the Valley’s slot machines. For decades, the approach to getting machines to learn from data languished; brief periods of hype were followed by long stretches of frustration. The AI techniques that dominated were ones in which computer scientists wrote rules that told machines what to do and when to do it.

But beyond expressing simply that there was a connection between two entities, the system characterized the nature of each connection in standardized ways. For example, Big Ben is located in the UK; the Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883; Emmanuel Macron is the president of France; Steph Curry is married to Ayesha Curry; Jon Voight is a parent of Angelina Jolie; Elon Musk was born in South Africa. Carefully defining allowable connections had a fringe benefit: True Knowledge effectively learned some commonsense rules about the world that, while blazingly obvious to humans, typically elude computers. A person can be born only in a single place. A physical object cannot simultaneously exist in two locations.


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A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

These machines would be the “last invention that man need ever make,” wrote Irving John Good, the Oxford mathematician who introduced the possibility of such an intelligence explosion: anything a human being could invent, they could improve upon.23 The prospect of such vastly capable AGIs has worried people like Stephen Hawking (“could spell the end of the human race”), Elon Musk (“vastly more risky than North Korea”), and Bill Gates (“don’t understand why some people are not concerned”)—though their worries are not always the same.24 One fear is that human beings, limited in what they can do by the comparatively snaillike pace of evolution, would struggle to keep up with the machines.

There are some cases of companies selling “pseudo-AIs,” chatbots and voice-transcription services that are actually people pretending to be machines (much like the eighteenth-century chess-playing Turk).70 Less dramatically, but in a similar spirit, a 2019 study found that 40 percent of Europe’s AI start-ups actually “do not use any AI programs in their products.”71 There are also notable instances of corporate leaders getting carried away. In 2017, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk expressed his hope that car production in the future will be so highly automated that “air friction” faced by robots would be a significant limiting factor.72 Just a few months later, under pressure as Tesla failed to meet production targets, he sheepishly tweeted, “yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake.”73 However, to dwell for too long on any particular omission or exaggeration is to miss the bigger picture: machines are gradually encroaching on more and more tasks that, in the past, had required a rich range of human capabilities.

Just 16 percent of Americans think a four-year degree prepares students “very well” for a well-paying job.21 In part, this may have been prompted by the fact that many of today’s most successful entrepreneurs dropped out from these sorts of institutions. The list of nongraduates is striking: Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Stanford University; Elon Musk did likewise; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University; Steve Jobs left Reed College; Michael Dell left the University of Texas; Travis Kalanick left the University of California; Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey left the University of Nebraska and New York University, respectively; Larry Ellison left both the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago; Arash Ferdowsi (cofounder of DropBox) left MIT; and Daniel Ek (cofounder of Spotify) left the Royal Institute of Technology.22 This list could go on.


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The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

It started off dreadfully bad but improved slightly with each game, and within 40 days of constant self-play it had become so strong that it thrashed the original AlphaGo 100–0. Go is now firmly in the category of ‘games that humans will never win against machines again’. Most people in Silicon Valley agree that machine learning is the next big thing, although some are more optimistic than others. Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk recently said that AI is like ‘summoning the demon’, while others have compared its significance to the ‘scientific method, on steroids’, the invention of penicillin and even electricity. Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, reckons that there isn’t a single industry that won’t shortly be ‘transformed’.

Read any political manifesto from across the spectrum and you’ll find yourself lost in a world of smart cities, lean governments and flexible workers. To seriously criticise any of this puts you at risk of being labelled a Luddite who doesn’t ‘get it’. And to whom do we look in order to solve our collective social problems? It’s no longer the state, but the modern tech-geek superhero. Space travel and climate change has fallen to Elon Musk. We look to Google to solve health problems and sort out ageing. Facebook gets to decide what free speech is and battle against fake news, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saves the Washington Post from bankruptcy and funds scholarships. One UK MP recently suggested we might run the National Health Service like Uber, while another pitched the idea of Airbnb-style room rentals for patients who needed to stay overnight.

It is the most significant legislation relating to data passed by the EU. * Max Tegmark, a prominent AI expert, is co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organisation which researches the challenges technology presents. One important aspect of their work – which received a major donation from Elon Musk – is a global research programme aimed at ensuring that AI is beneficial for humanity.


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On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

But eventually these subsidies have to stop. If the Sun (or wind) is to become the primary source of our energy, there must be some way to store it, so there’s still a supply at night and on days when the wind doesn’t blow. There’s already a big investment in improving batteries and scaling them up. In late 2017 Elon Musk’s SolarCity company installed an array of lithium-ion batteries with 100 megawatts capacity at a location in south Australia. Other energy-storage possibilities include thermal storage, capacitors, compressed air, flywheels, molten salt, pumped hydro, and hydrogen. The transition to electric cars has given an impetus to battery technology (the requirements for car batteries are more demanding than for those in households or ‘battery farms’, in terms of weight and recharging speed).

A clearer-cut ‘great leap forward’ would involve footprints on Mars, not just on the Moon. Leaving aside the Chinese, I think the future of manned spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers, prepared to participate in a cut-price programme far riskier than western nations could impose on publicly supported civilians. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk (who also builds Tesla electric cars), or the rival effort, Blue Origin, bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, have berthed craft at the space station and will soon offer orbital flights to paying customers. These ventures—bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—have shown it’s possible to recover and reuse the launch rocket’s first stage—presaging real cost savings.

If there were an abundance of fuel for midcourse corrections (and to brake and accelerate at will), then interplanetary navigation would be a low-skill task—simpler, even, than steering a car or ship, in that the destination is always in clear view. By 2100 thrill seekers in the mould of (say) Felix Baumgartner (the Austrian skydiver who in 2012 broke the sound barrier in free fall from a high-altitude balloon) may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk (born in 1971) of SpaceX says he wants to die on Mars—but not on impact. But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. And here I disagree strongly with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, who enthuse about rapid build-up of large-scale Martian communities. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems.


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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

There has been a growth in what Nye calls “the consumer’s sublime” of Disneyland and Las Vegas. There have been sublime technological objets, like the iPhone, whose original release was the closest my own generation possesses to a shared experience of techno-wonder. There have certainly been men and women who get famous selling the promise of the sublime—Elon Musk’s hyperloops being the most famous examples. And there have been moments of a nostalgic sublime—such as the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery, carried into history on a special Boeing 747 airliner, which had people craning their necks to watch as the retired spacecraft was ferried from Florida to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

Strikingly, just as political conservatism manifests precisely the vices that conservative intellectuals describe as characteristic of politics under big government, so too does a certain kind of centrism flirt with the strongman temptation that its critique implies we face. I’m thinking here of the kind of self-consciously moderate pundits who compare American government unfavorably to the smooth efficiency of the Beijing Politburo… or the kind of “No Labels” independents who imagine some hybrid of Mike Bloomberg, Elon Musk, and James Mattis emerging to lead America out of polarization… or the not particularly ideological voters who thrill to the idea of a businessman-president who just get things done. If Trump’s ascent reflected, in part, the pathologies of political conservatism, he also traded (like Ross Perot before him) on the populist version of this centrism, the sense that both parties are so corrupt that a demagogue who says, “I alone can fix it,” is the businessman-caudillo that our gridlocked republic needs.

Maybe we have simply been in a kind of bottleneck for the last few generations, achieving important scientific breakthroughs that don’t (yet) translate into society-altering changes. At a certain point, we’ll clear the bottleneck, and it will become clear that our era was a necessary prelude to renewed acceleration—eventually giving us self-driving cars courtesy of a finally profitable Uber, a Mars colony courtesy of the Elon Musk–Jeff Bezos space race, and radical life extension courtesy of Google’s longevity lab or some other zillionaire who can’t imagine shuffling off this mortal coil. All of this could happen on a scale that would be world altering without having the truly utopian scenarios come to pass. Terraforming Mars and becoming a multiplanetary species may be unattainable for now—but just going to Mars would be a bigger leap for mankind than anything we’ve accomplished since Neil Armstrong.


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Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Yet when doing this, we rely neither on teleportation nor on all the traffic lights staying green. Instead, we assume the world as it is (although we may hold out hope); it is the mode of transport that is changeable. One company that applied the mutability principle well is SpaceX, founded by the entrepreneur Elon Musk. It pioneered the development of reusable rockets. The idea had long been a dream of aeronautical engineers and a staple of science fiction. But when NASA scientists contemplated reusability in the 1960s and 1970s, they imagined a rocket with wings that could land like an airplane after returning to Earth.

If even Einstein can make that lapse, what hope is there for the rest of us? There is an important lesson here. In reframing, the celebrated stock-prospectus disclaimer applies: “past performance is no guarantee of future returns.” Much as we admire successful reframers such as Jennifer Doudna and Elon Musk, we should not necessarily pin our hopes on their next insights being equally important. The next crucial reframe could come from any one of us. When Mentality Meets the Moment And we all can get better at reframing. The starting point is to understand the sources of difficulty we face when attempting to switch frames.

Moreover, public perception of gasoline-powered cars had changed. If the latter half of the twentieth century had equated the car with personal freedom, at the start of the twenty-first century cars were seen as contributors to environmental degradation. The shift in context established the perfect conditions for Elon Musk’s reframing: cars didn’t need to be petrol-powered, they could be green and look cool. But in Germany, the country’s proud automakers, such as Daimler, BMW, and VW, resisted this reframing. Steeped in the conventional frame, they argued that only gasoline cars were real cars, and they delighted in pointing out electric cars’ shortcomings.


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Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

Just as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century created family dynasties like the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, today a new wave of entrepreneurs is accumulating wealth that is likely to last for generations. In January 2020, Bloomberg published a list of ‘green billionaires’ and predicted that there would be many more to follow in the next decade. The most recognisable person on the list is Elon Musk, the founder of electric car company Tesla. But many of the new wave of green billionaires are not – or not yet – household names. Topping the list, one place ahead of Musk, are four shareholders in Chinese electric battery maker CATL, which supplies firms including Toyota and BMW: Zeng Yuqun, Huang Shilin, Pei Zhenhua, and Li Ping, who between them have a combined wealth of $16.7bn.

In fact, it created a new market in residential solar loans, which can be sold on to investors such as Goldman Sachs, other asset managers and insurance companies. It is still a private company, but its exit path is unclear, says Parish, with listing just one option, though it was profitable in 2018. One of its peers, SolarCity, was bought by Elon Musk’s Tesla in 2016 for $2.6bn. Parish says that the early individual investors in his company were crucial for its initial success, and wishes that wealthier investors would do more to invest with climate change in mind. ‘We wouldn’t be around if individuals hadn’t used some of their private wealth to back us.

The longer-term uptake of electric vehicles is, pandemic wobbles aside, expected to accelerate rapidly. From fewer than 500,000 passenger vehicles in 2010 to 6m in 2018, Irena predicts the world will see 157m by 2030 and more than 1.1bn by 2050, if Paris Agreement commitments are met. The poster child for electric vehicles is Elon Musk’s Tesla, which experienced exponential growth in its share price before the coronavirus market crash in February 2020. In just two months, from November 2019, its share price doubled, pushing its valuation to over $100bn – more than the share value at that time of General Motors and Ford put together.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

They sought a “green recovery”—governments’ taking advantage of the crisis to reorient their energy mix away from oil and gas and hasten what they saw as the coming energy transition. ROADMAP Chapter 37 THE ELECTRIC CHARGE The lunch in a Los Angeles seafood restaurant in 2003 was not going well. Two engineers, J. B. Straubel and Harold Rosen, were pitching Elon Musk. An entrepreneur of iron-man determination, Musk was already known as one of the original members of the “PayPal Mafia,” who had launched the online payment system, and then as the founder of SpaceX, which was aiming to undercut the government’s cost for space transportation and pave the interplanetary path for travel to Mars.

In the United States, Ford announced that it would spend $11.5 billion on the production of electric vehicles by 2022. “Electric vehicles make sense,” said Ford’s executive chairman, Bill Ford. “We are betting very heavily on it.” And the list went on and on—and on. “There have been so many announcements that I’m waiting for my mom to announce one,” said Elon Musk. He could afford to joke. For in 2017, in terms of stock market valuation, Tesla, producing around just 100,000 cars, overtook General Motors, which that year sold 9.6 million vehicles worldwide.14 But one year later, Tesla was again caught up in another swell of turbulence. Production of the Model 3 was going much more slowly than anticipated.

Across America, for instance, the Volkswagen settlement helps pay for installing electric charging stations.18 * * * — In 2009, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest auto market, and the gap continues to grow. Beijing is determined that one out of every five new vehicles sold in China by 2025 should be a NEV—a “new energy vehicle.” China has its own great champion of electric vehicles—Wan Gang. He ranks with Elon Musk in terms of impact on the advancement of the EV and as one of the most consequential figures for the global auto industry. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, Wan was exiled to the countryside. He relieved the harshness and the tedium by spending hours in a tractor shed, fascinated by the tractor’s engine, disassembling it and reassembling it.


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The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent by Vivek Wadhwa

card file, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Elon Musk, immigration reform, Marc Andreessen, open economy, open immigration, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, synthetic biology, the new new thing, Y2K

This has been true since the founding of the United States as a nation composed of people seeking better economic chances and religious freedom in the New World, a process that started with the arrival of the Mayflower. Each decade has yielded top-flight entrepreneurs not born in this land, from Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel Company) to Alexander Graham Bell (AT&T) to Charles Pfizer (Pfizer) to Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems) to Sergey Brin (Google) to Elon Musk (PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors). A 2011 study by the Partnership for a New American Economy tabulated that first-generation immigrants or their children had founder roles in more than 40% of the Fortune 500. These companies had combined revenues of greater than $4.2 trillion and employed more than 10 million workers worldwide.4 More and more evidence indicates that immigrant founders drive a wildly disproportionate percentage of all net new job creation in America.

Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61363-020-4 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61363-021-1 About the Book Many of the United States’ most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entrepreneurial, technologically advanced society on earth. Now, Vivek Wadhwa, an immigrant tech entrepreneur turned academic with appointments at Duke, Stanford, Emory, and Singularity Universities, draws on new research to show that the United States is in the midst of an unprecedented halt in high-growth, immigrant-founded start-ups.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Hagel and Brown tell companies that they need to move “from monetizing stocks to monetizing flows”—that is, making money on the transactions, the service, the new value creation.19 So Elon Musk opens to the world the static intellectual property bound up in Tesla’s patents, because that is not where the value lies. The value lies in building on that base of knowledge, in engaging the hearts and minds of as many people as possible so that Tesla’s best guesses about electric cars and batteries become the foundational standard on which a new industry is built. Imagine Your Entire Ecosystem to Be Potential Co-creators When Elon Musk made Tesla’s patents open, he didn’t know from which corner breakthroughs would come—and he still doesn’t know.

Perhaps most exciting, from an innovation standpoint, is the ability for peers to “send” to one another the precise specifications for physical 3-D objects, enabling very rapid iterative prototyping across great distances. The natural progression toward increased openness, beyond the licensing of a previously closely held brand asset, is to get rid of that legal protection altogether. Elon Musk—founder of SpaceX, co-founder of PayPal, and currently CEO of Tesla Motors—made just such an announcement in a blog entry on June 12, 2014. “In the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology,” he wrote, Tesla was opening up all its patents. Musk understood that like in FOSS, where it is well appreciated that more minds are better than fewer minds, more rapid innovation demands more access.

“Five Cities Selected as Winners in Bloomberg Philanthropies 2014 Mayors Challenge,” Bloomberg.org, September 17, 2014, www.bloomberg.org/press/releases/five-cities-selected-winners-bloomberg-philanthropies-2014-mayors-challenge. 17. Christophe Vidal, “My Little Pony—Spitfire,” on Shapeways website, www.shapeways.com/model/2207519/my-little-pony-spitfire-asymp-70mm-tall.html?materialId=26. 18. Elon Musk, “All Our Patents Are Belong to You,” TeslaMotors.comblog, June 12, 2014, www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you. 19. Personal correspondence with John Hagel and John Seely Brown. 20. “Financial Performance,” J-Sainsbury.co.uk, www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/investor-centre/financial-performance. 21.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Ward (May 2015), “Blurred Boundaries: Internet Search, Cognitive Self-Esteem, and Confidence in Decision-Making.” Talk presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, New York, New York. fifty microprocessors each: auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/trends-innovations/car-computer.htm. Elon Musk: fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview. compromise overall safety: S. Greengard (2009). “Making Automation Work.” Communications of the ACM 52(12): 18–19. pilots . . . didn’t know what to do: www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-airfrance-447-6611877. GPS master: Examples can be found at www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3119/has-anyone-gotten-hurt-or-killed-following-bad-gps-directions.

The technological revolution has improved our lives in some ways, but it has also given rise to worry, despair, and even dread. Technological change is leading to all kinds of effects, and some may not be quite what we bargained for. Some of our greatest entrepreneurs and scientific minds see even darker clouds on the horizon. People like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have cautioned that technology could become so sophisticated that it decides to pursue its own goals rather than the goals of the humans who created it. The reason to worry has been articulated by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity,” as well as by Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and most recently by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who works at the University of Oxford.

Many of them are there to help you control the car: power steering setups can use computers to adjust the force you need to apply at different speeds and antilock brakes use computers to prevent skidding. And the automation revolution is just beginning: Completely automated cars are no longer science fiction. In late 2015, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, stated that the technology for full automation will be perfected in about two years, though it may take government regulators longer to work out the legal issues before driverless cars start taking over the roads. With larger vehicles, technology has already changed the playing field.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff. Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner.

(One of her jobs at a Silicon Graphics sales kickoff event was to sit inside a hollowed-out server the size of a refrigerator and respond as if she were a computer as people typed commands.) She had been at Bain—which had offered to reimburse her business school tuition if she worked there for two years—when Netscape went public in August 1995. The sixteen-month-old company, which had never posted a profit, was suddenly valued at more than $2 billion. That same year Elon Musk enrolled at Stanford to study applied physics. Two days after arriving, he applied for a deferment, convinced that the start-up zeitgeist wouldn’t come around again anytime soon. He started Zip2 to help the media industry move from print models to an electronic model. Two years earlier, at twenty-five, Theresia had married her former Bain colleague Tim Ranzetta, who now worked as a buy-side analyst at a mutual fund company in Boston.

THERESIA With the departure of Jim Goetz, Theresia was more than ever at the forefront of Accel’s efforts to rebuild, recruiting new stars, chasing new deals, and building team morale. One of Theresia’s first acts since Goetz left had been to hire a new principal, Kevin Efrusy. Theresia and Efrusy had worked together at Bain. After Bain, Efrusy went on to work as a product manager for Zip2, the company founded by Elon Musk, and as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he founded an applications service provider called Corio that went public in 2000. In her new role as managing partner, Theresia advised Efrusy on a new company that he was chasing for Accel as a possible investment.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

It is when people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin – or by their gender chromosomal constitution, or by whom they prefer to share a bed with, or by what accent they speak with, or by which political or religious affiliation they identify with – that freedom falls and liberty is lost. Chapter 14 Governing Mars Lessons for the Red Planet from Experiments in Governing the Blue Planet Preamble I originally penned this essay in the summer of 2018, stimulated by a Twitter exchange I had with Elon Musk, itself triggered by the SpaceX CEO’s previously announced decision to colonize Mars. This led me to wonder if this visionary had given any thought to what sort of government he would set up on the Red Planet, and if he already had a team of social scientists working on the problem or whether he was just going to wing it when they got there.

” * * * Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter, 2013 In September of 2017 Elon Musk announced his intention to establish a Martian colony by the mid 2020s, thereby assuring our survival as an interplanetary species. “If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” he told an SXSW (South by Southwest) audience in March of 2018, while also admitting that the endeavor will be “difficult, dangerous, a good chance you’ll die.”

Curious to know his thoughts on the subject, on June 16, 2018, I whimsically tweeted at the SpaceX CEO (Figure 14.1). Figure 14.1 Tweet from Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer), June 16, 2018. The thread is available at: https://bit.ly/30uUrNy Minutes later I received this reply from Musk (Figure 14.2). Figure 14.2 Tweet reply from Elon Musk (@elonmusk), June 16, 2018. There’s a lot packed into those 217 characters, but a tweet does not a constitution make. At that SXSW conference interview, when asked what type of government he envisions for the first Mars colony, Musk elaborated: Most likely, the form of government on Mars would be somewhat of a direct democracy where people vote directly on issues instead of going through representative government.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

That’s because he believed ICM’s shares may have been made available to hedge funds to borrow—and when those shares were sold by the original owner, they had to be returned, forcing the short-sellers to close their position. Finally, Letts made a comparison to another company that had been involved in a seemingly eternal tussle with hedge funds and had elicited emotions that professional share-market traders are trained to suppress: Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors. Musk, along with Peter Thiel, belonged to the ‘PayPal mafia’, having founded the groundbreaking payments company to solve the problem of the lack of trust between two strangers transacting online. Musk had taken his fortune and rolled the dice on what his disciples believed were humanity-altering ventures: launching cheap rockets into space, and accelerating the use of electric cars by building models that people actually wanted to drive.

By 2018, not much had changed. Tesla was still struggling to make a profit, or even enough cars to rival the auto majors. But its market capitalisation was now $50 billion. The short-sellers couldn’t help themselves. And Australia’s community of global hedge funds was among those taking the other side of the bet against Elon Musk. ‘Over-hyped, thematic “disruptors” are increasingly vulnerable to a fight-back from strong incumbent competitors,’ Jacob Mitchell, the head of Sydney-based fund Antipodes, told The Australian Financial Review.2 ‘Despite the recent share price rally, we believe Tesla’s fundamentals remain extremely weak and the company’s share price is vulnerable to a large fall, given the persistent huge operating losses, stressed balance sheet and the arrival of dozens of competing electric cars from the world’s top manufacturers,’ Melbourne-based L1 Capital told investors in a quarterly update.3 If Afterpay’s brokers were battling, then the war over Tesla was close to a nuclear one as Musk and short-sellers baited each other on social media.

The combination of rising sales and expanding multiples put a proverbial rocket under the share price.14 But supporters would have to stomach another round of volatility, driven by the emergence of new competition in the United States, while consumer groups were again raising their heads above the parapet. Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, had created Affirm in 2012 out of his incubator, HVF. In early 2014, he decided to make Affirm his full-time job. It had partnered with more than a thousand US retailers by July 2017, the company said. But its product was built on charging customers interest; its pitch centred on better transparency on charges, and the fact that it didn’t charge late fees.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Arkin, and Kevin Monahan, “Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems, top U.S. official says,” NBC News, February 7, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/russians-penetrated-u-s-voter-systems-says-top-u-s-n845721. 87 Fontaine and Frederick, “The Autocrat’s New Tool Kit.” 88 Dean Takahashi, “SoftBank believes 1 trillion connected devices will create $11 trillion in value by 2025,” VentureBeat, October 16, 2018, https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/16/softbank-believes-1-trillion-connected-devices-will-create-11-trillion-in-value-by-2025/. 89 Carlin, Dawn of the Code War, e-book, 756. 90 Paul Tullis, “The US military is trying to read minds,” Technology Review, October 16, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/16/132269/us-military-super-soldiers-control-drones-brain-computer-interfaces/. 91 “Elon Musk’s Neuralink puts computer chips in pigs’ brains in bid to cure diseases,” NBC News, August 29, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-s-neuralink-puts-computer-chips-pigs-brains-bid-n1238782. 92 Lora Kolodny, “Former Google CEO predicts the internet will split in two—and one part will be led by China,” CNBC, September 20, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-predicts-internet-split-china.html. 93 Rose Wong, “There May Soon Be Three Internets.

Because signals must travel about 22,000 miles into low-earth orbit and back again, the “latency”—the time it takes to transmit data—can be up to twelve times slower than fiber-optic connections. Signals can even be impacted by bad weather, a phenomenon known as “rain fade.” Satellites carry just a fraction—only 0.37 percent—of online communications,83 though that may be changing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in the process of launching as many as 42,000 new satellites, seeking to create a “Starlink” system of high-speed satellite Internet.84 For now, satellites prove especially useful for reaching landlocked or remote areas. Antarctica, for instance, relies entirely on satellite-based communications.

“It’s one thing,” notes John Carlin, the former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, “if a hacker’s malware insists on a $300 ransom to unlock your computer; it’s something else entirely if the hacker insists on a $300 payment before grandma’s home dialysis machine will be turned on again.”89 In some cases, these smart devices may even begin to merge with our minds. The Pentagon—our old friends at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—has begun experimenting with drones controlled by neural signals.90 Elon Musk’s Neuralink is in the early stages of testing human-computer interfaces that would link a person’s brain to the cloud.91 Once considered squarely in the realm of science fiction, these implantable devices could enable someone to effectively have a perfect memory, possessing the unlimited knowledge of an ingrained Google search.


pages: 243 words: 59,662

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lock screen, microdosing, Parkinson's law, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

Sarah Green Carmichael, “The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies,” Harvard Business Review, August 19, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies. 5. Bambi Francisco Roizen, “Elon Musk: Work Twice as Hard as Others,” Vator.TV, December 23, 2010, http://vator.tv/news/2010-12-23-elon-musk-work-twice-as-hard-as-others. 6. Michael D. Eisner, Work in Progress (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 301. 7. Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., 40% Get Less Than Recommended Amount of Sleep,” Gallup, December 19, 2013, http://news.gallup.com/poll/166553/less-recommended-amount-sleep.aspx. 8.

The more hours you work, the less productive you’ll be. The bankers fell prey to a common productivity myth: that energy is fixed, but time can flex. They believed they could get a consistent return on their effort while expanding their hours—that they’d be just as smart, strong, and engaged at 100 hours as they were at 50. Here’s Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, in a classic statement of the fallacy: “If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing . . . you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”5 But the bankers and Musk have it exactly backwards.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Clarke, sci-fi author, inventor and futurist The Russian Space Agency is no longer allowing paying passengers, but billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is currently offering a similar experience, albeit suborbital, for a much more down-to-earth price of $200,000. Other entrepreneurial companies active in this field include Space Adventures and Elon Musk’s SpaceX (Elon Musk is the forty-year-old entrepreneur behind PayPal and Tesla Motors). Rocket man Space is the next frontier for entrepreneurs, especially high-tech billionaires. Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, has announced a plan to build a commercial spaceship that could be space bound before 2020.

Probably not in our lifetimes in any meaningful sense, so in the meantime we’ll have to console ourselves with good old-fashioned staycations, ecotourism, glamping, climate change travel, virtual vacations, spa and sleep holidays, dark tourism, voluntourism, medical tourism and floating hotels. Unless, of course, we can invent low-cost warp drive or teleportation. “The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there’ll be a base on the Moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.” Elon Musk, engineer and entrepreneur Of course, there is another possibility. A good trick in terms of looking toward the far future is to start off by looking at the distant past. Why? Because it’s essential to separate cycles and fashion from what’s genuinely new and important, and because what appears to be new, or revolutionary, often turns out to be nothing of the sort—and time and money can easily be wasted.


pages: 201 words: 60,431

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb by Dorie Clark

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Blue Ocean Strategy, buy low sell high, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Lean Startup, lockdown, minimum viable product, passive income, pre–internet, rolodex, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, solopreneur, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Levy, the strength of weak ties, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

We don’t want to have hard conversations, and it’s easier to avoid them. (What will I even say?) We like feeling important and that we’re needed. (They unanimously voted to invite me!) We’re plagued by FOMO: the fear of missing out. (What if I find out later that everyone had the time of their lives? What if I miss the chance to become friends with the next Elon Musk?) For a long time, we can get away with it. Because let’s be honest: early in our careers, not that many people are queued up to talk with us. There’s margin available. But if you’re doing things right, as you get more experienced, you become much more in demand. And what started out as a smart move—saying yes to all kinds of opportunities and seeing where they lead—becomes a major liability.

But if you’re investing in SpaceX in 2001, it better have a massive return” to make up for the risk. A company that only makes moon shot bets could succeed fantastically—or go out of business if none of them happened to pan out. (That’s why X, where Adam Ruxton works, is only one arm of Alphabet.) The same is true for individuals. A few of us put everything on the line. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the CEO of Tesla, comes to mind. Buoyed by an unshakable faith, he plowed most of the $180 million fortune he accumulated at PayPal into these two companies—to the point where, by his own admission, he ran out of cash in late 2009.4 Since then, he’s recovered just fine, becoming one of the world’s richest men.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “An Owner’s Manual for Google’s Shareholders,” 2004 founders’ IPO letter, Google. 2. Nicholas Carlson, “The ‘Dirty Little Secret’ about Google’s 20% Time, According to Marissa Mayer,” Business Insider, January 13, 2015. 3. Jillian D’Onfro, “The Truth about Google’s Famous ‘20% Time’ Policy,” Business Insider, April 17, 2015. 4. Owen Thomas, “Tesla’s Elon Musk: ‘I Ran Out of Cash,’” VentureBeat, May 27, 2010. Chapter 5 1. Technically, the title is ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. 2. The organization Thinkers50, which ranks the world’s top business thinkers, has inducted Marshall into its Hall of Fame, making him the most highly lauded executive coach (https://thinkers50.com/biographies/marshall-goldsmith/).


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

I want somebody really smart to rethink the assumptions from the ground up.” After all, he continues, retail innovation did not come from Walmart; it came from Amazon. Media innovation did not come from Time magazine or CBS; it came from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. Space innovation did not come from Boeing and Lockheed; it came from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Next-generation cars did not come from GM and Volkswagen; they came from another Musk company, Tesla. “I can’t think of a single, major innovation coming from experts in the last thirty, forty years,” Khosla exclaims. “Think about it, isn’t that stunning?” If the future is best discovered by means of maverick moon shots, another insight follows.

If Thiel and Levchin had sailed onward to success, the history of Silicon Valley might have been different. Confinity would have staged a triumphant IPO, and its founders would have joined the ranks of Valley royalty, forgetting their earlier resentment of the VC princes. But at the end of 1999, Confinity found itself battling a rival called X.com, led by an entrepreneur named Elon Musk. The two companies were close equivalents in many ways. Both had around fifty employees and 300,000 users. Both were growing fast, and for a while both had offices in the same building on University Avenue in Palo Alto. But X.com had one distinguishing advantage. Whereas Confinity had secured capital from Nokia, a marginal Silicon Valley player, X.com had been anointed by Sequoia.

Moritz told his partners at Sequoia that merging was the better option. The two sides were like feuding families in a medieval Italian town, firing arrows across the street at each other. A merger would mean that Sequoia’s share in the resulting company would shrink. But it would be worth it.[15] Thiel and Levchin met Elon Musk and Bill Harris at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to discuss Moritz’s proposal. Musk was all for bringing the two companies together, but because he had Sequoia at his back, he presumed he was by far the senior partner. X.com had more money in the bank, and having a brand-name venture investor ensured that it could raise further cash if needed.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

, CNBC, 20 May 2020; https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/aws-salesman-pitch-to-oil-and-gas-we-actually-consume-your-products.html. 9. For an elaboration of the paperclip hypothesis, see Nick Bostrom, ‘Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence’, 2003; https://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html. 10. Samuel Gibbs, ‘Elon Musk: Regulate AI to Combat “Existential Threat” Before It’s Too Late’, The Guardian, 17 July 2017; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/17/elon-musk-regulation-ai-combat-existential-threat-tesla-spacex-ceo. 11. Nick Statt, ‘Bill Gates is Worried about Artificial Intelligence Too’, CNET, 28 January 2015; https://www.cnet.com/news/bill-gates-is-worried-about-artificial-intelligence-too/. 12.

Some of the strongest warnings about AI have in fact come from its greatest proponents: the billionaires of Silicon Valley who have most bullishly pushed a narrative of technological determinism. Technological determinism is the line of thinking which decrees that technological progress is unstoppable. Given that the rise of AI is as inevitable as that of computers, the internet, and the digitization of society as a whole, we should strap ourselves in and get with the programme. Yet Elon Musk, creator of PayPal and owner of Tesla and SpaceX, believes that AI is the ‘biggest existential threat’ to humanity.10 Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft – whose Azure AI platform keeps Shell’s oil platforms humming – has said he doesn’t understand why people are not more concerned about its development.11 Even Shane Legg, co-founder of the Google-owned AI company DeepMind – best known for beating the best human players at the game of Go – has gone on the record to state that ‘I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this.’

The latter name evokes some kind of intelligent imp or sprite conjured up to undertake minor tasks on the wizard’s to-do list. This is pretty much what the algorithmic daemon does: checking network connections, keeping other tasks running and shutting down defunct processes. But it also suggests a certain malevolence. When Elon Musk described work on artificial intelligence as ‘summoning the demon’, he was evoking something powerful and unknowable – something potentially dangerous. It’s this equation between the unknowable and the dangerous which I want to challenge, because it seems to squat at the root of many of our fears about technology and the broader, physical world.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Wojcicki replied: MostlySane, “In Conversation with CEO, YouTube—Susan Wojcicki,” YouTube video, April 16, 2019, 26:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-9uEvKD0o. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “jacksepticeye and Elon Musk”: jacksepticeye was a top creator; Elon Musk appeared on YouTube often but didn’t have his own channel. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT one email newsletter: Claire Stapleton, “Down the ’Tube: (no subject),” Tiny Letter, February 15, 2019, https://tinyletter.com/clairest/letters/down-the-tube-no-subject.

That past autumn, when a YouTube channel featuring Bollywood songs looked set to surpass PewDiePie’s subscriber total, his army had formed a rallying cry to defend their king against critics and the threat to his crown. Subscribe to PewDiePie! That cry rang out from every corner of the internet. It appeared on signs at the Super Bowl in Atlanta and during a basketball game in Lithuania. A British political party tweeted it. A colorful cast of characters spread the cry: HackerGiraffe, Goose Wayne Batman, Elon Musk. It was an antiestablishment mantra, a screw-you to corporate internet overlords, a cultural phenomenon. A meme. And the cry, like YouTube.com, grew beyond anything YouTube, the company, ever imagined. Since the death to all jews incident, YouTube had kept its biggest star at arm’s length, making no public displays of support or promotions as it did for other broadcasters.

A Google c-suiter few had ever worked with or even met was taking charge. Those close to Wojcicki knew she had been restless and itching for a loftier executive role, like many of her peers had. By 2014 her conflict with the ads engineer Ramaswamy felt untenable. Wojcicki held private talks to join Tesla as a chief operating officer, number two under Elon Musk, an old PayPal Mafia member. But Page wanted her to stay. He knew Kamangar wanted out. And by then, Page had begun plotting his own exit—a plan to hand Google off to a trusted deputy, Sundar Pichai. In a conversation, Laszlo Bock, Page’s HR chief, suggested Page could more easily clear the way for his chosen successor by moving Wojcicki to YouTube.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

Evan had a team build a Snapchat music product that combined Snapchat’s penchant for communicating through media with Evan’s vision for how music should work digitally. However, it was never released, likely because the rights to the music were too complex and expensive. Employees were happy to work tirelessly on Evan’s experiments, music or otherwise. Evan’s benevolent dictatorship is not uncommon in tech. Many visionaries like Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have been described in similar, and even more draconian, ways. But Jobs, Musk, and Bezos have accomplished such spectacular achievements that employees will follow them no matter what. Evan seemed to be following right in their footsteps, but we have only seen him at the helm when Snapchat is thriving and growing spectacularly well.

White had cut her teeth at the much larger and more established Google and Facebook; it was difficult for her to translate those experiences to the rapidly changing Snapchat, which had only fifty employees when she arrived. Once she left Snapchat, White joined the board of directors of Hyperloop Technologies, a startup trying to realize Elon Musk’s vision for a high-speed, tube-based transportation system. White also founded Mave, a high-end personal concierge startup in Santa Monica. White’s departure was made worse by the sheer number of high-level executives who left around the same time. Many didn’t survive a year at Snapchat. Mike Randall, who had been hired by White and reported to her while at Snapchat, left after seven months.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT THE ROAD TO IPO JUNE 2015 RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CA The Code Conference is an annual tech conference held at an exclusive resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The high point of the conference is an interview with tech press legends Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. The two have sat in iconic red chairs across from the biggest names in the business, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk to Bill Gates. Now, in June 2015, Evan sat in one of those same red chairs as Swisher and Mossberg probed about Snapchat’s future. Initial public offerings are in many ways the finish line for startups. They are liquidity events, giving founders, employees, and investors an actual hard cash return on the years of investment and work they’ve poured into the company.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But arguably, the ultimate destination of the Austrian ideology is a system which starts to eliminate the market altogether, at least in the ordinary sense of companies competing to sell to the same set of customers. New private empires are built to compete against rival private empires, with attributes that appear more like those of states than typical businesses. The billionaire Elon Musk, for example, seized the initiative from NASA and the European Space Agency and made traveling to Mars one of his entrepreneurial ambitions. Amazon’s relationship to retail markets is becoming closer to that of a regulator than a competitor. Companies such as Palantir and SCL, which founded the now defunct Cambridge Analytica with Mercer’s financial support, straddle commercial, political, and military domains of intelligence operations.

Sure enough, Facebook soon appointed Mark Chevillet, an applied neuroscientist from Johns Hopkins University, and Regina Dugan, a former head of the US defense research agency DARPA, who was hired to lead on “technologies that fluidly blend physical and digital worlds.” Technologies are emerging for limited forms of mind-reading. DARPA has invested $60 million in brain–computer interface technology, while a Boston-based start-up, Neurable, is seeking to develop technologies that can track “intentions” of users in virtual reality environments.1 Elon Musk has founded a company, Neuralink, to develop “neural lace” technologies which will see chips implanted directly into the brain, so as to integrate thinking with computers. Among Dugan’s projects at Facebook was the development of technologies through which users could send brief “text messages” using only their thoughts, and could “hear” similar messages through their skin, wearing a vibrating sleeve.2 Discussing these new technological frontiers in April 2017, Dugan put a neat multicultural spin on the vision that Zuckerberg had laid out a couple of years earlier: “it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and you to feel it instantly in Spanish.”

If Napoleon turned war into a conflict between national populations, the Cold War turned it into a conflict between national intelligence infrastructures, both in the sense of espionage and of “artificial” intelligence. That paradigm still obtains today. Vladimir Putin has expressed the view, regularly advanced by others such as Elon Musk, that the country that leads the world in artificial intelligence will dominate the twenty-first century.8 The initial question put forward by Turing was whether a machine could “think,” which he argued it could. But this quickly flips into speculation as to what kind of “machine” is the mind. During the 1940s and 1950s, as computers were becoming imbued with almost metaphysical and humane characteristics, cognitive scientists reimagined humans as circuits of information.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

In 2014, the physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”7 In the same year, the entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla and SpaceX companies, said that artificial intelligence is probably “our biggest existential threat” and that “with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”8 Microsoft’s cofounder Bill Gates concurred: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”9 The philosopher Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, on the potential dangers of machines becoming smarter than humans, became a surprise bestseller, despite its dry and ponderous style.

Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—and Doing My Best Not to Flinch,” in Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge, ed. T. Dartnell (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 67–100.   7.  Quoted in R. Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540.   8.  M. McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence, We Are Summoning the Demon,’” Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2014.   9.  Bill Gates, on Reddit, Jan. 28, 2015, www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2tzjp7/hi_reddit_im_bill_gates_and_im_back_for_my_third/?. 10.  Quoted in K. Anderson, “Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 26, 2014. 11.  

Kreye, “A John Henry Moment,” in Brockman, What to Think About Machines That Think, 394–96. 28.  Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 494. 29.  R. Kurzweil, “A Wager on the Turing Test: Why I Think I Will Win,” Kurzweil AI, April 9, 2002, www.kurzweilai.net/a-wager-on-the-turing-test-why-i-think-i-will-win. 30.  Ibid. 31.  Ibid. 32.  Ibid. 33.  M. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair, March 26, 2017. 34.  L. Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” Time, Feb. 10, 2011. 35.  From Singularity University website, accessed Dec. 4, 2018, su.org/about/. 36.  Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 316. 37.  


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These narratives are tied to the forgery of universality: an article in the Atlantic magazine, for example, suggests that science is “in decline,” partly because the random nature of individual scientists’ “previous experiences” plays too large a role in scientific discovery—but that “outsourcing to A.I. could change that.”21 The viability of AI systems exceeding human thought is also conveyed through dystopian scenarios. The Guardian reported that Silicon Valley billionaires are “prepping for the apocalypse” by buying secure hideouts in New Zealand, the “apocalypse” being a situation of “systematic collapse” that may include nuclear war or “rampaging AI.”22 Similarly, Silicon Valley mogul Elon Musk has stated to considerable fanfare that current work on AI is “summoning the demon” and that AI is “our biggest existential threat.”23 These narratives are testament to the unstated consensus among experts that AI possesses transformative powers; this is why fantastical commentaries can pass without even referencing specific instantiations of AI or its history.

For example, in 2017 the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the MIT Media Lab jointly received a $7.6 million grant from a fund created by Reid Hoffman (cofounder of LinkedIn), Pierre Omidyar (cofounder of eBay), William and Flora Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard Company), and the Knight Foundation to study the “ethics and governance” of AI. Other universities have launched similar initiatives. UC Berkeley, for instance, began a $5.5 million initiative in 2016 to study AI, sponsored through a foundation created by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, as well as by the Elon Musk–funded Future of Life foundation. See “Berkeley Launches Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence,” Philanthropy News Digest, September 5, 2016. Carnegie Mellon University started its own new AI center, in partnership with Boeing, Uber, IBM, Microsoft, and the Pentagon, among others.   40.   

Brace for the Robot Apocalypse,” Guardian, February 15, 2019.   21.   Ahmed Alkhateeb, “Can Scientific Discovery Be Automated?,” Atlantic, April 25, 2017.   22.   Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian, February 15, 2018.   23.   Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence We Are Summoning the Demon,’ ” Washington Post, October 24, 2014.   24.   Glenn Greenwald, “Glenn Greenwald: As Bezos Protests Invasion of His Privacy, Amazon Builds Global Surveillance State,” Democracy Now!, February 11, 2019.   25.   Max Tegmark, “Let’s Aspire to More than Making Ourselves Obsolete,” in Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, ed.


pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

He had plowed it into a small empire of good barbecue and guided hunts and, illuminated at night, a curiosity cabinet of magnificently antlered bucks, dozens of heads expertly stuffed. The rich man said it was all for God. He was also interested in artificial intelligence. His brother was investing heavily in Tesla, he said, to get closer to Elon Musk, so he could bring him to Christ. “Imagine,” said the Popper King, “what Elon Musk will be able to do when he knows Jesus!” The Popper King wondered if we might yet discover the ghost in the works, whether a God-fearing Elon might build for us robots with souls. I thought of a recurring theme in Wisconsin Death Trip’s local news clippings of the 1890s: men driven mad—taken off to the asylum—by their attempts to invent a perpetual-motion machine.

I’m just saying, the situation”—he meant his marriage—“was unrecoverable.” 2 The term “red pill” is derived from the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which the hero, Neo, is offered a choice of a red pill that will awaken him to the brutal truth of a world controlled by intelligent machines, or the blue pill, which will allow him to remain contentedly ignorant. “Red-pilling” has been adopted as a meme not only by MRAs but also by White nationalists, despite the film’s radical commitment to genderfluid multiculturalism. “Fuck both of you,” Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski told Ivanka Trump and billionaire troll Elon Musk when they Tweeted their “red-pilled” status to each other in an apparent expression of contempt for Covid-19 protocols. 3 Within the manosphere, Farrell passed as a gentle character. In his daylong pre-conference workshop, he asked attendees to make massage circles, to close their eyes and think of their fathers, to role-play explaining manly needs to the one woman in the session.

“They”—the elites, the communists, the city-dwellers—try to tell us we live in an age of innovation. This, he said is a ruse. “What has been invented in the last fuckin’ hundred and some years?” I suggested a few notable items. James dismissed each as derivative, wan commentary on an age of American genius a hundred years gone. Except, he said, for Elon Musk. I didn’t argue. I never do, with the well-armed. “He wants to colonize Mars,” said James, pulling from within himself a skein of hope for his nine children’s seven children. A mission to colonize Mars, James let himself hope, would make us great again. It’d be like the Old West, like our forefathers.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

I dug in: Various articles from Reuters, Bloomberg, the New York Times, Forbes, and others. 152 Sequoia was blown away . . . during a Zoom call: Sequoia Capital, profile on Sam Bankman-Fried from Sequoiacap.com (since removed), September 22, 2022. 156 We began: Ben McKenzie interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, 1 Hotel Central Park (New York, NY), July 2022. CHAPTER 10: WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? 180 Elon Musk . . . promoted Dogecoin: Eric Deggans, “Elon Musk Takes An Awkward Turn As ‘Saturday Night Live’ Host,” NPR, May 9, 2021. 181 President Biden . . . executive order: White House, “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets,” March 9, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/03/09/executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-development-of-digital-assets/. 181 The statistics cited by the FTC: Emma Fletcher, “Reports show scammers cashing in on crypto craze,” FTC, June 3, 2022, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze. 182 The revolving door kept spinning: Tech Transparency Project, “Crypto Industry Amasses Washington Insiders as Lobbying Blitz Intensifies,” https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/crypto-industry-amasses-washington-insiders-lobbying-blitz-intensifies. 186 Mark Hays: Ben McKenzie interview with Mark Hays, Summer 2022. 188 The United States of America is unique: Conversations with Lee Reiners (policy director at the Duke Financial Economics Center and a lecturing fellow at Duke Law), Summer 2022. 193 John Reed Stark: Ben McKenzie interview with John Reed Stark, Maryland, August 2022. 198 Two weeks later, Kim Kardashian: press release, “SEC Charges Kim Kardashian for Unlawfully Touting Crypto Security,” U.S.

Flash crashes in crypto markets tend to be accompanied by technical snafus or unexplained outages, including an inability to withdraw funds. On September 7, 2021, for example, when El Salvador introduced Bitcoin as a form of legal tender, a market-wide slide led to a number of exchanges reporting transaction delays and other problems. Similarly, Binance users have reported regular technical issues, with Tesla chief executive Elon Musk publicly criticizing the exchange for an issue that prevented traders from withdrawing Dogecoin for at least two weeks in November of 2021. (A Binance representative said that “the Dogecoin withdrawal issue was an unlikely and unfortunate coincidence for Binance and the DOGE network,” and pointed out that “the technical issue was resolved.”)

It was no longer so cool to be a bored ape if your JPEG was now worth a few hundred thousand real dollars less than when you had FOMO’d into it. Analysts argued over whether the NFT market had collapsed by 97 percent or 99 percent. In its public filings, Tesla revealed that it had lost hundreds of millions of dollars on its crypto investments. Elon Musk, the supposed genius billionaire who had gone on Saturday Night Live the year before and promoted Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency he admitted was “a hustle,” had apparently been hustled himself. (Musk was simultaneously in the midst of receiving the most expensive lesson in contract law in history with his ill-conceived bid for Twitter.)


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The Harvard Business School guru Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail) argues, “Financial markets—and companies themselves—use assessment metrics that make innovations that eliminate jobs more attractive than those that create jobs.” Whereas the return on “efficiency innovations” is relatively quick, the more important “market-creating innovations,” which create entirely new industries that produce jobs, have a long time in which to return the investment. Even Silicon Valley heroes such as Elon Musk and his Tesla car are merely producing what Christensen calls “performance-improving innovations [that] replace old products with new and better models. They generally create few jobs because they’re substitutive: When customers buy the new product, they usually don’t buy the old product.” While economists of such different political affiliations as Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, and Tyler Cowen all have written extensively about the cause of the joblessness and “secular stagnation” in the US economy that has endured since 2000, they never examine the role that monopoly capitalism might play in this crisis.

And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs. Google makes sure to place bets on both sides of the aisle. So while Eric Schmidt is advising Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Larry Page flew with Sean Parker and Elon Musk in March of 2016 to a secret Republican meeting at a resort in Sea Island, Georgia, organized by the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute. There they met with Republican leadership, including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as well as Karl Rove, to plan Republican 2016 election strategy.

The conference, called the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, left me wondering whether there isn’t a kind of bubble in the Valley that has nothing to do with the inflated valuations of the “unicorns” (private companies worth more than $1 billion), which were so much a focus of conversation onstage and envy offstage—especially from established Hollywood moguls, who are drawn to Graydon Carter like moths to a flame. The real bubble is a thought bubble, in which the magical thinking of the guys who clearly believe they are the smartest cats in the room goes completely unchallenged. Case in point: Elon Musk, who said that he will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on his quest to inhabit Mars, going so far as to suggest that we cause a nuclear explosion on the planet in order to melt all that frozen water, warm the atmosphere, and enable us to grow vegetables for future space colonies. Musk proposed this with a straight face, and neither the interviewer nor the other panelists even blinked.


Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

Virtual or augmented reality technology may become so advanced as to be indistinguishable from reality, connect directly into our nervous systems, and allow us to live in worlds currently unimaginable. Furthermore, an advanced understanding of the mind may allow us to perfectly simulate the human brain through digital computers and upload our consciousness to the cloud. Organizations such as DARPA10 and Elon Musk’s Neuralink11 are already working to create brain-machine interfaces. These devices would allow our brains to connect directly to computers, convert our thoughts into bits and back again, and augment our intelligence, communication, and more. Theoretically, this could allow us to effectively merge with artificial intelligence, or with other people to form one radically intelligent and capable mind.

When people take action according to their distorted worldviews, they can cause great damage and harm in the name of doing good. (Belief systems may be simplified for demonstration purposes) Methods for Cognitive Debiasing You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong. - Elon Musk Perhaps as you read over these biases you accepted the consistently irrational tendencies we all share. Or maybe, you thought to yourself, “Well, I can see that most people would have that bias, but I don’t think I have that one.” Well, I’ve got another one for you. Bias blind spot refers to the tendency to believe one is immune to the same biases which plague others.

If we are unable to conquer the human tendencies to believe and act according to dogma and desire, the same forces which cause destruction and war today will cause total extinction tomorrow.35 But even the most selfish sociopath has plenty of reason to view the world as clearly as possible. Rationality is a core building block of wisdom. Good decisions in your life, your relationships, and your career or business depend on the ability to think clearly and learn properly. On his excellent blog, Wait But Why, Tim Urban provides an analysis of Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX.36 He suggests a key factor of the entrepreneur’s success is his ongoing endeavor to optimize his own mind. Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns—and since there aren’t companies out there designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tests it every day, and makes constant updates.


pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

.’, @stephenniem, 2017 <https://twitter.com/stephenniem/status/919897406031978496> Muldrew, Craig, ‘ “Th’ancient Distaff” and “Whirling Spindle”: Measuring the Contribution of Spinning to Household Earnings and the National Economy in England,1550–1770’, The Economic History Review, 65 (2012), 498–526 Murray, Margaret Alice, The Tomb of Two Brothers (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1910) Musk, Elon, ‘I Am Elon Musk, CEO/CTO of a Rocket Company, AMA!-R/IAmA’, Reddit, 2015 <https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk_ceocto_of_a_rocket_company_ama/> [accessed 12 December 2017] ———, ‘Instagram Post’, Instagram, 2017 <https://www.instagram.com/p/BYIPmEFAIIn/> [accessed 12 December 2017] N NASA, Apollo 16 – Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcript, April 1972 <https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS16_TEC.PDF> ———, Lunar Module: Quick Reference Data Nelson, Craig, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (London: John Murray, 2009) ‘New Fibres Spur Textile Selling’, New York Times, 19 April 1964, section Finance, p. 14 Newman, Dava, ‘Building the Future Spacesuit’, Ask Magazine, January 2012, 37–40 Nightingale, Pamela, ‘The Rise and Decline of Medieval York: A Reassessment’, Past & Present, 2010, 3–42 ‘Nike Engineers Knit for Performance’, Nike News, 2012 <https://news.nike.com/news/nike-flyknit> [accessed 9 January 2018] ‘Nike Launches Hijab for Female Muslim Athletes’, the Guardian, 8 March 2017, section Business <http://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/08/nike-launches-hijab-for-female-muslim-athletes> [accessed 17 December 2017] Niles’ Weekly Register, 1827, xxxiii Noble, Holcomb B., ‘Secret Weapon or Barn Door?’

One astronaut, upon returning from their mission, reported that a ‘urine dump at sunset’ was the most beautiful thing they’d seen on the entire voyage.42 Man Made for Mars To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. Mary Roach, Packing for Mars, 2010 In the summer of 2017, Elon Musk released a concept image for our space-age future. The picture was of the spacesuit astronauts might wear on the manned version of the SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule. It was sleek and fitted and strikingly monochrome – a world away from the Omega, which Armstrong once memorably described as ‘tough, reliable and almost cuddly’.

Slonim, Effects of Minimal Personal Hygiene and Related Procedures During Prolongued Confinement (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio: Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories, October 1966), p. 4. 39Ibid., pp. 6, 10; Borman, Lovell, and NASA, pp. 156–8; ‘Astronauts’ Dirty Laundry’. 40NASA, Apollo 16, pp. 372, 435. 41Hadfield, quoted in Roach, p. 46. 42PBS; quoted in Nelson, p. 55. 43Musk, ‘I Am Elon Musk; Musk, ‘Instagram Post’; Brinson. 44Monchaux, pp. 263, 95. 45Grush; Mark Harris; Ross et al., pp. 1–11; Dieter. 46Dieter; Newman; Mark Harris; Feinberg; Masse. 47Howell; Burgess, pp. 209, 220–4. 12 Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger 1‘Swimming World Records in Rome’. 2Ibid.; Crouse, ‘Biedermann Stuns Phelps’; Burn-Murdoch; ‘Swimming World Records in Rome’. 3Quoted in Brennan; Crouse. 4Wilson 5‘Space Age Swimsuit Reduces Drag’.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

It is quite possible that car ownership would fall sharply as people predominantly chose to take rides in driverless vehicles from a floating pool. A joint study by the World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group sees substantial scope for the sharing of rides in driverless cars, thereby undermining the market for public transport.6 Elon Musk has said that “owning a human-driven vehicle will be similar to owning a horse – rare and optional.7 The results would include fewer cars needing to be built (as well as sold, repaired, insured, etc.). Additionally, there would be less demand for space to park cars that remain idle most of the time.

Advocates of the vision of driverless vehicles sometimes try to counter the point about “safety drivers” still being needed by pointing out that these “safety drivers” can still provide some of the ancillary services provided by drivers now, such as helping passengers with their bags, helping them in and out of the vehicle, and chatting to them during the journey. This is true, but they cannot do this anymore when they are not actually driving the vehicle than when they are. And while they are there in the car, they cost just the same. So, what’s the point? Overall assessment Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, has warned against setting the safety requirements of driverless vehicles too high. After all, he reasons, since human error when driving is responsible for a large number of fatalities, there is room for driverless vehicles to cause some fatal accidents that a human driver could have avoided and yet for the introduction of driverless cars still to reduce the overall accident rate and the number of fatalities.

Accordingly, it makes sense for us now to leave it to one side and to concentrate on the more mainstream idea of a UBI. It seems much more likely to fly. Indeed, in some senses it has already taken off. Illustrious support The essential principle of a UBI has recently received widespread support, including from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. At the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, referring to the coming transformation of transportation, the latter said: “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12 [to] 15 percent of the workforce be unemployed.” And on UBI he said: “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice.


pages: 353 words: 106,704

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, connected car, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Hyperloop, index card, Indoor air pollution, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, white picket fence

Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, accessed November 27, 2017, https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.html. 28 “Cars on England’s Roads Increase by Almost 600,000 in a Year,” BBC News, January 20, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35312562. 29 “PC World Vehicles in Use,” International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, accessed November 27, 2017, http://www.oica.net/wp-content/uploads//PC_Vehicles-in-use.pdf. 30 Transport Outlook: Seamless Transport for Greener Growth, International Transport Forum at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development 2012: 31, accessed August 20, 2018, https://www.oecd.org/greengrowth/greening-transport/Transport%20Outlook%202012.pdf. 31 David Roberts, “China Made Solar Panels Cheap. Now It’s Doing the Same for Electric Buses,” Vox, April 17, 2018, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/4/17/17239368/china-investment-solar-electric-buses-cost. 32 Kara Swisher, “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech,” New York Times, August 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/opinion/elon-musk-crazy-tesla.html. 33 Swisher, “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” Chapter Nine 1 Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles (New York: Overlook Press, 2008), 13–17, 35, 51–52. 2 Arthur Winer, emeritus professor, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, UCLA, Skype interview with author, January 27, 2015. 3 Mary Nichols, “UCLA Faculty Voice: How Angelenos Beat Back Smog,” UCLA Newsroom, October 20, 2015, accessed November 14, 2017, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/ucla-faculty-voice-how-angelenos-beat-back-smog. 4 Connie Koenenn, “Bent on Clearing the Air: Attorney Mary Nichols Hopes ‘Amazing L.A.’

As Kim bids us farewell—“Hopefully I showed a lot of the magic and the mystery around your car,” she says—I finally realize what’s missing, the part I haven’t seen here, one so familiar it’s taken me until now to clock its absence. There are no exhaust pipes on these cars. Tesla—with its sleek style and big ambitions, its well-publicized troubles, and a CEO, Elon Musk, whom one columnist dubbed “the id of tech”32—has taken on outsized symbolism as the representative of an industry hoping to jump from its infancy straight into adolescence and beyond. Its cars drive smoothly, require little maintenance, and are replete with clever touches like door handles that pop out when a driver approaches and large touch screens in place of old-fashioned dashboard controls.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

As with climbers, every person, every company, every agency faces both opportunities and obstacles to their progress. Yes, we all need motivation, ambition, and strength. But, by themselves, they are not enough. To deal with a set of challenges, there is power in locating your crux—where you can gain the most by designing, discovering, or finding a way to move through and past it. ONE OF ENTREPRENEUR Elon Musk’s passions is populating Mars. He imagined promoting this idea by sending a small payload there. In a 2001 visit to Russia, Musk tried to buy an old Russian rocket but was unhappy with the style of bargaining and how the price tripled during the negotiations. He began to look at the problem of why it cost so much to put payloads into orbit.

Going into space is risky, and rockets are risky. The current media climate would turn any fatal accident into a circus. Under current norms, there would have never been the development of aircraft during the twentieth century—someone might get hurt. I can tell you that the key to SpaceX’s advantage in rocketry arose from Elon Musk’s grasp of the crux of the problem and his insight into how to surmount it. Plus, advantage is created by the company’s coherent policies, all directed reliably at putting mass into orbit at the lowest cost possible. EFFECTIVE PEOPLE GAIN insight through finding and concentrating attention on the crux of a challenge—the part of the tangle of issues that is both very important and addressable (which can be overcome with reasonable surety).

For example, a proposal to build more low-income housing should be confronted by the fact that people in such developments have, in the past, been the frequent victims of crime.8 Without a law-enforcement or crime-control substrategy, simply building the project may do more harm than good. Given this history, a new solution to low-income housing requires an audacious leap to a novel mixture of policy, architecture, planning, and action. Elon Musk, as we noted earlier, saw the crux of the challenge of cheaper cost to orbit as reusability. His audacious leap occurred when he realized that fuel is cheaper than hardware. His new rocket would include extra fuel so it could return to Earth without burning up. Here are some more examples of audacious leaps to action based on a recognition of a crux: • Like Russia, China had traditionally collected tax and operating revenues centrally and then allocated funds based on various plans.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Hence why the threat of planetary deterioration is rarely a consideration when it comes to major decisions. Why have children if we suspect that they will have to fight over basic resources like water? Why buy property in a coastal city that is likely to be flooded by rising water levels? Why not just sit back and have faith that Elon Musk will save us? For the governments who are genuinely committed to starving off an environmental Armageddon, a saner assumption is that Elon will flee to Mars (along with every fellow plutocrat wealthy enough to afford the ride) and watch the world burn from afar. One can always take the middle ground and refuse to succumb to excessive optimism or pessimism.

In some cases, like that of PayPal founder Peter Thiel (perhaps the most vocal libertarian of his cohort) the obsession with market fundamentalism made him become a staunch supporter of Trump, and he even served as part of his transition team. He remained a Trump advisor even after many of his tech colleagues, such as Elon Musk, abandoned the administration due to its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Figure 6.7: The bigger firms keep getting bigger Notes: This chart shows the share of revenues by the top 4 firms in each industry (based on NAICS two-digit levels which are given in parenthesis) where data on industry concentration is available.

Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.34 This monarchy, of course, would be a corporatist one. In other words, government would operate not unlike an actual enterprise with the CEO as the monarch and the populace as the shareholders. Yarvin calls this system of government “neocameralist” and he certainly has one man in line for the job: “It’s easy to say ‘put Elon [Musk] in charge, he’ll figure it out,’ and he might well”.35 Some tech tycoons certainly appear to be eying the possibility of running for office. Before Facebook was riddled with public scandals over its role in the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg went on a country-wide road trip that led to suspicions that he may have been harboring presidential ambitions.36 The trip was immaculately staged and photographed, and the people he interviewed carefully chosen so as to not be too controversial nor disruptive, which goes to show how loosely he correlates transparency with democracy.


The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Vrimani, “Ocean vs Space: Exploration and the Quest to Inspire the Public,” Marine Technology News, June 7, 2017, https://www.marinetechnologynews.com/news/ocean-space-exploration-quest-549183. 13.Alex Macon, “When SpaceX Rockets Take Flight (or Blow Up), LabPadre Is Watching,” TexasMonthly, December 15, 2020, https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/spacex-rockets-launch-labpadre-livestream/. 14.FY 2020 Agency Financial Report, NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_fy2020_afr_508_compliance_v4.pdf. 15.Mike Read, “Virtual Conference: Industry Role in Seabed 2030,” Marine Technology Society Virtual Symposia, June 11, 2020, https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/3054056681389715723. 16.Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger, “How the IRS Was Gutted,” ProPublica, December 18, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted. 17.Chris Isidore, “Elon Musk’s US Tax Bill: $11 Billion. Tesla’s: $0 | CNN Business,” CNN, February 10, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html. 18.Kim McQuaid, “Selling the Space Age: NASA and Earth’s Environment, 1958–1990,” Environment and History 12, no. 2 (May 2006): 127–63, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20723571. 19.Carl Sagan, “The Gift of Apollo,” Parade, January 11, 2014, https://parade.com/249407/carlsagan/the-gift-of-apollo/. 20.Maria Johansson et al., “Is Human Fear Affecting Public Willingness to Pay for the Management and Conservation of Large Carnivores?

Throughout the twentieth century, national governments typically funded scientific or military operations to reach extreme unexplored terrain, but more recently, the world’s wealthiest individuals—most of them white men—have been outpacing government investment by forming their own private exploration companies. Critics argue that companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are not a step forward but rather a slide backward, throwing up barriers that only the rich and connected can hope to overcome. By privatizing exploration, such companies make exploration in the twenty-first century look a lot like exploration in the nineteenth century, when the brutal inequalities of England’s Industrial Revolution provided enough “gentlemen explorers” with the time and money to pursue a new hobby: striking out for unknown terrain.7 Over the coming four years, Victor would sink millions into chasing the five deepest dives that Branson had abandoned.

But after decades of neoliberal capitalism, hobbled government agencies,16 and the wealthiest people and corporations paying little to no tax, the richest people in the world can now launch private exploration companies that rival the US government’s. For now, the clients for deep-sea and space travel are other ultrarich patrons or government agencies, such as NASA contracting SpaceX to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. But the spacefaring entrepreneur Elon Musk—at one point the richest man in the world, whose car company, Tesla, paid zero federal income tax in 202117—dreams of a day when the masses can afford a trip to Mars. Of course, everyone would be better served by less flashy ambitions, such as a sustainable future here on planet Earth. The two fields also share the hunt for extreme life that thrives in severe conditions found in the deep sea and on faraway planets.


Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, deal flow, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, diversification, drop ship, Elon Musk, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, high net worth, intangible asset, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, Peter Thiel, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, Y Combinator

By combining an investment in the existing revenue, infrastructure, and earnings with the drive and innovation fueling the entrepreneur, acquisition provides a powerful recipe, allowing existing companies to go to new heights, having tremendous impact, and providing a platform for the entrepreneur’s art. 10 ACQUISITION ENTREPRENEURSHIP VERSES VENTURE CAPITAL Acquisition entrepreneurship is not right for every circumstance or everyone. After all, certain entrepreneurs have enjoyed such remarkable success that they have obtained celebrity, even legendary status. We’re all familiar with the titans of technology who dominate the business media: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, to name a few. These 9 guys didn’t start by buying a company, so why should you? Lately, it’s been the startups able to get to the billion-dollar valuation, the “unicorn” companies, in the limelight. These companies are changing how we live and work, and they are not only creating tremendous value but are introducing new business models.

The knowledge that things are malleable creates an interest for solving market problems, generating innovative solutions, and implementing ongoing improvement—both for yourself and your work— which is the mark of successful entrepreneur. A fixed mindset, by contrast, confirms a deterministic view of the world and results in never achieving your full potential. Without a growth mindset, Elon Musk’s SpaceX would never have achieved successful trips to the International Space Station after the first three rockets literally crashed and burned. Or, take Thomas Edison. His teachers notoriously said he was “too stupid to learn anything,” and he ultimately failed over 1,000 times before eventually creating the lightbulb.

It could be an eternally profitable, high growth, or turnaround. More likely, it’s somewhere in the middle. A nice, “good” company with some aspects of stability and some of risk, but the goal is to define an acquisition target by the growth opportunity it provides. It’s a little understood fact that Elon Musk bought PayPal when his own similar startup X.com, well, failed. Peter Thiel came with the acquisition and later ran PayPal as CEO. Tesla, as well. Although he is now considered a founder, the company was started by two others and grown very effectively by Musk. Gary Vaynerchuk took over his parents’ liquor store.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, which had become one of the many Trump media bêtes noires in the media world, nevertheless took pains to reach out not only to the presidentelect but to his daughter Ivanka. During the campaign, Trump said Amazon was getting “away with murder taxwise” and that if he won, “Oh, do they have problems.” Now Trump was suddenly praising Bezos as “a top-level genius.” Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration’s joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at. Stephen Schwarzman, the head of the Blackstone Group—and a Kushner friend—offered to organize a business council for Trump, which Trump embraced. Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and fashion industry queen, had hoped to be named America’s ambassador to the UK under Obama and, when that didn’t happen, closely aligned herself with Hillary Clinton.

In the restaurant that morning: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman; Washington fixture, lobbyist, and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan; labor secretary nominee Wilbur Ross; Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith; Washington Post national reporter Mark Berman; and a table full of women lobbyists and fixers, including the music industry’s longtime representative in Washington, Hillary Rosen; Elon Musk’s D.C. adviser, Juleanna Glover; Uber’s political and policy executive, Niki Christoff; and Time Warner’s political affairs executive, Carol Melton. In some sense—putting aside both her father’s presence in the White House and his tirades against draining the swamp, which might otherwise include most everyone here, this was the type of room Ivanka had worked hard to be in.

The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol. Uber’s Kalanick resigned from the council. Disney CEO Bob Iger simply found that he was otherwise occupied on the occasion of the forum’s first meeting. But most of the people on the council—other than Elon Musk, the investor, inventor, and founder of Tesla (who would later resign)—were not from media or tech companies, with their liberal bent, but from old-line, when-America-was-great enterprises. They included Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors; Ginni Rometty of IBM; Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE; Jim McNerney, the former CEO of Boeing; and Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

The fears surrounding AI oscillate between its nascent reality and its omnipotent future. Thought leaders and industry moguls from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have warned that at a critical moment when AI becomes independent, the human race should be quite concerned about its own survival. Hawking wrote, “The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” He worried that once humans develop full AI, it will take off on its own and redesign itself without human control. Elon Musk has warned that AI may become a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”18 The thought experiment goes like this: What if we told a robot to maximize the number of paper clips it produces or the number of strawberry fields it plants?

Subcomm. on Energy, H. Comm. on Sci., Space & Tech., 115th Cong. 50 (2018). 17. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950): 433, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433. 18. David Z. Morris, “Elon Musk Says Artificial Intelligence Is the ‘Greatest Risk We Face as a Civilization,” Fortune, July 15, 2017, https://fortune.com/2017/07/15/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-2/. 19. Joshua Gans, “AI and the Paperclip Problem,” VoxEU, June 10, 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/ai-and-paperclip-problem. 20. Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 286. 21.


Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Slaying Giants with Basic Income 31 (6) The robot advance One relatively new justification for a basic income is the threat to jobs posed by robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Bank of England, the OECD and the McKinsey Global Institute are among those predicting the disappearance of huge numbers of jobs over the next two decades.61 Elon Musk, one of several very wealthy and successful entrepreneurs who have made similar statements, has concluded that a basic income is a necessary policy for a fast-approaching future in which ‘there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better’. There are reasons for scepticism about the more apocalyptic forecasts.

Sensible, modern business folk, including leading entrepreneurs and CEOs of mainstream corporations, also understand that basically secure people make more cooperative and productive workers, and even more rational consumers. Those on the political left should not be cynical about the fact that leading entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson have come out in favour of basic income. There is growing evidence that a basic income has popular support and the potential for much more, contrary to jaundiced views by prominent figures who have not studied the subject.2 Two types of evidence are worth mentioning. Some years ago, a team of social psychologists conducted experiments in deliberative democracy covering large samples in three countries, in which people were asked to decide which of four options of fair distribution policy should have precedence.


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The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

It doesn’t matter what the reality is—Amazon will win, as it’s playing poker with ten times the chips. Amazon can muscle everyone else out of the game. The real hand-wringing is going to begin when people start asking if what’s good for Amazon is bad for society. It’s interesting to note that even while some scientists and tech tycoons (Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk) publicly worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and others (Pierre Omidyar, Reid Hoffman) have funded research on the subject, Jeff Bezos is implementing robotics as fast as he can at Amazon. The company increased the number of robots in its warehouses 50 percent in 2016.37 Peterson, Hayley.

In sum, the parent brand “China” provides an unwelcome halo of “We may not be cool, but we are corrupt.” In high school, the “Bad Boy” who was also lame did not get laid. Tesla History is littered with the skeletons of entrepreneurs who challenged big auto—they make movies about them (think Tucker). But right now, it looks as if the movie about Elon Musk involves a dope outfit and a brooding Gwyneth Paltrow. Tesla faces challenges, but it has accomplished more than any other start-up automobile company in our lifetime, and looks well positioned to solidify its position as the market leader in electric- powered cars. Although it remains mostly a luxury product for Silicon Valley bros, its combination of design (no more Hobbit electric cars), innovation in digital control, and massive investment in infrastructure (notably the giant battery factory outside Reno)—not to mention its Edison-like, visionary leader—suggest Tesla has the potential to bust out of its specialty niche and become a mass market player.

It’s a fundamental American myth, from Ayn Rand’s still influential personification of entrepreneurial independence in Hank Rearden to the mythmaking that erupted upon the death of Steve Jobs. Entrepreneurs are seen as individual, self-made visionaries with vast wealth. They are perhaps the purest expression of the American hero. Superhero, even. Superman can reverse the rotation of the Earth, but Iron Man Tony Stark would be better on an earnings call and is a very human superhero—Elon Musk. As we’ve discussed, it’s not for most people—and the odds against you seem heavier by the year. In fact, very few people have the personality characteristics and skills that make up a successful entrepreneur. And it isn’t about being “good enough” or “smart enough”—indeed, some of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs are real detriments in other aspects of life.


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The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Bob violino, “Why Robotic Process Automation Adoption Is on the Rise,” ZDNet.com, November 18, 2016. 4. Harriet Taylor, “Bank of America Launches AI Chatbot Erica —Here’s What It Does,” MONEY 20/20, CNBC.com, October 24, 2016. 5. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Great A.I. Awakening,” New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2016. 6. Ron Miller, “Artificial Intelligence Is Not as Smart as You (or Elon Musk),” TechCrunch.com, July 25, 2017. 7. Disney Research, “Neural Nets Model Audience Reactions to Movies,” Phys.org, July 21, 2017. 8. Specifically, 60 percent of jobs are in occupations where at least 30 percent of the job is automatable using proven technology according to McKinsey Global Institute in “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity,” January 2017. 9.

In Gate’s view, job displacement is coming too fast for the economy to absorb. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed.”1 And Gates is not the only rich tech guy who’s worried. The technology entrepreneur, Elon Musk, who owns rocket ships as a sideline to being CEO of Tesla, also knows a thing or two about disruptive technologies. Tesla was valued more highly by the stock market in 2017 than any of the traditional carmakers. And Musk is as concerned as Gates. Here is how he phrases it: “What to do about mass unemployment?

If history is a guide, the next step will be some form of backlash, and possibly another wave of populism. It has happened before. 1. Quote from Kevin Delaney, “The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes, Says Bill Gates,” Quartz, February 17, 2017. 2. Quote from Quincy Larson, “A Warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking,” freeCodeCamp.org, February 18, 2017. 3. Quoted in Walt Mossberg, “Five Things I Learned from Jeff Bezos at Code,” Recode (blog), June 8, 2016. 4. Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” The Guardian, December 1, 2016. 5. Quotes from Adam Lashinksy, “Yes, AI Will Kill Jobs.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

We passed another Tesla in Greenwich Village, and we waved. This is a thing that Tesla owners do: they wave to each other. Drive a Tesla on the highway in San Francisco, and your arm gets tired from waving. Ryan kept referring to Elon Musk. A cult of personality surrounds Musk, unlike any other car designer. Who designed the Ford Explorer? I have no idea. But Elon Musk, even my son knew. “He’s famous,” my son said. “He was even a guest star on the Simpsons.” We parked and took a picture of my son and me standing next to the bright white car, its wings up. We got into our family car parked outside.

“You know, regulations,” meant that Joshua Brown died in an Autopilot crash and the NTHSA hadn’t yet finished its investigation—so Tesla had turned off the Autopilot on all cars until the developers could build, test, and roll out new features. Ryan chatted about the future, which in his view meant Teslas everywhere. “When we have full autonomy, Elon Musk says you should be able to press a button and summon your car no matter where you are. It might take a few days for your car to find you, but it should arrive.” I wondered if it occurred to him that waiting for days for your car to arrive kind of defeats the point of having a car at all. “Someday” is the most common way to talk about autonomous vehicles.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Meanwhile the rest of us who lie on the couch and watch films get almost 98 per cent, in lower prices for goods and services, and therefore increased purchasing power. This is a beneficial form of inequality, and the greater the profits made by entrepreneurs, the more our 98 per cent share will be worth. On the other hand, 2.2 per cent of multi-billion profits are enough to become a new Ingvar Kamprad, Bill Gates or Elon Musk, and the hope of joining them can inspire many. Sven Norfeldt, one of Sweden’s most successful entrepreneurs, once described the market to me as a minefield. Over there, on the other side, there is new knowledge, capacities, products and services that could enrich the whole of society. But our path there is blocked by a minefield of uncertainty, technological dead-ends, unpredictable consumers, shifting business cycles, interest rate changes, capricious policies and plain bad luck.

Can we even find a single collective project that would make Patrick Deneen, Noreena Hertz, Joel Halldorf and Nina Björk cuddle together in communitarian hygge? Even then we are still only talking about a small homogeneous group of Western intellectuals who demand a collective political project. What does the collective utopia look like that would fill the empty hearts of such diverse people as Stephen Fry, MrBeast, Elon Musk, Billie Eilish, Roger Federer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Danielle Steel, Richard Dawkins, PewDiePie, Robert Downey Jr, Nick Cave, LeBron James, Larry David, Donald Trump, Kylie Jenner, The Rock, Boris Johnson, Quentin Tarantino, Posh Spice, Robert Smith, Chris Rock, Blixa Bargeld, Neal Stephenson, Kim Kardashian, Lionel Messi, Johan Norberg and some 7.9 billion more?

Nordhaus, ‘Schumpeterian profits in the American economy: Theory and measurement’, NBER Working Paper no.10433, 2004. 6. Compare with Frédéric Bastiat’s reasoning on the invention of the printing press, Bastiat 1964, pp.37f. 7. Donald Boudreaux, Globalization, Greenwood Press, 2008, p.32f. 8. Not Gates any more. Jeff Bezos beat him a few years back, then it was Elon Musk and now it is Bernard Arnault. It changes very fast depending on the temporary stock prices of the companies the super-rich founded, so I’ll continue to use Gates as an example for a while. 9. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014, p.444ff. 10. Ibid., p.31. 11.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

In December 2022, several thousand German law enforcement agents were involved in arresting a group suspected of plotting a violent coup – based on QAnon ideology – that sought to reimpose the country’s Second Reich.17 Simultaneously, in the US the world’s second-richest man – and the owner of one of the world’s key social networks, Twitter – was openly flirting with QAnon conspiracy theories, falsely suggesting that Twitter’s former head of trust and safety supports the sexualisation of children, and that Anthony Fauci (the chief medical advisor of the US) should be prosecuted in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic. So overt was Musk’s flirtation with the Q movement that some within it started to wonder whether Elon Musk, not Donald Trump, was the movement’s promised saviour.18 QAnon constantly changes shape, but it just keeps coming. We can’t just study each of these manifestations as some kind of independent occurrence, as if each emerged from nothing and eventually dwindled – there is a reason the internet keeps generating these movements, and until we change the internet, it will continue to do so.

In the UK, for example, only 7 per cent of people are privately educated, but 59 per cent of Liz Truss’s first cabinet were. Top journalists and top politicians are often married to one another. The ultra-rich know and socialise with each other – PayPal founder and billionaire Peter Thiel knows billionaire and former PayPal CEO Elon Musk, who socialises with Google founder Larry Page, and so on. But the reality of it being a small world at the top is transformed into a conspiracy theory that they are actively conniving and running the show as a cabal of some sort. It’s a theory that is perhaps oddly more reassuring than the idea that everything is just random, and everyone is fumbling their way through life.

Mass Shooter Said He Was American, Trump-Supporting Virgin’, www.thedailybeast.com, 13 August 2021. 16. Complaint online at https://heavy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/USA-v-Coleman-COMPLAINT.pdf. 17. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/12/germany-conspiracy-us-arrests-january-6-capitol-attack-bundestag-nazism-reich-coup/ 18. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-replacing-trump-qanon-celebrity-du-jour-twitter-rcna61802 1 ASK THE Q 1. moot is no longer anonymous but is still a rather private individual, as his personal site shows: https://moot.tumblr.com. 2. The (priceless) headline was ‘Modest Web Site Is Behind a Bevy of Memes’, by Jamin Brophy-Warren, www.wsj.com, 9 July 2008. 3.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us. Innovation happens through entrepreneurship and it is impossible to grasp innovation without understanding the business motivations behind it. In reality, books like ours cannot substitute for studies of successful entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sam Walton, and the business environment they and others created in their respective firms. More people than we can mention have generously taken the time to talk through particular issues with us or showed us the power of new technology and innovative business ideas. We are particularly grateful to a group of friends who have read, commented, and in other ways helped us with various versions of the manuscript.

Most sizable modern companies have automated information flows in their production and logistics, and these flows will prompt action even if there is no human being to command it. But Beer’s Cybersyn was not a product of Silicon Valley, the MIT Media Lab, or other places where big-data business models grow and artificial intelligence develops. He was not hired by Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, nor was he in the employment of NASA or the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. He never had a Facebook account, and never tweeted his cybernetic vision. The long-bearded, Rolls-Royce-driving Beer is fascinating because he is a product of history. He died in 2002 and his grand cybernetic model was created over 40 years ago.

It also boosted the number of M&As, because companies needed to become bigger than before to capture the specialization gains from a growing world economy. There was little demand for innovators and entrepreneurs fanning that “perennial gale of creative destruction,” and that demand naturally declined as companies turned into logistics hubs. Executive recruiters were not scouting for entrepreneurial people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to take up key positions in multinationals. They wanted executives with specialisms in optimization, management, logistics, capital markets, and other key operative functions of a firm. They wanted trusted partners from the “technostructure” of managerial capitalism, to quote John Kenneth Galbraith.6 And these partners were planners, not entrepreneurs.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

id=sjMsDwAAQBAJ. 86The US Department of Defense defines: Heather Roff (9 Feb 2016), “Distinguishing autonomous from automatic weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://thebulletin.org/autonomous-weapons-civilian-safety-and-regulation-versus-prohibition/distinguishing-autonomous-automatic-weapons. 86If they are autonomous: Paul Scharre (29 Feb 2016), “Autonomous weapons and operational risk,” Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/autonomous-weapons-and-operational-risk. 86Technologists Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking: Michael Sainato (19 Aug 2015), “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates warn about artificial intelligence,” Observer, http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence. 86The risks might be remote: Stuart Russell et al. (11 Jan 2015), “An open letter: Research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence,” Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter. 86I am less worried about AI: These two essays talk about that: Ted Chiang (18 Dec 2017), “Silicon Valley is turning into its own worst fear,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway.

Weapons that can’t be recalled or turned off—and also operate at computer speeds—could cause all sorts of lethal problems for friend and foe alike. All of this comes together in artificial intelligence. Over the past few years, we’ve read some dire predictions about the dangers of AI. Technologists Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking, and philosopher Nick Bostrom, have all warned of a future where artificial intelligence—either as intelligent robots or as something less personified—becomes so powerful that it takes over the world and enslaves, exterminates, or ignores humanity. The risks might be remote, they argue, but they’re so serious that it would be foolish to ignore them.


pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Ring and Orseau, “Delusion, Survival, and Intelligent Agents.” 73. Plato, Protagoras and Meno. In Plato’s text, Socrates poses this to Protagoras in the interrogative, though he makes clear that this is indeed his view. CHAPTER 7. IMITATION 1. Egan, Axiomatic. 2. Elon Musk, interviewed by Sarah Lacy, “A Fireside Chat with Elon Musk,” Santa Monica, CA, July 12, 2012, https://pando.com/2012/07/12/pandomonthly-presents-a-fireside-chat-with-elon-musk/. Not only was the car uninsured, but Peter Thiel was not wearing a seat belt. “It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” says Thiel. See Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself.” 3. This is discussed in greater detail in Visalberghi and Fragaszy, “Do Monkeys Ape?”

“If he can distinguish good from evil, nothing will force him to act otherwise than as knowledge dictates, since wisdom is all the reinforcement he needs.”73 PART III Normativity 7 IMITATION I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me. —GREG EGAN1 Watch this. —ELON MUSK TO PETER THIEL, IMMEDIATELY BEFORE LOSING CONTROL OF AND CRASHING HIS UNINSURED $1 MILLION MCLAREN F12 In English, we say that to imitate something is to “ape” it, and we’re not the only ones; this seemingly arbitrary linguistic quirk appears again and again across languages and cultures. The Italian scimmiottare, French singer, Portuguese macaquear, German nachäffen, Bulgarian majmuna, Russian обезьянничать, Hungarian majmol, Polish małpować, Estonian ahvima: verbs for imitation and mimicry, again and again, have their etymologies rooted in terms for primates.3 Indeed, the simian reputation for being a great imitator, not just in etymology but in science, goes back a century and a half at the minimum.

But I am certain that, at a minimum, conversations and exchanges with the following people have made the book what it is: Pieter Abbeel, Rebecca Ackerman, Dave Ackley, Ross Exo Adams, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Jacky Alciné, Dario Amodei, McKane Andrus, Julia Angwin, Stuart Armstrong, Gustaf Arrhenius, Amanda Askell, Mayank Bansal, Daniel Barcay, Solon Barocas, Renata Barreto, Andrew Barto, Basia Bartz, Marc Bellemare, Tolga Bolukbasi, Nick Bostrom, Malo Bourgon, Tim Brennan, Miles Brundage, Joanna Bryson, Krister Bykvist, Maya Çakmak, Ryan Carey, Joseph Carlsmith, Rich Caruana, Ruth Chang, Alexandra Chouldechova, Randy Christian, Paul Christiano, Jonathan Cohen, Catherine Collins, Sam Corbett-Davies, Meehan Crist, Andrew Critch, Fiery Cushman, Allan Dafoe, Raph D’Amico, Peter Dayan, Michael Dennis, Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Anca Drăgan, Eric Drexler, Rachit Dubey, Cynthia Dwork, Peter Eckersley, Joe Edelman, Owain Evans, Tom Everitt, Ed Felten, Daniel Filan, Jaime Fisac, Luciano Floridi, Carrick Flynn, Jeremy Freeman, Yarin Gal, Surya Ganguli, Scott Garrabrant, Vael Gates, Tom Gilbert, Adam Gleave, Paul Glimcher, Sharad Goel, Adam Goldstein, Ian Goodfellow, Bryce Goodman, Alison Gopnik, Samir Goswami, Hilary Greaves, Joshua Greene, Tom Griffiths, David Gunning, Gillian Hadfield, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Moritz Hardt, Tristan Harris, David Heeger, Dan Hendrycks, Geoff Hinton, Matt Huebert, Tim Hwang, Geoffrey Irving, Adam Kalai, Henry Kaplan, Been Kim, Perri Klass, Jon Kleinberg, Caroline Knapp, Victoria Krakovna, Frances Kreimer, David Kreuger, Kaitlyn Krieger, Mike Krieger, Alexander Krizhevsky, Jacob Lagerros, Lily Lamboy, Lydia Laurenson, James Lee, Jan Leike, Ayden LeRoux, Karen Levy, Falk Lieder, Michael Littman, Tania Lombrozo, Will MacAskill, Scott Mauvais, Margaret McCarthy, Andrew Meltzoff, Smitha Milli, Martha Minow, Karthika Mohan, Adrien Morisot, Julia Mosquera, Sendhil Mullainathan, Elon Musk, Yael Niv, Brandie Nonnecke, Peter Norvig, Alexandr Notchenko, Chris Olah, Catherine Olsson, Toby Ord, Tim O’Reilly, Laurent Orseau, Pedro Ortega, Michael Page, Deepak Pathak, Alex Peysakhovich, Gualtiero Piccinini, Dean Pomerleau, James Portnow, Aza Raskin, Stéphane Ross, Cynthia Rudin, Jack Rusher, Stuart Russell, Anna Salamon, Anders Sandberg, Wolfram Schultz, Laura Schulz, Julie Shah, Rohin Shah, Max Shron, Carl Shulman, Satinder Singh, Holly Smith, Nate Soares, Daisy Stanton, Jacob Steinhardt, Jonathan Stray, Rachel Sussman, Jaan Tallinn, Milind Tambe, Sofi Thanhauser, Tena Thau, Jasjeet Thind, Travis Timmerman, Brian Tse, Alexander Matt Turner, Phebe Vayanos, Kerstin Vignard, Chris Wiggins, Cutter Wood, and Elana Zeide.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

‘We’re not trying to bring material back to Earth. We’re after hydrocarbons, water, nickel, iron. All the materials you’d need to build cities in space.’ ‘And you actually think we’ll live to see people living in space?’ ‘I think I’ll live another thirty years, yeah,’ he said. ‘Elon Musk wants to put people on Mars by 2026. Anyone else at any other time in history would’ve been mad to say that. But this is Elon Musk.’ I wondered about the influence of Ayn Rand among his fellow founders. Steve Jobs, for one, is said to have treated Atlas Shrugged as his ‘guide in life,’ whilst Travis Kalanick of Uber used the cover of The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar.

Once the specific microbial species that made up their particular bacterial community was analysed, a personalized treatment would be delivered. Austen was immediately interested. He agreed to help not only with the technology but with business advice. He took a 10 per cent stake in her company. Word of his work spread further. He met Sergey Brin from Google, Elon Musk from Tesla and SpaceX and Jared Leto from the movies. He was invited to Richard Branson’s private island, where apparently he silenced the billionaire’s dinner table with his visions of an intentionally designed, synthetic future. He was interviewed by Fortune and NPR and Wired. CNN named his technology as one of its ‘Top Ten Ideas That Could Save Lives’.

Ultimately, we can all take comfort in the understanding that they’re not actually perfect, and that none of us ever will be. We’re not, as we’ve been promised, ‘as gods’. On the contrary, we’re animals but we think we’re not animals. We’re products of the mud. * Before I left Silicon Valley, I accompanied some residents of the Rainbow Mansion to a rocket launch. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX had been contracted to take a NASA satellite into orbit. As we drove south out of Cupertino, I watched as the blue dot on my smartphone’s map passed Big Sur and Esalen, not far to the west. With the highway running into the great Californian sky in front of us, I thought about the other journey I’d been on, which was now, finally, drawing to a close.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

“Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war,” acknowledged Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1955, “for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.”131 Today, just 25 percent of Americans say they believe nuclear weapons can be eliminated.132 When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”133 After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer put out word that “the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.”134 9 Destroying the Environment to Save It 1. “The Only Path” In spring 2015, Elon Musk walked on stage to loud applause from an audience of hundreds of supporters and invited guests. “What I’m going to talk about tonight,” he said, “is a fundamental transformation of how the world works, about how energy is delivered across Earth. “This is how it is today—it’s pretty bad.” He showed a graph of rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Human civilization would have to occupy one hundred to one thousand times more space if it were to rely solely on renewables. “This power density gap between fossil and renewable energies,” writes energy analyst Vaclav Smil, “leaves nuclear electricity generation as the only commercially proven non-fossil high-power-density alternative.”81 What about Elon Musk’s claim that an apparently tiny square of solar panels could power the United States? It was deeply misleading. If the only requirement was producing the same total electricity the United States currently does, regardless of time of day or season, Musk underestimated the required land area by 40 percent.

“CNN Poll: Public Divided on Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons,” CNN, April 12, 2010, http://www.cnn.com. 133. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 309. 134. Ibid., 317. 9: Destroying the Environment to Save It 1. Bryan Bishop and Josh Dzieza, “Tesla Energy Is Elon Musk’s Battery System That Can Power Homes, Businesses, and the World,” The Verge, May 1, 2015, https://www.theverge.com. 2. Tesla, “Tesla introduces Tesla Energy,” YouTube, May 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=82&v=NvCIhn7_FXI&feature=emb_logo. 3. H. J. Mai, “Tesla Powerwall, Powerpack deployment grows 81% to 415 MWh in Q2,” Utility Dive, July 30, 2019, https://www.utilitydive.com. 4.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

., “PM2.5 Exposure Impairs Sperm Quality through Testicular Damage Dependent on NALP3 Inflammasome and miR-183/96/182 cluster Targeting FOXO1 in Mouse,” Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 169 (March 2019): 551–63, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2018.10.108. 9 NASA, “NASA Announces US Industry Partnerships to Advance Moon, Mars Technology,” press release no. 19-063, July 30, 2019, https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-us-industry-partnerships-to-advance-moon-mars-technology. 10 Elon Musk, March 25, 2019, on Twitter as @elonmusk. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1110329210332053504. 11 Justin Bachman, “New Space Race Shoots for Moon and Mars on a Budget: QuickTake,” Washington Post, February 21, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-space-race-shoots-for-moon-and-mars-on-a-budget-quicktake/2021/02/18/661c1c0a-7243-11eb-8651-6d3091eac63f_story.html; Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is on Track to Launch People to Mars within 6 Years—Here’s the Full Timeline of His Plans to Populate the Red Planet,” Business Insider, November 2, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-mars-plan-timeline-2018-10; “UAE Aims to Establish Human Settlement on Mars by 2117,” SpaceWatch.Global, February 2017, https://spacewatch.global/2017/02/uae-aims-establish-human-settlement-mars-2117/. 12 “Governance Futures Lab—Reinventing Civic Society,” Institute for the Future, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.iftf.org/govfutures/. 13 Alan Taylor, “Mars in the Gobi Desert,” Atlantic, April 17, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/04/photos-mars-gobi-desert/587353/. 14 Jason Pontin, “The Genetics (and Ethics) of Making Humans Fit for Mars,” Wired, August 7, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-jason-pontin-genetic-engineering-for-mars/. 15 Swan, Count Down, 2–3. 16 Nathaniel Scharping, “Sperm Counts Are on the Decline.

Who, exactly, is going to be watching the sun rise differently on Mars in the next decade? Is this a ridiculous, at first, idea—or just a ridiculous one? We dug deeper. It turns out there are plenty of space entrepreneurs trying to develop the technology to help humans settle on Mars as soon as possible. Elon Musk and his SpaceX company is the best known, but there are at least thirteen other companies working with NASA to make Mars settlement more feasible—including Lockheed Martin, which is developing autonomous robots to grow and harvest plants so people could feed themselves in space.9 Meanwhile, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India, and the United Arab Emirates all have unmanned research programs underway aimed at the red planet, with an eye toward sending humans in the 2030s.

., “PM2.5 Exposure Impairs Sperm Quality through Testicular Damage Dependent on NALP3 Inflammasome and miR-183/96/182 cluster Targeting FOXO1 in Mouse,” Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 169 (March 2019): 551–63, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2018.10.108. 9 NASA, “NASA Announces US Industry Partnerships to Advance Moon, Mars Technology,” press release no. 19-063, July 30, 2019, https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-us-industry-partnerships-to-advance-moon-mars-technology. 10 Elon Musk, March 25, 2019, on Twitter as @elonmusk. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1110329210332053504. 11 Justin Bachman, “New Space Race Shoots for Moon and Mars on a Budget: QuickTake,” Washington Post, February 21, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-space-race-shoots-for-moon-and-mars-on-a-budget-quicktake/2021/02/18/661c1c0a-7243-11eb-8651-6d3091eac63f_story.html; Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is on Track to Launch People to Mars within 6 Years—Here’s the Full Timeline of His Plans to Populate the Red Planet,” Business Insider, November 2, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-mars-plan-timeline-2018-10; “UAE Aims to Establish Human Settlement on Mars by 2117,” SpaceWatch.Global, February 2017, https://spacewatch.global/2017/02/uae-aims-establish-human-settlement-mars-2117/. 12 “Governance Futures Lab—Reinventing Civic Society,” Institute for the Future, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.iftf.org/govfutures/. 13 Alan Taylor, “Mars in the Gobi Desert,” Atlantic, April 17, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/04/photos-mars-gobi-desert/587353/. 14 Jason Pontin, “The Genetics (and Ethics) of Making Humans Fit for Mars,” Wired, August 7, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-jason-pontin-genetic-engineering-for-mars/. 15 Swan, Count Down, 2–3. 16 Nathaniel Scharping, “Sperm Counts Are on the Decline.


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It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If you look at the history”: “Comedy Master Class with Casey Bloys and Jenni Konner,” Banff World Media Festival, June 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jVOLp_DRtY. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Afterward, Tesla’s Elon Musk: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s Silicon Valley Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” Recode, Vox, April, 3, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Some critics would: Esther Breger, “The Boring Sexism of HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley,’ ” New Republic, May 30, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In June 2014: Hadas Gold, “Rupert Murdoch’s Failed $80B Bid for Time Warner,” Politico, July 16, 2014.

While critics were generally delighted, not every American tech billionaire was amused by the needling. As part of the show’s rollout, HBO held a premiere at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, in the cradle of Silicon Valley. Under dimmed lights, a passel of prominent venture capitalists, cast members, and masters of the tech universe watched the first two episodes. Afterward, Tesla’s Elon Musk, well on his way to becoming one of the richest humans on the planet, bristled at HBO’s uppity, unflattering depiction of the tech world. It was totally off base, he told Recode. “I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley,” Musk said. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.”

Over time, as the series grew into a hit, the tech industry grew more guarded and self-conscious around Judge and his staff. Judge recalls that during a second visit to one of California’s big tech giants, his crew received a much different reception. Casually observing brogrammers in the wild was no longer going to be such a breeze. “They put us in a room with nothing but female engineers,” Judge recalls. While Elon Musk was simmering down, HBO had another headstrong tycoon to worry about. In June 2014, just a couple of months after HBO’s Sunday night premiere of Silicon Valley, Rupert Murdoch, the insatiable media mogul, made an unsolicited $80-billion bid for Time Warner, taking everyone by surprise. Jeffrey Bewkes met with the company’s board members, who rejected the offer.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

By far the most significant measure governments of wealthy nations could have taken to stop the spread of new variants would have been to make vaccines free and available to the entire global population at the same time as they were rolled out domestically; the suspension of pharmaceutical company patents would have been more than justified, since public money so heavily subsidized the development and rollout of the vaccines. And the cost would have been relatively low: the chief economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimated that the entire world could have been vaccinated for $50 billion, just a little more than Elon Musk paid to turn Twitter into his personal plaything. But doing so would have required a waiver of intellectual property protections at the World Trade Organization, which would have facilitated lifting the patents that have allowed a handful of pharmaceutical companies to treat the vaccines as permission to print money.

It is, moreover, extremely dangerous and troubling that corporate platforms can arbitrarily delete users and cut them off from the web of connections they built with their own words, images, and labor over years. When Wolf says that “they start purging your enemies, then they purge you,” she’s not wrong. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, progressives in North America had been pretty complacent about this threat because it had mostly been their political adversaries getting booted off platforms. But well before Musk started suspending the accounts of Twitter users who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of India’s Hindu-supremacist government.

But a minority of them, steeped in diagonalist rhetoric, claimed that the vaccine requirement constituted a new form of tyranny, and so they teamed up with a mix-and-match of aggrieved small- business owners, ex-cops and ex-soldiers, the author of Oh She Glows vegan cookbooks, and a great many evangelical Christians—all banding together to “shut the country down,” with a stretch goal of convincing the governor general, the Queen’s representative in Canada, to dissolve Trudeau’s newly reelected government. The convoy had plenty of fans. Donald Trump and Elon Musk celebrated the “Canadian truckers” as working-class heroes; Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson gave them blanket coverage; my doppelganger cheered them on as modern-day freedom fighters. Soon enough, copycat convoys were on the move from Washington, D.C., to Wellington, New Zealand. After taking a remarkably passive approach to the occupation for weeks, the Trudeau government made an abrupt about-face and invoked, for the first time in our history, the Emergencies Act, which cleared the way for a range of repressive tactics like freezing supporters’ bank accounts.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

As we have seen, Les Mills International had to adopt a very different business model from traditional gym businesses in order to grow to the size it did. The emphasis on network effects is an insight of Thiel’s that suggests that governments might become more important to company success in the future. One of Peter Thiel’s PayPal cofounders, Elon Musk, is currently involved in what might become one of the ultimate network businesses: self-driving, battery-powered cars. The network effect would be familiar to any nineteenth-century entrepreneur. Horses and carts needed a gigantic network of stables to feed and water the horses and repair the carts.

This is why leadership is going to be so valued in an intangible economy. It can at best replace, and likely mitigate, the costly and possibly distortive aspects of managing by authority. A good example of the importance of leadership in an intangible age can be seen in the phenomenon sometimes called systems or systemic innovation. Elon Musk is sometimes described as a systems innovator, aspiring to develop new products in a number of related fields (electricity storage, solar power, electric cars) or in complex systems (space procurement, carbon credits). Systems innovation is also widely discussed in the not-for-profit sector, particularly as large-scale funders such as the Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies seek to change whole systems at once, such as public health in developing countries or city government.

As we have seen, the largest institutional investors may be able to invest broadly across an ecosystem, knowing that they can benefit from spillovers of intangible investments even if an individual company they have backed does not. These larger national funds could be deployed to invest in particular ecosystems (in the way that Fidelity is reported to have invested across Elon Musk’s intangible-intensive business empire). Alongside these regulatory changes, we might cautiously hope for a cultural shift among the managers of large companies and institutional investors. The UK’s Purposeful Company project (Big Innovation Centre 2017) and the international initiative Focusing Capital on the Long Term have both argued for managers and large shareholders to be more willing to make long-term investments, particularly in intangible investments like R&D and organizational and human capital.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Immigration, meanwhile, not only allows foreigners to share in the American Dream, which is something we should value for its own sake, but may also fuel economic growth.16 Low-skilled workers tend to bid down wages for low-skilled work, which sounds bad until you remember that this lowers the cost of the products we all buy. And high-skilled workers bring us all the benefits of their ability, which includes starting new businesses (see the careers of Andrew Carnegie, PayPal’s Elon Musk, Intel’s Andy Grove, and Google’s Sergey Brin, among many others). But we should not paint a one-sided picture. Although the inequality critics highlight the restrictions on economic liberty of the post-war era (more on that shortly), in many ways it was an era of growing economic freedom. This is difficult to quantify, but the best attempt to date comes from economist Leandro Prados de la Escosura, who has constructed a Historical Index of Economic Liberty (HIEL) similar to indexes produced by the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute that try to measure economic freedom today.

The greatest contributors to production are not those who supply physical labor but those who contribute ideas—new theories, inventions, tools, businesses, and methods—to the productive process. We can see this most clearly when we look at the role of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur seeks out new profit opportunities, often introducing new products, new services, or new ways of doing business. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates (Microsoft), Elon Musk (PayPal), and Richard Branson (Virgin) are the risk takers and trailblazers who start new businesses and even new industries. The word “entrepreneur” comes from the French word entreprendre, which means to “undertake” and is thought to have been coined by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. According to Say, the entrepreneur is the “master-agent.”

Talent is the currency of Silicon Valley, and individuals there use their talent to move us forward, pioneering revolutionary achievements in social media, big data, personalized health care, biotechnology, smartphones, mobile commerce, cloud technology, and 3D printing, to name just a few. Silicon Valley is the place creators like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Peter Thiel go to make a fortune by inventing the future. What made it all possible? No doubt there are many forces at work, but one enormous factor is the extent to which the government has kept its hands off the Valley. Perry Piscione points out the benefits of “the lack of heavy government regulation that would typically favor the interests of established banks, companies, and labor unions” over young upstarts.36 People are free to act on their ideas and compete on ability, without having to wade through a minefield of government permissions before launching their ventures.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

If he was a Japanese man, he wrote in idiomatic, flawless English that alternated between American spellings and British spellings. The time stamps of his writings revealed no particular time zone. Investigative journalists had named at least fifteen people as possible alter egos to the mysterious inventor, including Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire, and Hal Finney, a game designer and cryptographer who had received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi in 2009; but none of these leads had led anywhere. “To me,” Voorhees said, “the mystery surrounding Satoshi is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it is not built around Satoshi, it’s not built around anyone.

Both Lonsdale and Thiel were chess geniuses known to battle it out with each other for hours on end. Thiel himself was, of course, a Valley legend, having founded PayPal, and was considered the “don” of the “PayPal Mafia”—a group of PayPal alums who’d gone on to start a slew of world-changing companies. The group included Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), David Sacks (Yammer), Ken Howery (Founders Fund), Max Levchin (Yelp), and others. Thiel also happened to have been the first investor in Facebook; he turned a $500,000 check into a billion-dollar investment, a mind-blowing 13,000x return. At the dinner, Naval had told the twins about the company he had cofounded in 2010, called AngelList, a meeting place for investors and entrepreneurs—something Business Insider had once called “Match.com for investors.”

A handsome Taiwanese-American entrepreneur and investor, Lee had sold his first company for $265 million during the dot-com frenzy in the late 1990s. After that, he had exited to the Dominican Republic, where he’d bought a hotel and surfed for two years. Upon his return, Lee had promptly backed his best friend Elon Musk’s new startups: Tesla and SpaceX. A few years later, he would marry Al Gore’s youngest daughter. Lee was probably one of the most influential yet under-the-radar people in the Valley—virtually unknown to the outside world. Inside the Valley, he cut his own image—imbued with a style that strayed far from the khaki pants of the VCs on Sand Hill Road, or the hacker hoodies of the Facebook set.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Eric Verdin and his incredible colleagues at the Buck Institute are working hard on defining a “universal theory of aging,” but it may not even be necessary: nowadays, most longevity pioneers prefer to just get on with the work of developing our ability to manage aging, whether we fully understand it or not. But how can this be done effectively? You can’t very well solve a problem that you do not first boil down to its essential elements. This is something that Aristotle referred to in Greek as arche, which modern-day problem solvers like Elon Musk call “first principles.” Even if figuring out the “cause” of aging is more trouble than it’s worth, gerontologists still need a way to identify the first principles of the problem of aging. THE HALLMARKS OF AGING In 2013, a group of European scientists led by biochemist and molecular biologist Carlos López-Otín published a seminal paper entitled “The 9 Hallmarks of Aging,” which tackled this problem and gave the longevity community a way to study aging without agreeing on its root cause.

CTRL Labs invented a wristband equipped with what they call “myocontrol” that can already allow you to execute fine-motor-control behavior like typing on a keyboard, without ever touching a real keyboard. Actions can be caused by manipulating your hands remotely, or just by thinking about doing so. CTRL Labs was acquired by Facebook in 2019. All of these technologies are noninvasive—they involve wearing something. But if Elon Musk has his way, brain-machine interfaces may take another turn. In August 2020, Musk’s company Neuralink made history when it introduced the world to Gertrude—a pig fitted with a microchip and over a thousand electrodes in her brain. Instead of wearing an external device, which may have limited ability to pick up high-fidelity electrical signals, Neuralink seeks to build on its work with Gertrude to achieve full man-machine integration.

Today, renewable energy accounts for nearly one-fifth of global energy consumption.12 Air pollution in the United States decreased by 54 percent13 between 1990 and 2010, while the number of bodies of water that meet clean-water standards has nearly doubled14 in just the first twenty-five years since such regulations were introduced. Where electric cars were a not-very-sexy choice reserved for penny-pinchers and do-gooders a few years ago, Elon Musk and the success of Tesla have forced the automotive industry to make carbon-emission reduction a core pillar of its strategy. And even China and India—historically among the greatest polluters on Earth—have engaged in aggressive measures to improve their air and water quality. I’ve been visiting China at least once a year for almost two decades.


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Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Imitation may well be the sincerest form of successful product innovation. Twitter’s checkered track record on product innovation may be due to its unusual management structure—the fact that Jack Dorsey, its CEO, is simultaneously the CEO of Twitter and Square. Now there are several examples of successful two-firm CEOs, such as Elon Musk, who has been extraordinarily innovative with Tesla. And Dorsey’s other company, Square, has been enormously successful in the public markets. I also believe Dorsey deserves the highest of praise for cofounding two different successful businesses. He has to go down as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation.

Ma at Alibaba, Bezos at Amazon, Jobs at Apple, Zuckerberg at Facebook, Brin and Page at Google, Gates at Microsoft, Hastings at Netflix, Lütke at Shopify, Ma at Tencent, and Musk at Tesla (Table 8.1). TABLE 8.1 Founders and Their Companies Steve Jobs’s tenure excludes the period when Jobs left Apple in 1985 and rejoined in 1997; Elon Musk as cofounder per 2009 settlement. Market cap as of Febuary 9, 2021. Check out the average tenure of these founders: 24 years! That’s more than two times the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours/10 years rule for excellence he offered in Outliers. And that’s weighed down by the fact that Zuckerberg didn’t think to start Facebook until 2004 (when he was 19, two years below the minimum legal drinking age), Lütke didn’t help conceive of Shopify until 2004 (when he was 25), and Musk was busy with PayPal before he thought to help launch Tesla in 2003 (at the advanced age of 32).

It helped that Barton and Frink controlled a large chunk of the company’s shareholder vote, but as founders, the three individuals had the ability and the credibility to take on this type of risky decision. I am skeptical that a non-founder executive could have pulled off this type of pivot, which has turned out to be enormously beneficial to ZG shareholders. So those are the main examples of the long-term stock benefits of founder-led companies. One other quick example comes to mind—Tesla and Elon Musk. As an analyst, I never covered TSLA. But as a regular market participant, it was impossible to not notice the audacity, vision, and drive of that company’s founder. It’s hard to see how Musk hasn’t been a key part of that company’s and that stock’s success. Now just because almost every single one of the most successful tech stocks has belonged to founder-led companies doesn’t mean that all founder-led companies make great stocks.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Tim has gained a number of prominent readers as well, like authors Sam Harris and Susan Cain, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, TED curator Chris Anderson, and Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova. Tim’s series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk have been called by Vox’s David Roberts “the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I’ve read in ages.” You can start with the first one, “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man.” Tim’s TED Talk, “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator,” has received more than 21 million views. * * * What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

I think the key to life is to figure out when it makes sense to save mental energy and be like Keating (I’m super conforming in my clothing choices because it’s not something that’s important to me) and when in life it really matters to be like Roark and reason independently (choosing your career path, picking your life partner, deciding how to raise your kids, etc.). The Fountainhead was a major influence when I wrote a long blog post about why I think Elon Musk is so successful. To me, he’s like Roark—he’s tremendous at reasoning from first principles. In the post, I call this being a “chef” (someone who experiments with ingredients and comes up with a new recipe). Musk is unusually cheflike. Most of us spend most of our lives being like Keating, or what I call a “cook” (someone who follows someone else’s recipe).

I think swimming in the middle lane happens most often in people’s 30s or 40s, a stage where you begin crafting your own language for what you do as an increasingly “strong poet”—you make your craft your own and view your life as more self-expression than simply playing out other people’s roles for you. And then some small percentage of people will paddle over to the lane next to chaos, the place where you find novelists Robert Pirsig and David Foster Wallace, investors like Mike Burry or Eddie Lampert, or entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I experience them as consistently “asserting reality” through their powerful storytelling, while always bearing the risk that their egos grow too big and their creative narcissism becomes too well defended. They can lose their feedback loop with reality and flop onto the bank of chaos. Through this lens, Pirsig’s wrestling with his sanity toward the end of his life, Steve Jobs’ magical thinking about his illness, and Eddie Lampert’s Ayn Randian framing of his investment in Sears may all have been examples of strong poets losing their feel for where they can mythologize to the point of bending our collective reality and where they suddenly appear crazy.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

See https://dogecoin.com/ for more information on the provenance of Dogecoin and to sign up. Price and market capitalization figures for Dogecoin are from https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/. See Ryan Browne, “Tweets from Elon Musk and Other Celebrities Send Dogecoin to a Record High,” CNBC, February 8, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tweets-from-elon-musk-and-celebrities-send-dogecoin-to-a-record-high.html. The story about how Meme coin came to be and Lyall’s quote on the matter can be found in Mathew Di Salvo, “How an Anti-Meme Coin Joke Backfired into a $1.2 Million Meme Coin,” Decrypt, August 15, 2020, https://decrypt.co/38887/an-anti-meme-coin-joke-just-led-to-a-1-2-million-meme-coin.

There is also another dimension of technological vulnerability that strikes at the heart of what was intended as a key distinguishing feature of cryptocurrencies. We consider that next. Mirage of Digital Anonymity In July 2020, the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent persons displayed the same message: “Send Bitcoin and get double your money back.” The hacked accounts belonged to such luminaries as Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and a few even more culturally significant personages such as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Former US president Obama’s account displayed this message: “I am giving back to my community due to Covid-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000!”

Then the price took off, and the market capitalization peaked at $1.9 billion on January 7, 2018. It fell back sharply after that, but not quite back to earth, with a still astonishing market capitalization of $580 million as of December 2020. That was not it, however. A series of supportive tweets from Elon Musk, who referred to it approvingly as “the people’s crypto,” then helped push Dogecoin’s market capitalization briefly above $90 billion in early May 2021! Struck by the absurdity of such meme coins, in August 2020 a programmer named Jordan Lyall introduced the Degenerator, a phony project that supposedly allowed anyone to create their own DeFi project in less than five minutes.


Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

A commercial lunar base providing propellant in lunar orbit would reduce the cost to NASA of sending humans to Mars by as much as $10 billion a year. Of course, the space agency needs to devote the up-front resources to build such a base. Over the past few years since the study was published, the situation has improved, says Miller, pointing to space tech luminaries like Elon Musk with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin. Both space entrepreneurs are pushing forward with plans to develop boosters capable of reaching the Moon. “We went to the Moon in the 1960s as a race between nations,” Miller says. “The best way to go back to the Moon is to set up a race between billionaires

He suggests that one delivery spot could be Shackleton crater, at the lunar south pole—a location that contains ice for fuel and logistics support, mineral compounds for developing structures, and near-continuous sunlight for power generation. Shackleton crater and other locations like it offer pragmatic proving grounds for judging deep-space exploration technologies in close proximity to Earth. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk, founder and leader of the California-based firm SpaceX, also has company crosshairs on the Moon. “Having some permanent presence on another heavenly body, which would be the kind of Moon base, and then getting people to Mars and beyond—that’s the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for,” Musk says.


pages: 183 words: 51,514

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

The long-term results of this ‘first’ are beyond our ability to see at the beginning of this era, but there is no doubt that it will serve as a huge incentive for young people who now have firm evidence of the value, and opportunity for individual initiative,” he added. “Near-Earth space is now firmly a regular part of the human environment along with the air, water, and land. The future is now, once again, opened to imagination, creativity, and dreams!” I applaud all these comments and see the achievement by commercial rocketeer Elon Musk and his SpaceX team as a first step. Others will follow, cultivating new capabilities that drive down costs and further secure a private-sector toehold in low Earth orbit. Buzz Aldrin salutes the flag at Tranquillity Base: his proudest moment. (Illustration Credit 3.13) CHAPTER FOUR DREAMS OF MY MOON People often ask me to recount my Apollo 11 moonwalking experiences, my reminiscences of being on the moon.

(Illustration Credit 7.8) Here an artist’s rendering depicts Dragon spacecraft on the planet. (Illustration Credit 7.9) Red Dragon: A Private Affair With Mars The reach for Mars need not be a governmental event. One private-sector plan is being led by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a U.S. commercial space firm birthed in June 2002 by entrepreneur Elon Musk. He gained his fortunes, in part, from co-founding and then selling PayPal, the online money transfer and payment system. In May 2012 SpaceX made history when its Dragon spacecraft flew atop the company’s Falcon 9 booster to become the first commercial vehicle to rendezvous with and then attach to the International Space Station.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

Putting it differently, I suppose, with tongue firmly in cheek I could say it was a classic case of, ‘Screw It, Let’s Blue It.’ Sorry! ENVISAGING VISIONARIES Brett is just one of many true visionaries I have been lucky to know with the passion, drive, focus and skills to turn their often seemingly impossible dreams into game-changing realities. Like a lot of people before him, Elon Musk had a vision to build a commercially viable electric car. This is a space in which all the early movers have focused their attention on the mass market by developing affordable, compact fuel-saving vehicles almost completely devoid of anything in the way of sex appeal. Musk decided instead to come at it from the premium sports car end of the market and over time move into more mainstream vehicles.

The $70,000 Tesla Model S not only looks like a very cool sports car but behaves like one: it reportedly accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in an incredible 3.7 seconds and for those like me who have a conscience about such things, it is almost twice as energy efficient as the homely sector-leading Toyota Prius. And as if all that were not enough, the influential ‘Consumer Reports’ magazine ranked the Tesla as ‘the best we have ever tested’ with a ninety-nine per cent overall rating. Rate this one an A on all counts. Of course Tesla is not Elon Musk’s first big success at breaking new ground in emerging industries. His vision of creating a new form of payment to accommodate the unique requirements of online retail sales started life as X.com and soon morphed into PayPal. His other current major dream coming true is SpaceX, which, along similar lines to Virgin Galactic, is developing a private sector satellite launch vehicle to take over where NASA left off.

His other current major dream coming true is SpaceX, which, along similar lines to Virgin Galactic, is developing a private sector satellite launch vehicle to take over where NASA left off. There is even talk of Musk merging his PayPal and space ventures with PayPal Galactic to tackle the challenges of ‘off-Earth’ payments – I will have to give some more thought to that one! In any case Elon Musk’s successes at Tesla, PayPal and Space-X only serve to demonstrate the incredible results that can flow from vision and leadership coming together in one inspired individual with the assistance of an army of equally inspired followers. PASSION KNOWS PASSION Another great advantage to having truly passionate leaders is their inherent ability to recognise raw passion in others when they see it.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

., Man of Ideas and Nonviolent Social Action (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). as was Nelson Mandela: “Nelson Mandela, the ‘Gandhi of South Africa,’ Had Strong Indian Ties,” Economic Times, December 6, 2013, articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-06/news/44864354_1_nelson-mandela-gandhi-memorial-gandhian-philosophy. Elon Musk . . . Lord of the Rings: Tad Friend, “Plugged In: Can Elon Musk Lead the Way to an Electric-Car Future?” New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in. Peter Thiel . . . Lord of the Rings: Julian Guthrie, “Entrepreneur Peter Thiel Talks ‘Zero to One,’” SFGate, September 21, 2014, www.sfgate.com/living/article/Entrepreneur-Peter-Thiel-talks-Zero-to-One-5771228.php.

King was inspired by Gandhi, as was Nelson Mandela. In some cases, fictional characters may be even better role models. Growing up, many originals find their first heroes in their most beloved novels, where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose Lord of the Rings,, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to A Wrinkle in Time,, in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travel through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to Ender’s Game, where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Kirsten Grind, “’Bond King’ Bill Gross Loses Showdown at Firm,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/bond-king-bill-gross-loses-showdown-at-firm-1411773652. 28. Barbara Kiviat, “Even Bond Guru Bill Gross Can’t Escape,” Time, September 18, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1842501,00.xhtml. 29. Robert Frank, “Elon Musk’s Ex-Wife on Secret to Getting Rich: ‘Be Obsessed,’” CNBC, April 20, 2015, http://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/20/elon-musks-ex-wife-on-secret-to-getting-rich-be-obsessed.xhtml. 30. Ray Dalio, Principles. 31. Michelle Celarier & Lawrence Delevingne, “Ray Dalio’s Culture of Radical Truth,” Institutional Investor, March 2, 2011, http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/Article/2775995/Ray-Dalios-radical-truth.xhtml. 32.

Even the most talented fund manager must employ a minimum of interpersonal skills and build a network of loyal supporters to call in favors, accumulated in the form of social capital, when the time comes. ON A MONOMANIACAL MISSION: RAY DALIO Another common superhub trait is an ability to focus excessively on one idea. Perhaps Elon Musk’s ex-wife, Justine, put it best when she said that “extreme success results from an extreme personality.” But their chief characteristic, according to Justine, can be summed up in two words: Be obsessed. “People who are obsessed with a problem or issue can work through all the distractions and barriers that life puts in their way.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Let’s start by observing that many smart people are thinking about the robot-filled society of the future, and that they are widely distributed on the basic question of whether we are all going to hell in a handbasket. Our news culture being what it is, we tend to hear the opinions of celebrity thinkers and innovators the most, and particularly when they are willing to thrill us with a good scare. Thus the statement by Elon Musk that AI represents “our biggest existential threat” was probably the most repeated quote of 2014. Right on its heels was Stephen Hawking’s warning that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” and Bill Gates’s musing that “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

Should her employer forbid that (or encourage it)? Is it something the Department of Labor or its Occupational Safety and Health Administration needs to rule on? Sitting a layer above our need to answer such questions is our need to figure out how they should be answered, and by whom. Speaking at a 2014 MIT event, Elon Musk said, “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.” But issues of governance will arise in every setting where smart machines take over tasks from humans, and we doubt they can all be answered by governments.

(Even the International Atomic Energy Agency holds sway only over those countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Is it possible that, seventy years from now—deep into that time frame when AI experts expect machine superintelligence to exist—no global mechanisms will exist to contain a technology that Elon Musk calls “potentially more dangerous than nukes”? We’re encouraging the many convenings that are happening already to surface the decisions that must be made about artificial intelligence and its impacts—and the more international they are, the better. When a major business-oriented conference like the Global Drucker Forum focuses on a theme like “Claiming our Humanity in the Digital Age,” that can only be for the good.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

[242] website in April 2017 alone: “The History of FIRE / Financial Independence, Retire Early.” 8 May. 2017, toreset.me/242. A brilliant blog post explaining in detail the history of the FIRE movement. [243] Which?: “Which? – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/243. [244] Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis: “Martin Lewis (financial journalist) – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/244. [245] SpaceX: “SpaceX.” toreset.me/245. [246] Elon Musk: “Elon Musk – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/246. [247] “deep pits”: “An International Portfolio from The Escape Artist – jlcollinsnh.” 12 Jan. 2018, toreset.me/247. JL Collins is one of my FI heroes, author of The Simple Path to Wealth and the person who introduced me to the liberating idea of F.U. Money. [248] Build your assets: “Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids... – Amazon UK.” toreset.me/248, p. 85.

Over the past two years living in Glasgow, I’ve asked hundreds of people if they’ve ever heard of the financial independence movement or Mr. Money Mustache. Not a single one has answered yes. I hope RESET will change that. Yes, much you will have heard before, no it’s not about being tight, and yes, some of it’s just common sense. But so’s rocket science, when you think about it, and I imagine – unless you’re SpaceX[245] founder Elon Musk[246] – you need instructions before you begin. Benefits F.U. Money brings freedom. You can live the lifestyle you want. It gives you options. As a friend of mine says: “Money gives you time tokens.” You can work for people and towards goals you like and respect. Financial independence gives you the power to lead life on your own terms.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2017/10/24/richard-baker-of-hudsons-bay-talks-about-we-work-lord-taylor-deal/#2ca653d23487 [Last accessed 30/6/2018]. 18 Taylor, Kate (2018) Tesla may have just picked a spot for Elon Musk’s dream ‘roller skates & rock restaurant’ – here’s everything we know about the old-school drive in, Business Insider, 13 March. Available from: http://uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-restaurant-los-angeles-2018-3 [Last accessed 1/7/2018]. 19 Anonymous (2018) Mothercare confirms 50 store closures, BBC, 17 May. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44148937 [Last accessed 1/7/2018]. 20 La Monica, Paul (2018) The death of the big toy store, CNN, 13 March.

Never failing to impress, Selfridges launched the world’s first boxing gym within a department store. Meanwhile, now-defunct department stores (BHS sites, for example) are being reincarnated not only as fitness centres but also bowling alleys, crazy golf centres, cinemas and even an art gallery. And if Elon Musk has his way, his Tesla supercharger stations across the US will feature upmarket convenience stores alongside climbing walls, outdoor cinemas and 1950s-style drive-in restaurants with waiting staff on roller skates – giving customers something to do during the 30 minutes it takes to recharge their vehicles.18 It’s not quite colonizing Mars, but it’s certainly blurring the lines between retail and entertainment.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Adam was pitching investors on this expanded vision for his company—an entire WeWorld. He wanted others to see WeWork as capable of much more than managing offices. The company referred to its Chelsea home as its “Galactic Headquarters,” and Adam told a reporter in 2015 that “WeWork Mars is in our pipeline.” He fantasized about working with Elon Musk. “When he gets everybody to Mars,” Adam said, “we’re going to build a community like there’s never been.” * * * WHILE HE WAITED to hear from Musk, Adam set his sights on occupying other territory. “Adam, more than anything, was a deal guy,” one of his early investors said. “Whether he was raising money or closing a building, he loved the deal.”

But IWG operated five times as many spaces as WeWork did globally, and was still valued at just $3 billion. What exactly WeWork was doing to merit a tech company valuation of $20 billion remained a mystery. * * * TWO YEARS AFTER declaring that “WeWork Mars is in our pipeline,” Adam finally got his meeting with Elon Musk. Adam was nervous, as he often was before big meetings, when he seemed to course with anxiety until his audience was in front of him and whatever pitch he was making hit a groove. Tesla was one of the hottest tech stocks on the market, and Musk was the Valley’s leading eccentric visionary—a rare entrepreneur whose ambition and self-regard outpaced Neumann’s.

For JPMorgan, it would mean not only a $50 million fee but also the lead left slot. For Adam, it meant that successfully going public would give him access to $9 billion to fund his vision for the We Company. * * * DURING HIS WEST COAST SWING, earlier in the year, Adam had made another attempt at enmeshing WeWork into the ecosystem of tech giants he aspired to join. Elon Musk wasn’t taking any more meetings with WeWork, but Adam and Michael Gross went fishing for potential partnerships. They talked about building an office-management app with Salesforce, and with Apple about ways to use iPhones as access devices to WeWork spaces. Adam and Bruce Dunlevie had dinner with Ruth Porat, the CFO of Alphabet, in the hope of enticing her to join WeWork’s board.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

The myth of artificial intelligence is that its arrival is inevitable, and only a ­matter of time—­t hat we have already embarked on the path that ­w ill lead to human-­level AI, and then superintelligence. We have not. The path exists only in our imaginations. Yet the inevitability of AI is so ingrained in popu­lar discussion—­promoted by media pundits, thought leaders like Elon Musk, and even many AI scientists (though certainly not all)—­that arguing against it is often taken as a form of Luddism, or at the very least a shortsighted view of the ­f uture of technology and a dangerous failure to prepare for a world of intelligent machines. As I ­w ill show, the science of AI has uncovered a very large mystery at the heart of intelligence, which no one currently has a clue how to solve.

Hedgehogs returned, and predictably, the media fanned the flames of fresh futurism. But something strange is happening in AI lately. I noticed it in more skeptical talk in 2018, and in 2019 it’s unmistakable. The foxes are returning. Many mythologists (with a few notable exceptions) are also non-­ experts, like Elon Musk, or the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, or even Bill Gates. Still, they helped create much of the media ballyhoo about AI—­mostly, deep learning ballyhoo—­which peaked a few years ago (circa 2015, give or take a year). Now, though, it’s increasingly common to hear talk of limitations again—­for instance, from Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and founder of robotics com­ pany Robust.AI, who coauthored with computer scientist Ernest Davis the 2019 Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can 76 T he S implified W orld Trust.9 Marcus and Davis make a compelling argument that the field is yet again overhyped, and that deep learning has its limits; some fundamental advance ­w ill be required to achieve generally intelligent AI.

If he has had any equals in that re­spect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.2 Yet Peirce died an outcast, largely forgotten. Forgotten geniuses are common enough in history that we occasionally rediscover them, as with Tesla. But arguably more than Tesla—­who, a­ fter all, achieved a kind of posthumous fame as Elon Musk’s choice of inspiration to name an electric car com­pany ­a fter—­Peirce stands as an impor­tant thinker who has been mostly written out of the history books. His work is most appreciated in philosophy, where he is known as the founder of the philosophical school known as pragmatism. His early work on computing has been all but forgotten.


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

Another group of researchers, who said they had transmitted a memory of a sensation, had used thirty-two electrodes. But Johnson told reporters that the plan was prosthetic memory implants containing nearly 2,000 electrodes, and that 5,000 or even 10,000 were achievable. Never to be outdone, SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk proposed a brain implant that would read to and write from thousands of neurons simultaneously. (Not known for modest goals, Musk advocated using this implant to “co-evolve” with artificial intelligence.) It seemed like a fairly straightforward, linear progression: the more neurons you could manipulate, the more precisely you could write the neural code; the more precisely you could write the neural code, the more powerful the brain interface.

However, now there are several other new designs in the works—another electrode called Neuropixels is already being used to record data in patients undergoing DBS implantation.79 It’s not yet approved but has a similar design to Kennedy’s neurotrophic electrode, able to record deeper in the brain. And then there’s neural dust—micron-size piezoelectric sensors that would be scattered throughout the brain and use reflected sound waves to capture electrical discharges from nearby neurons.80 The one you have probably heard of is neural lace, the stuff Elon Musk sewed into a pig using a robot sewing machine. The most recent entrant is neurograins; salt grain–sized sprinkles unveiled in 2021 to make a better ECoG.81 They are proliferating, largely because money has been pouring in. BlackRock, the investment fund that has financed the neurograins, is on record as stating that they want brain chips to become more common than pacemakers.82 There are three essential problems facing the further development of brain interfaces.

Frontiers in Neuroengineering, 27 May 2014 <https://doi.org/10.3389/fneng.2014.0001> 14 “The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000,” NobelPrize.org <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2000/summary/> 15 Cuthbertson, Anthony. “Material Found by Scientists ‘Could Merge AI with Human Brain,’” The Independent, 17 August 2020 <https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/artificial-intelligence-brain-computer-cyborg-elon-musk-neuralink-a9673261.html> 16 Chen, Angela. “Why It’s so Hard to Develop the Right Material for Brain Implants,” The Verge, 30 May 2018 <https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17408852/brain-implant-materials-neuroscience-health-chris-bettinger> 17 Technically, there are also ways to inhibit action potentials, but that just means stimulating inhibitory neurons—which are the kinds of neurons that make other neurons not fire.


pages: 175 words: 54,755

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving by Jason Torchinsky

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, interchangeable parts, job automation, Philippa Foot, ransomware, self-driving car, sensor fusion, side project, Tesla Model S, trolley problem, urban sprawl

* * * 35 “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars,” Tesla.com, https://www.tesla.com/autopilot. 36 Thatcham Research Press Release, “Automated Driving Hype is Dangerously Confusing Drivers,” October 18, 2018, https://news.thatcham.org/pressreleases/autonomous-driving-hype-is-dangerously -confusing-drivers-study-reveals-2767283. 37 Felton, Ryan, “Tesla Says Autopilot Was On Before Fatal Model X Crash, But That Driver Didn't Abide Warnings,” Jalopnik, March 30, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/tesla-admits-autopilot-was-on-before-fatal -model-x-cras-1824224176. 38 Noyes, Dan, “Victim Who Dies in Tesla Crash Had Complained About Autopilot,” ABC7 News, March 28, 2018, http://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-victim-who-died-in-tesla-crash-had -complained-about-auto-pilot/3275600/. 39 Westbrook, Justin, “Tesla Blames Driver in Fatal Model X Autopilot Crash As Family Considers Legal Action,” Jalopnik, April 11, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/tesla-blames-driver-in-fatal-model-x-autopilot -crash-as-1825193432. 40 “Discover Cadillac,” Super Cruise, https://www.cadillac.com/world -of-cadillac/innovation/super-cruise. 41 King, Alanis, “Stop Doing This Shit with Autonomous Cars,” Jalopnik, January 15, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/stop-doing-this-shit -with-semi-autonomous-cars­­-1822090627. 42 Davies, Alex, “Ford’s Working on a Remote Control for Your Car,” Wired, January 26, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/01/fords-working-remote-control-car/. 43 Coxworth, Ben, “Full Size Remote-Control Cars - Coming Soon to a Road Near You?” New Atlas, July 30, 2013, http://www.gizmag.com/remote-control-cars/28521/. 44 Hawkins, Andrew J., “Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Think Lidar is Necessary for Fully Driverless Cars,” The Verge, February 7, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/­­2018/2/7/16988628/elon-musk-lidar-self -driving-car-tesla. 45 Orlove, Raphael, “Angry Owners Sue Tesla for Using Them as Beta Testers of ‘Dangerously Defective’ Autopilot,” Jalopnik, April 20, 2017, https://jalopnik.com/angry-owners-sue-tesla-for-using-them -as-beta-testers-o-1794503348.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

a machine that can truly reason: Kevin Hartnett, “To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect,” Quanta Magazine, May 15, 2018, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515; Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal,” arXiv, January 2, 2018, accessed August 21, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631. with surprising speed: Bostrom, Superintelligence, 1723. rise up to kill us: “Elon Musk Talks Cars—and Humanity’s Fate—with Governors,” CNBC, July 16, 2017, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/16/musk-says-a-i-is-a-fundamental-risk-to-the-existence-of-human-civilization.html; Maureen Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair, April 2017, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x. 10 to 25 years from now: Oren Etzioni, “No, the Experts Don’t Think Superintelligent AI Is a Threat to Humanity,” MIT Technology Review, September 20, 2016, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602410/no-the-experts-dont-think-superintelligent-ai-is-a-threat-to-humanity.

So we could wake up one day, fifteen years from now, to discover that, whoops, someone in Shenzhen has almost accidentally produced a superintelligence. Given that, a phalanx of AI experts has begun to prepare now. “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” Tesla founder Elon Musk said, and he followed up on his warning by investing in OpenAI, a think tank devoted to planning for “responsible” AI—smart machines that won’t, or can’t, rise up to kill us. If you wanted some comfort, though, consider that of the AI experts I’ve spoken to—the people who, unlike Bostrom and even Musk, build AI all day long—most were considerably less worried about ultraintelligent machines emerging suddenly.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

He loves this format, much preferring it to lecturing or being interviewed fireside-style by pesky journalists. He takes special pride in telling the crowd that Facebook has built a satellite that will expand Internet coverage to many unserved areas of Africa, including Nigeria. The results will soon be delivered, as the bird is on the launchpad now, on a SpaceX rocket ship. Elon Musk’s company. One of the pre-submitted questions the moderator has on hand asks how easy—or hard—it had been for Zuckerberg to move from the total control of a software developer to the fuzzier domain of running a company. Did he miss just coding? “I’m an engineer, like a lot of you guys,” he says.

A survey early in the year ranked him “Tech’s most popular CEO.” He was happily married, and after a series of disheartening miscarriages (news of which he would share on Facebook), his wife gave birth to their adorable daughter. Even his pet, a shaggy Hungarian sheepdog whose white fur looked twisted into dreadlocks, had a fan club. As problems go, Elon Musk’s exploding satellite and concerns about Internet.org weren’t so insurmountable. In short, Facebook had taken its place as one of the great American success stories. Mark Zuckerberg’s world seemed perfect. What could go wrong? * * * • • • BARELY TWO MONTHS after Mark Zuckerberg returned from Nigeria, Donald Trump was elected the president of the United States.

If not, Hoffman figured, he’d step up himself. Criticism or not, he wasn’t going to pass on this opportunity. Thiel was head of the Founders Fund, an investment firm he started after leaving the company that made his own fortune, PayPal. (Besides Hoffman, other veterans of that payment company included Tesla founder Elon Musk and entrepreneur Max Levchin. They would become known as the PayPal mafia because of their undue influence—in both investing and philosophy—on Silicon Valley thereafter.) Thiel didn’t name his fund by accident: he believes that the prime indicator of a successful company is a driven, iconoclastic founder, the kind of person who perseveres even when others think they are utterly insane.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

The inhabitants would not necessarily be able to tell whether their world is simulated or not; but if they are intelligent enough they could consider the possibility and assign it some probability.”2 This hypothesis has been extremely popular among the representatives of whatever simulation of an intelligentsia the tech industry has produced. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has concluded that the probability that our world is a simulation is at least several billion to one. The celebrity physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who otherwise has done much to broaden the values of scientific literacy and rationality, has said of the simulation argument: “I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none.”3 On social media, popular memes proclaim that the belief that our world is the “real” world amounts to a new sort of “geocentrism”: a stubborn attachment to an increasingly insupportable prescientific theory.

Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment §64, 5:370/242. Chapter 3. The Reckoning Engine and the Thinking Machine 1. Alim et al., “Mechanism of Signal Propagation in Physarum polycephalum.” See also Tero et al., “Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design.” 2. Bostrom, Superintelligence, 164. 3. See Corey S. Powell, “Elon Musk Says We May Live in a Simulation. Here’s How We Might Tell If He’s Right,” NBC News, October 2, 2018. 4. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:464/328. 5. Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”, 243. 6. Dennett, “Will AI Achieve Consciousness? Wrong Question.” 7. Schneider, “It May Not Feel Like Anything to Be an Alien.” 8.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

While DigiCash failed to become a household name, some players will resurface in our story, such as Nick Szabo, the father of “smart contracts,” and Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash, both of whom worked at DigiCash for a time.5 Other attempts were made at digital currencies, payment systems, or stores of value after ecash, like e-gold and Karma. The former ran into trouble with the FBI for serving a criminal element,6 while the latter never gained mainstream adoption.7 The pursuit of a new form of Internet money drew the attention of present day tech-titans such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, both of whom had a hand in founding PayPal. Except for Karma, the problem with all these attempts at digital money was that they weren’t purely decentralized—one way or another they relied on a centralized entity, and that presented the opportunity for corruption and weak points for attack. THE MIRACLE OF BITCOIN One of the most miraculous aspects of bitcoin is how it bootstrapped support in a decentralized manner.

In June 2014, Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship14as a 20-year-old dropping out of the University of Waterloo to pursue his interest in Ethereum on a full-time basis. While Buterin may go down as one of Thiel’s greatest investments, Thiel wasn’t alone in recognizing the potential of Ethereum. In 2014, Buterin was given the World Technology Award in Information Technology Software,15 alongside influential names such as Elon Musk in the Energy category and Walter Isaacson in Media & Journalism. While the Thiel Fellowship was an indication of what was to come for Buterin, $100,000 wasn’t enough to sustain his team. To that end, from July 23, 2014, to September 2, 2014, they staged a 42-day presale of ether, the cryptocommodity underlying the Ethereum network.16 Ether was sold at a range of 1,337 to 2,000 ether per bitcoin, with 2,000 ether per bitcoin on offer for the first two weeks of the presale and then declining linearly toward 1,337 ether per bitcoin in the latter half of the sale, creating momentum by incentivizing people to buy in at the beginning.

In the past, this world was open only to the wealthy, but with new trends such as crowdfunding, token launches, and innovative regulation via the JOBS Act, opportunities exist for innovative investors of all shapes and sizes to get involved. Chapter 16 The Wild World of ICOs During the early tech days, innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell became iconic figures who had turned ideas into multibillion-dollar businesses. Over the last decade, we’ve seen visionaries such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg do the same. These innovators changed the world because people believed in their visions, and these early believers invested money to turn their ideas into reality. While these investments brought great benefit, they were not based on altruism; initial investors were looking to get a sizable return on their risky investments.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Facebook announced a breakthrough in its research into machine learning algorithms: BBC News. (2019, July 31). Facebook funds AI mind-reading experiment. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49165713 Neuralink … is reportedly developing “a high bandwidth brain-machine interface”: Wong, J. C. (2019, July 17). Elon Musk unveils plan to build mind-reading implants: ‘The monkey is out of the bag’. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/17/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-implants-mind-reading-artificial-intelligence Ryan Calo has ominously warned where these experiments might lead: Calo, R. (2014). Digital market manipulation. George Washington Law Review 995(82). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2309703; See also Calo, R., & Rosenblat, A. (2017).

With such capabilities in hand back in 2010, imagine what can be done now, or a few short years from now. In 2019, Facebook announced a breakthrough in its research into machine learning algorithms136 capable of turning brain activity into speech, while Neuralink, a company owned by Tesla founder and inventor Elon Musk, is reportedly developing “a high bandwidth brain-machine interface” to connect people’s minds directly to a computer and to “read” the activity of neurons.137 University of Washington cyberlaw expert Ryan Calo has ominously warned where these experiments might lead, noting we are entering into a new era of digital market manipulation, whereby “firms can not only take advantage of a general understanding of cognitive limitations, but can uncover, and even trigger, consumer frailty at an individual level.”138 Such awesome power to manipulate the emotions of billions of users, in the hands of a few small platforms, should give everyone serious cause for concern.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

But in the moment, it can be difficult to determine whether a founder’s “change-the-world” vision is delusional. In the early 1970s, for example, many people thought Fred Smith was crazy for trying to raise what at the time was the biggest VC round in history to fund the nascent Federal Express. As I write this, skeptics are asking similar questions about Elon Musk’s sanity, and Tesla’s long-term viability. There is no foolproof method for avoiding the Cascading Miracles failure pattern, but I’ll present some early-warning signs that a late-stage startup might be heading toward this treacherous path. How to Fail (Better) My postmortem interviews with founders put the human cost of entrepreneurial failure into sharp focus.

According to Hamm, these impulses include 1) loyalty to colleagues who may lack the skills to fulfill evolving leadership roles, 2) a relentless focus on executing today’s “to-do list” at the expense of thinking strategically, and 3) working in isolation instead of with management team members or ecosystem partners, which is especially prevalent among founders who excel at product development. Founders who successfully led their firms through the scaling phase and beyond come readily to mind—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. However, these entrepreneurs are the exception rather than the rule. Despite coaching, most founder/CEOs cannot master the skills required to lead a larger, more complex startup. According to research by Yeshiva University’s Noam Wasserman, 61 percent of founders who held the CEO role when their ventures launched were no longer in that role after their firms raised Series D financing.

Examples of failed moonshots come easily to mind, because we are so often dazzled by these visionary ventures on their way up and riveted by the huge, steaming craters they leave in the landscape after they crash. But other moonshots do succeed in reaching their destination. Federal Express did; when Fred Smith founded the company in the early 1970s, it was the biggest venture capital bet in history. More recently, we have Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, both of which have soaring valuations as I write this. So, expect more moonshots; indeed, we need them to address grand societal challenges like climate change. Visionary entrepreneurs around the world are working on hyperloops, autonomous vehicles, gene editing, and quantum computing.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Such research thus is almost entirely a phenomenon characteristic of public institutions or private charities rather than market actors. Similarly, it was not the market that got us to the moon, but a grand public-sector enterprise called NASA. Today, if we are to be honest, we must recognize that due to the vast costs associated with a viable Mars colony such as the one proposed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX (even if the cost of escaping Earth’s gravity is significantly reduced, for instance, through the use of reusable rockets), there still has to be a profitable commodity resulting from that colony that can be sold back on Earth. If there is one, bully for him. If not, his investors will quickly abandon him.

Leaving aside the grotesque inequalities that would result from steadily ratcheting up flat taxes, even as working-class and poor people spend a larger proportion of their income on fuel, carbon-tax advocates have forgotten that their solution to climate change—the market—is the very cause of the problem. Think Bigger How will a carbon price build a network of electric vehicle fast-charging stations? Tesla only builds them in those areas where it can rely on profits. Like a private bus company or an internet service provider, Elon Musk won’t provide a service where it doesn’t make money (or at least, one that doesn’t convince investors that it will someday make money; Tesla is currently a loss-making black hole for venture capital). The market leaves the public sector to fill the gap. This is no abstract argument. Norway provides free parking and charging for electric vehicles, allows these cars to use bus lanes, and recently decided to build a nationwide charging network.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Instead, Google was experimenting with a business model that enhanced the value of its smartphone software, Android, and also paved the way for its own eventual self-driving taxi service. Looming largest for Uber, at least in the ultracompetitive mind of Travis Kalanick, were Tesla and its founder, Elon Musk. Tesla had added a controversial feature to its electric cars called Autopilot, a kind of glorified cruise control that allowed drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel during highway driving. Rumors had begun to circulate that Musk coveted more than the self-driving car market. As part of a long-established goal of creating products that didn’t rely on fossil fuels—Musk had started the solar panel company Solar City, which he merged with Tesla in late 2016—the Tesla founder was assumed to be exploring a ridesharing service of his own.

Kalanick isn’t able to hide his defensiveness or his annoyance. He ascribes his moments of pique to “fierce truth seeking.” Someone willing to say exactly what he thinks, empathy be damned, will be judged harshly. He’s not alone. It’s a trait that’s been repeatedly ascribed to Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and to Kalanick’s contemporary Elon Musk. Kalanick is aware of this, referring to the “meme that founder-CEOs have to be assholes to be successful.” He rejects that notion, but he’s obviously just short of obsessed by it. “I think there’s this question out there,” he says, shifting away from general memes to himself. “Is he an asshole?


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Tesla was willing to give away its best ideas to help make that happen. “Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote. “By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.” Rather than maximizing for a Now Me financial return, Tesla’s patent strategy maximizes for Future Us sustainability.

“positive impact on the environment”: Patagonia’s public benefit statements can be found at https://www.patagonia.com/b-lab.html. “we’re giving it away”: The biorubber story comes from a report by Sustainable Brands (“Patagonia Sharing Proprietary Biorubber to Advance Sustainable Surf Industry”). “factories every day”: Elon Musk’s blog post announcing Tesla’s new patent policy was titled “All Our Patent Are Belong to You,” June 12, 2014 (https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you). CHAPTER NINE: HOW TO DO A PERFECT HANDSTAND thirty years as a cadence for change: My thinking on the thirty-year theory of change was first sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

And part of the answer had to do with a phrase Dixon coined called “the Bat Signal Effect.” “The way I think about it is like this,” Dixon began. “Let’s just take Elon Musk. There were all these people around the world who wanted to build electric cars. Like [for example] there was some smart MIT grad who was working in the Innovation Group before whose dream was to work on electric cars. And the only place to do it prior to Tesla was to work at a regular car company. In some back room. They don’t really take the project seriously. And then you maybe see this person—Elon Musk—is starting this company and you’re intrigued, but you’re not sure where it’s going. But then maybe you see that they sold some cars, or raise some money, or recruited some talented person [laughs], and you realize that this sort of Bat Signal goes out.

It wasn’t all that long ago, Chen recalled, that technology was portrayed as an instrument of evil. Supercomputers, geolocation devices, and robotic assistants—these were all hallmarks of an evildoer. Now, these tropes were the staples of our heroes. From fictional protagonists—like Tony Stark and Rick Sanchez—to Silicon Valley icons—like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs—the “mad scientist” moniker had been replaced with words like visionary, luminary, and disruptor; and technology, in our cultural consciousness, had become perceived an instrument of empowerment. Sure, some people were afraid of technology (or maybe, on some level, we were all a little spooked), but the next generation of unknowns—and the one after that, and the one after that—just didn’t send a chill down our collective spines anymore; at least nowhere close to the way that it used to.

Xoxo As with Nimble America’s original announcement earlier that day, Yiannopoulos’s post was largely met with anger and annoyance, ranging from comments like “Fuck off with the money grab” to “Love you Milo but you’re hardly ever here except when it helps you and nobody else.” The NimbleRichMan post, however, was better received, inspiring many members of the community to speculate on his identity (and whether or not he really existed). Several theories were thrown out—Peter Thiel, being the most popular, but Elon Musk and Carl Icahn were also in the mix. Ultimately, however, community members seemed less interested in who this individual was than why, if he really were a member of the 0.001 percent, he felt compelled to hide his identity. That seemed cowardly. Why wouldn’t he proudly step forward as a Trump supporter?


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Muse.com <http://www.choosemuse.com/> (accessed 30 November 2017). Zoltan Istvan, ‘Will Brain Wave Technology Eliminate the Need for a Second Language?’ in Visions of the Future, ed. J. Daniel Batt (Reno: Lifeboat Foundation, 2015), 641. Cade Metz, ‘Elon Musk isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain’, Wired, 31 March 2017 <https://www.wired.com/­ 2017/03/elon-musks-neural-lace-really-look-like/?mbid=social_ twitter> (accessed 30 November 17). Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 1. Daniel Kellmereit and Daniel Obodovski, The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things (DND Ventures LLC, 2013), 3.

Wired, 6 May 2016 <https://www.wired.com/2016/05/ facebook-trying-create-ai-can-create-ai/> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017). Metz, Cade. ‘Microsoft Bets its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip’. Wired, 25 Aug. 2016 <https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ microsoft-bets-future-chip-reprogram-fly/?mbid=social_twitter> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017). Metz, Cade. ‘Elon Musk Isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain’. Wired, 31 Mar. 2017 <https://www.wired.com/2017/03/ elon-musks-neural-lace-really-look-like/?mbid=social_twitter> (accessed 30 Nov. 17). Metz, Cade. ‘Google’s Dueling Neural Networks Spar to Get Smarter, No Humans Required’. Wired, 11 Apr. 2017 <https://www.wired. com/2017/04/googles-dueling-neural-networks-spar-get-smarterno-humans-required/> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017).


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Some of these luminaries are still famous, while others were well-known in decades past and have since faded, so might provide a pleasant surge of nostalgia if you remember them when. Listing people by generation provides a new perspective outside of the usual prototypical representatives of a generation. Most people know that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was a Gen X’er—but so are Jimmy Fallon, Kanye West, Blake Shelton, Julia Roberts, Elon Musk, and Jennifer Lopez. Mark Zuckerberg is a quintessential Millennial, but the generation also includes Beyoncé, Michael Phelps, and Lady Gaga. You may find a few surprises: Until I made these lists, I didn’t realize that Melania Trump was a Gen X’er. There are also some intriguing parallels: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in the same year, 1955.

POPULATION IN 2020) 62.7% White 12.8% Black 16.6% Hispanic 6.7% Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander 1.2% Native American Parents: Silent and Boomers Children: Millennials, Gen Z, Polars Grandchildren: Polars and post-Polars MOST POPULAR FIRST NAMES * First appearance on the list Boys Michael Jason* David Christopher* John James Robert Girls Lisa Jennifer* Karen Mary Kimberly* Susan Michelle* Amy* Heather* Angela* Jessica* Amanda* FAMOUS MEMBERS (BIRTH YEAR) Actors, Comedians, Filmmakers Ben Stiller (1965) Chris Rock (1965) Brooke Shields (1965) Viola Davis (1965) Adam Sandler (1966) John Cusack (1966) Jim Gaffigan (1966) Julia Roberts (1967) Jimmy Kimmel (1967) Will Ferrell (1967) Will Smith (1968) Molly Ringwald (1968) Anthony Michael Hall (1968) John Singleton (1968) Margaret Cho (1968) Jennifer Lopez (1969) Jennifer Aniston (1969) Matthew McConaughey (1969) Wes Anderson (1969) Ken Jeong (1969) Julie Bowen (1970) Matt Damon (1970) Tina Fey (1970) Melissa McCarthy (1970) Ethan Hawke (1970) Kevin Smith (1970) Sarah Silverman (1970) Winona Ryder (1971) Amy Poehler (1971) Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) Ava DuVernay (1972) Sofia Vergara (1972) Seth Meyers (1973) Kristen Wiig (1973) Dave Chappelle (1973) Wilson Cruz (1973) Jimmy Fallon (1974) Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) Drew Barrymore (1975) Angelina Jolie (1975) Zach Braff (1975) John Cena (1977) James Franco (1978) Katie Holmes (1978) Ashton Kutcher (1978) Andy Samberg (1978) Jason Momoa (1979) Jordan Peele (1979) Mindy Kaling (1979) Claire Danes (1979) Musicians and Artists Janet Jackson (1966) Kurt Cobain (1967) Liz Phair (1967) Jay-Z (1969) Gwen Stefani (1969) Queen Latifah (1970) Tupac Shakur (1971) Snoop Dogg (1971) Eminem (1972) Jewel (1974) Lauryn Hill (1975) Blake Shelton (1976) Kanye West (1977) John Legend (1978) Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople Michael Dell (1965) Peter Thiel (1967) Sheryl Sandberg (1969) Elon Musk (1971) Larry Page (1973) Sergey Brin (1973) Sean Parker (1979) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Brett Kavanaugh (1965) Kevin McCarthy (1965) Neil Gorsuch (1967) Gavin Newsom (1967) John Fetterman (1969) Paul Ryan (1970) Ted Cruz (1970) Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) Hakeem Jeffries (1970) Marco Rubio (1971) Gretchen Whitmer (1971) Amy Coney Barrett (1972) Stacey Abrams (1973) Raphael Warnock (1973) Marjorie Taylor Greene (1974) Andrew Yang (1975) Ron DeSantis (1978) Josh Hawley (1979) Athletes and Sports Figures Mary Lou Retton (1968) Nancy Kerrigan (1969) Tonya Harding (1970) Andre Agassi (1970) Mia Hamm (1972) Shaquille O’Neal (1972) Dale Earnhardt Jr. (1974) Derek Jeter (1974) Tiger Woods (1975) Tom Brady (1977) Kobe Bryant (1978) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Rodney King (1965) Matt Drudge (1966) Mika Brzezinski (1967) Kellyanne Conway (1967) Anderson Cooper (1967) Joe Rogan (1967) Ron Goldman (1968) Tucker Carlson (1969) Melania Trump (1970) Chuck Klosterman (1972) Monica Lewinsky (1973) Rachel Maddow (1973) David Muir (1973) Norah O’Donnell (1974) John Green (1977) Donald Trump Jr. (1977) Kourtney Kardashian (1979) On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Dog Trait: Analog and Digital Communicators YouTube was created because a Gen X’er wanted to see a nipple.

Before long, Gen X’ers and others were finding new things people wanted to do online, often around two of their favorite things: pop culture and commerce. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar (b. 1967); the first item that sold on the site was a broken laser pointer. Tom Anderson (b. 1970) cofounded Myspace, the social networking site that was the most popular until Facebook took over—he’s still remembered by Gen X’ers and early Millennials as “Tom from Myspace.” PayPal was founded by Peter Thiel (b. 1967) and Elon Musk (b. 1971). Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey (b. 1976), and Uber by Travis Kalanick (b. 1976) and Garrett Camp (b. 1978). Sean Parker (b. 1979) cofounded Napster, the file-sharing music site later shut down over copyright issues, and served as the first president of Facebook. Gen X’er Sheryl Sandberg (b. 1969) didn’t found Facebook—that would be Millennial Mark Zuckerberg—but she helped run it for a decade.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as Space X, is an aerospace manufacturer that builds and launches space rockets, founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel’s cofounder at PayPal, Elon Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla Motors. Elon’s goal is to reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. “SpaceX is already 3-D printing essential elements of its rockets rather than purchasing machined parts from a contractor,” says Chris. “SpaceX launches cargo into space at a much lower launch cost than the incumbent players. How? Elon Musk reasons from first principles. Begin with what is known to be true and eliminate assumptions—especially those coming from long-established industries.

“We need docking modules that will allow any number of FLIPs to lock together above and below the waterline and allow safe passage between them while at sea. No one FLIP design will work for every job, so the new FLIPs should be infinitely configurable so they can do an insanely great job at whatever our markets require of them. All of these modules should be easily interchangeable without the use of a shipyard. Elon Musk will finally have a stable, multi-FLIP rocket recovery base. That’s our Step One market. Our Step Two market will involve people finding value in other ways that we can’t imagine yet.” Bob Ballard didn’t tell Chris he was crazy. Bob thinks going to Mars is crazy, and mass-producing FLIPs is a necessity.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

CHAPTER 18 186“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more”: Eric Jackson, PayPal Wars (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2004). 187Thiel advocating for floating structures: “Peter Thiel Offers $100,000 in Matching Donations to TSI, Makes Grant of $250,000,” Sea-steading Institute, February 10, 2010, http://www.seasteading. org/2010/02/peter-thiel-offers-100000-matching-donations-tsi-makes-grant-250000/. 187aiming for the colonization of Mars: Adam Mann, “Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony,” Wired, November 26, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/11/elon-musk-mars-colony/. CHAPTER 19 190In June 2012 the founders announced: BFL (Butterfly Labs) to BTCF, June 16, 2012. 190a young Chinese immigrant in New York, Yifu Guo, announced: ngzhang to BTCF, September 17, 2012. 191that power doubled again in just one month after Yifu’s machines: Historical data on the hashing power available at https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate. 195“This is a dark day for Bitcoin”: “Breaking: The Blockchain Has Forked,” Bitcoin Trader, March 11, 2013, http://www.thebitcointrader .com/2013/03/breaking-blockchain-has-forked.html. 196“clarify the applicability of the regulations implementing”: The FinCen guidance is available at http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html.

Investors and entrepreneurs were cooking up ever more ambitious schemes involving virtual reality, drones, and artificial intelligence, alongside more quotidian projects, like remaking public transportation and the hotel industry. The PayPal founders were among the most ambitious, with Thiel advocating for floating structures where people could live outside the jurisdiction of any national government. Elon Musk, an early PayPal employee and founder of SpaceX, was aiming for the colonization of Mars. If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life.


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Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

In the following six months, it would climb to $383. The technology and business website Ars Technica reports that when another Tesla customer died in an Autosteer-related crash in March 2018, Tesla cited NHTSA’s positive report in a blog post defending the technology. A few weeks later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk “berated reporters for focusing on stories about crashes instead of touting the safety benefits of Autopilot.” “They should be writing a story about how autonomous cars are really safe,” Musk said in a May 2018 earnings call. “But that’s not a story that people want to click on. They write inflammatory headlines that are fundamentally misleading to readers.”

Boudette, “Tesla’s Self-Driving System Cleared in Deadly Crash,” New York Times, January 19, 2017; Tom Randall, “Tesla’s Autopilot Vindicated with 40% Drop in Crashes,” Bloomberg, January 19, 2017; Andrew J. Hawkins, “Tesla’s Crash Rate Dropped 40 Percent After Autopilot Was Installed, Feds Say,” Verge, January 19, 2017; Elon Musk (@elonmusk-Twitter), “Report highlight: ‘The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation,’” Twitter, January 29, 2017, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/822129092036206592; Chris Mills, “Report Finds Tesla’s Autopilot Makes Driving Much Safer,” BGR, January 19, 2017. 4.In its report on this matter, the firm states that it has no financial stake in Tesla, its competitors, or any other interests connected to the technology of autonomous cars and driver assistance systems. 5.

As a consequence, the overall 40 percent reduction in the crash rates reported by NHTSA following the installation of Autosteer is an artifact of the Agency’s treatment of mileage information that is actually missing in the underlying dataset” (“NHTSA’s Implausible Safety Claim”). 7.Timothy B. Lee, “In 2017, the Feds Said Tesla Autopilot Cut Crashes 40%—That Was Bogus,” Ars Technica, February 13, 2019. See also Timothy B. Lee, “Sorry Elon Musk, There’s No Clear Evidence Autopilot Saves Lives,” Ars Technica, May 4, 2018. 8.Sam Peltzman, Regulation of Automobile Safety (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), p. 4. 9.According to the Fatal Analysis Reporting System of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in the year 2000 seat belts alone were estimated to have a 48 percent effectiveness in preventing fatalities (to people over twelve years old) in crashes that otherwise would have been fatal.


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Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Sagaria, ‘Misperception of Exponential Growth’, Perception & Psychophysics, 18(6), November 1975, pp. 416–422 <https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03204114>. 14 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 20. 15 Pascal Boyer and Michael Bang Petersen, ‘Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, 2018, E158 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17001960>. 16 Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), pp. 178–179. 17 ‘Planet of the Phones’, The Economist, 26 February 2015 <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/02/26/planet-of-the-phones> [accessed 15 March 2021]. 18 Simon Evans, ‘Solar Is Now “Cheapest Electricity in History”, Confirms IEA’, Carbon Brief, 13 October 2020 <https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-confirms-iea> [accessed 18 December 2020]. 19 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York, NY: Penguin, 2000). 20 Suzana Herculano-Houzel, ‘The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-up Primate Brain’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3 November 2009 <https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009>. 21 Carl Zimmer, ‘100 Trillion Connections: New Efforts Probe and Map the Brain’s Detailed Architecture’, Scientific American, January 2011 <https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0111-58>. 22 Even if we could build a machine with the complexity of the human brain – comprising artificial rather than real neurons, and connections between them – it isn’t clear this would give rise to anything that can do what the human brain does. 23 Graham Rapier, ‘Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Have 1 Million Robo-Taxis on the Road Next Year, and Some People Think the Claim Is So Unrealistic That He’s Being Compared to PT Barnum’, Business Insider, 23 April 2019 <https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-robo-taxis-elon-musk-pt-barnum-circus-2019-4> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 24 Andrew Barclay, ‘Why Is It So Hard to Make a Truly Self-Driving Car?’, South China Morning Post, 5 July 2018 <https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3028605/why-it-so-hard-make-truly-self-driving-car> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 25 Rani Molla, ‘How Apple’s iPhone Changed the World: 10 Years in 10 Charts’, Vox, 26 June 2017 <https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-apple-10-year-anniversary-launch-mobile-stats-smart-phone-steve-jobs> [accessed 22 July 2020]. 26 Ritwik Banerjee, Joydeep Bhattacharya and Priyama Majumdar, ‘Exponential-Growth Prediction Bias and Compliance with Safety Measures Related to COVID-19’, Social Science & Medicine, 268, January 2021, 113473 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113473>. 27 Robert C.

Our best current guess is that the human brain has about 100 billion neurons.20 Each neuron is connected, on average, to a thousand others, leading scientists to estimate that there are 100 trillion connections in the human brain.21 If these estimates prove correct, and if we have properly understood the function of neurons, a machine that mimics the complexity of the brain could conceivably be built within a couple of decades. But those are big ifs. When our scientific understanding of a subject is still developing, predictions are sometimes little better than guesswork.22 Self-driving cars create similar, if rather smaller, headaches. In 2019, Elon Musk envisioned that Tesla, the car firm, would have a fleet of 1 million self-driving taxis, what he called ‘robo-taxis’, on the roads by the end of 2020.23 The actual number was zero. And Tesla is not alone. Every self-driving car company has missed its targets. It turns out that the problem is much harder, from a purely technical perspective, than the teams building the technologies were willing to acknowledge.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

At Stanford University, we rarely meet students who know Swartz’s name or can describe what he did. They do know the names of Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and former Stanford students such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the cofounders of Google), Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (the cofounders of Snapchat), Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (the cofounders of Instagram), and Elon Musk (the founder of Tesla and SpaceX). And many students on campus today know the name Joshua Browder. If they haven’t heard of his successfully funded start-up, they know of his work because he spammed the entire student body in early 2019 to offer them a chance, by using his service DoNotPay, to get out of fees that support a wide array of student groups on campus.

Since Russell published his open letter, more than three thousand individuals and organizations have indicated their support for an autonomous weapons ban and signed a pledge not to “support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.” The signatories include major names in technology, including Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla), Jeff Dean (the head of Google AI), and Martha Pollack (the president of Cornell University), and leading organizations, such as Google DeepMind. A campaign to ban killer robots has gone global, and thirty member countries of the United Nations have explicitly endorsed the call for a ban.

“Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,” the OpenAI team wrote, “we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper.” OpenAI was created in 2015 as a nonprofit organization funded by wealthy technologists, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Reid Hoffman, who were concerned with charting a path toward safe artificial general intelligence. With a social rather than profit-making mission, the team worried that the powerful tool it created could easily be put to illicit or even nefarious use producing fake text analogous to deep-fake images and videos.


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Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Several of the students told me how fortunate they felt that the SAT preparation program I was leading had happened to arrive during the year when they needed to prepare for the SATs. Had the program arrived even a year later, they would have lacked crucial resources to secure admission to universities that served as gateways to further opportunities. Many rich white men credit luck with enabling at least some of their success, too. There are exceptions—like Elon Musk, who tweeted “Working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks in year and people still calling me lucky”12—but most rich men I know factor in luck. When I reviewed the two hundred letters written by billionaires who signed the Giving Pledge—an initiative started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that asks the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate at least half of their wealth to charitable causes—participants reference how luck contributed to their success more than sixty times.

When the American Investment Council aligns otherwise-competing private equity firms to protect the carried interest loophole, that’s anticompetitive—and antidemocratic, since the public’s desire to close the loophole is suppressed. Extractive actions like these enabled Amazon and Tesla—the companies led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the world’s two richest men—to pay zero income taxes in 2018.9 When rich white guys deplete public infrastructure—such as the public universities that educate our workforces and the roads that get employees to our offices—without renewing it, we are engaging unsustainably, enriching ourselves at the expense of the public good.

Samantha Artiga, Olivia Pham, Kendal Orgera, and Usha Ranji, “Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Health: An Overview,” Kaiser Family Foundation, November 10, 2020, https://www.kff.org/report-section/racial-disparities-in-maternal-and-infant-health-an-overview-issue-brief/. 11. Colleen Murphy, “What Is White Savior Complex—and Why Is It Harmful?,” Health, September 20, 2021, https://www.health.com/mind-body/health-diversity-inclusion/white-savior-complex. 12. Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks in a year and people still calling me lucky,” Twitter, June 11, 2020. 13. Warren Buffett, pledge letter, Giving Pledge, accessed September 15, 2022, https://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=177. 14. Jon and Karen Huntsman, pledge letter, Giving Pledge, June 18, 2010, https://givingpledge.org/pledger?


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The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The US government provides $2500 tax credits for plug-in EVs, and has in the past provided other subsidies for fuel efficient vehicles. Many states and other countries provide additional subsidies. New companies formed to market high-end EVs. Leading the charge, Tesla Motors, was founded by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk (also of SpaceX, Solar City, and PayPal) Their continued growth in profits and increasing sales is paving the way (no pun intended). Such fame is derived in large part from automobile production, but their real advances are as a robust battery manufacturer. Sales of EVs, shown in Figure 5.1,119 remain in the thousands, while the US market is about 13 to 14 million cars and light trucks per year.120 That has not stopped Musk from claiming most new cars will be EVs within 20 years.

Fast forward just a few years and we see that Google hired many of the leaders of the Stanford and Carnegie Mellon teams.155 156 Google Self-Driving Cars have since traveled 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) autonomously, mostly around the San Francisco Bay Area, but also more recently in Austin, Texas and Kirkland, Washington (Figure 7.1).157 Google's cars are map-dependent, operating where the roads have been mapped out in detail, so that they can compare what they see with what they expect to see158—a strategy with obvious strengths and weaknesses.159 In Fall of 2015, the electric vehicle automaker Tesla remotely upgraded its most recent model year cars (about 50,000 vehicles) with “auto-pilot”, making them semi-autonomous (late Level 2, early Level 3).160 Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, says he expects fully autonomous vehicles within 3 years (i.e. by 2018). David took a test ride with a Tesla owner running the vehicle in Autopilot. As countless internet videos attest, Teslas are able to function in hands-off mode some of the time. They use adaptive cruise control to follow the vehicle in front at a desired speed constrained by a fixed following distance and use lane markings to stay in lane.


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The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

Billionaires don’t seem to view the world that way, however. To them, all oceans are purple, a blending of available opportunity extant within established practice. John Paul DeJoria launched John Paul Mitchell Systems into the populated market of high-end hair care; there were other ways to pay sellers online before Elon Musk bought PayPal; Bharti Enterprises founder Sunil Mittal got his start importing known, legacy technologies into India; Sara Blakely’s Spanx were inserted into a hosiery market dominated by L’eggs and Hanes; Carnival Cruise billionaire Micky Arison made his billions by reinventing the cruising business away from its status as a vacation option only for the wealthy and elderly; James Dyson invented the dual cyclone to compete in a product space that was so entrenched that Mr.

In 1985, he branched into film and television by purchasing 20th Century Fox and creating the Fox Broadcasting Company. Other acquisitions include HarperCollins and the Wall Street Journal. Today, Murdoch remains executive chairman of News Corporation, while continuing to make headlines for his efforts to acquire more media properties. Elon Musk b. 1971, South Africa Tesla, PayPal The South African native and serial entrepreneur founded multiple businesses before the ones that made him famous. In 1999, he cofounded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail company. A year later X-com merged with Cofinity, along with its online bank subsidiary, PayPal.


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Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

(Thiel was an early investor in, and advocate of, the seasteading movement, though his interest has waned in recent years.) Then you mined the moon for its ore and other resources, before moving on to colonize Mars. This last level of the game reflected the current preferred futurist fantasy, most famously advanced by Thiel’s former PayPal colleague Elon Musk, with his dream of fleeing a dying planet Earth for privately owned colonies on Mars. The influence of The Sovereign Individual was all over the show. It was a detailed mapping of a possible future, in all its highly sophisticated barbarism. It was a utopian dream that appeared, in all its garish detail and specificity, as the nightmare vision of a world to come.

Nippert, in a recent New Zealand Herald article, had published the architect’s plans for the place. Thiel was making some alterations to the master bedroom. He was putting in a panic room. 5 OFF-WORLD COLONY Toward the end of the final episode of the National Geographic documentary series Mars, there is a scene where Elon Musk, the founder of the private space transportation company SpaceX, visits Cape Canaveral with his young son. Together they ascend the elevator up the launch tower to where the space shuttles once began their trajectory into space, and he explains to the boy that in years past this was exactly how the astronauts themselves would have ascended before launching.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Giant and far-flung business visions are usually associated with Valley and tech CEOs who have outsize personalities. Steve Jobs is the archetype. Even as the late Apple CEO introduced some of the most profoundly disruptive technology the world has ever seen, he nourished a cult of personality with his distinct appearance and a stage presence worthy of P. T. Barnum. Elon Musk, who runs both the electric car company Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, likes to share extravagant plans for living on Mars and building high-speed tunnels between US cities. In person and online, Musk is combative and outrageous—picking fights with the SEC on Twitter and smoking weed during live radio interviews.

On social media, the scams became so bad that crypto firm Ripple filed a lawsuit against YouTube over a series of send-us-your-money videos that hijacked the image of its CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Meanwhile, teenagers would hack into Twitter in July of 2020, hijacking the accounts of everyone from Brian to Elon Musk to Michelle Obama in order to invite their millions of followers to send bitcoin. And, in the fifth season of Billions, the Showtime series beloved by finance junkies, a key plot point turns on an illegal bitcoin mining operation run by the main character’s teenage son. Overall, though, bitcoin’s reputation is better than it’s ever been.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

Even earlier, the first real movement for suffrage was in California, sometime in the 1890s. Electronic technology is just another goldmine. In a sense, unleashing and controlling the power of the electron is no different than digging in the ground, smelting, yada, yada, yada. The nineteenth century looks primitive today, and we’ll look primitive in a hundred years. The Elon Musk effect, the Travis Kalanick obsession—they’re just the lucky sons of guns who staked their claim on the right river. And it’s produced a volcanic eruption of money. There’s reinvestment: a lot of money gets plowed back into tech. Hell, since the housing meltdown in 2008, the global economy is so shitty, a lot of the world’s surplus money gets buried in tech because it doesn’t know what else to do.

What separates me and you from him?” The guy got frustrated and asked, “Can you please just drop me here?” We get that more and more now. I was here when Uber was at the beginning, when Travis Kalanick was at his beginning, or Brian Chesky from Airbnb, or Jack Dorsey was trying to make Square, and the beginning of Elon Musk doing Tesla.§ I have driven many of them. From my own experience, when you meet them, you don’t see anything inspiring on them. You don’t see that genius in them. These are normal people with regular IQs, maybe they’re sneakier than others. Maybe they took the back roads, the shortcuts. In the end, I go to myself, Well, it’s a good thing, because it means it’s easier to succeed in this city than it seems.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

This made use of each car’s existing suite of onboard cameras and sensors—a forward-looking, long-distance radar system to see through bad weather, cameras equipped with image-recognition software, and a battery of ultrasonic proximity sensors—to achieve a limited degree of autonomous operation. As far as Tesla was concerned, this capacity was meant to augment, rather than supplant, human guidance. That it was limited, however, wasn’t always clear from the company’s official pronouncements. “The car can do almost anything,” enthused CEO Elon Musk, talking up Autopilot at an unveiling event. “We’re able to do lane keeping on freeways, automatic cruise control, active emergency braking … It’ll self-park. Going a step further, you’ll be able to summon the car, if you’re on private property.” Anyone enticed by this reeling-off of capabilities—or his earlier brag that a driver could take a Model S from San Francisco to Seattle “without touching the controls at all”—could perhaps be forgiven for missing the hesitant “almost” with which he hedged the claim.10 Musk further touted his product’s almost uncanny ability to learn from experience, referring to each Model S owner as an “expert trainer” who could tutor Autopilot simply by driving with the mode engaged.

Else, “The ‘1033 Program,’ Department of Defense Support to Law Enforcement,” Congressional Research Service, August 28, 2014, fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R43701.pdf. 15.Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013; Novara Media, “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” podcast, June 2015, novaramedia.com/2015/06/fully-automated-luxury-communism/. 16.Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, New York: Bantam Books, 1971. 17.Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, New York: Olympia Press, 1968. 18.Quoctrung Bui, “Map: The Most Common* Job In Every State,” National Public Radio, February 5, 2015, npr.org. 19.Elon Musk, “Master Plan, Part Deux,” July 20, 2016, tesla.com. 20.See the site of Amazon’s fully owned robotics subsidiary at amazonrobotics.com, and the video of one of its warehouses in operation at youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A. 21.Pew Research Center, “Digital Life in 2025: AI, Robotics and the Future of Jobs,” August 6, 2014, pewinternet.org. 22.In fairness, while nobody invokes the Bui map directly, several of Pew’s respondents did point out that truck driver is the number-one occupation for men in the United States, and that alongside taxi drivers, current holders of the job would be among the first to be entirely displaced by automation.

October 14, 2015, teslamotors.com/en_GB/blog/your-autopilot-has-arrived. 10.Alex Davies, “The Model D is Tesla’s Most Powerful Car Ever, Plus Autopilot,” Wired, October 10, 2014; Damon Lavrinc, “Tesla Auto-Steer Will Let Drivers Go From SF To Seattle Hands-Free,” Jalopnik, March 19, 2015. 11.Roger Fingas, “ ‘Apple Car’ Rollout Reportedly Delayed Until 2021, Owing to Obstacles in ‘Project Titan,’” AppleInsider, July 21, 2016. 12.Danny Yadron and Dan Tynan. “Tesla Driver Dies in First Fatal Crash While Using Autopilot Mode,” Guardian, July 1, 2016. 13.Elon Musk, Tweet, April 17, 2016. twitter.com/elonmusk/status/721829237741621248. 14.Tesla Motors, Inc. “A Tragic Loss,” June 30, 2016, teslamotors.com/blog/tragic-loss. 15.Tesla Motors, Inc. “Misfortune,” July 6, 2016, teslamotors.com/blog/misfortune. 16.Fred Lambert, “Google Deep Learning Founder Says Tesla’s Autopilot System Is ‘Irresponsible,’ ” Electrek, May 30, 2016. 17.United Nations General Assembly.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

The book then analyzes the medium term effects of those semi-intelligent tools upon society. This includes some surprising results from an historical review of existing technologies. There is a growing awareness of these issues, with concerns recently raised by physicist Stephen Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and billionaire Elon Musk. Copyright Copyright 2015 Anthony Berglas. Createspaces ISBN-13: 978-1502384188 ISBN-10: 1502384183 Images in this book are marked as follows:Owned. The images are owned by Anthony. William Black and Samantha Lindsay drew many of them as noted. Permitted. The owner of the image has given specific permission to use it in this book.

It takes a cold look at where that technology is likely to lead, with an unusually strong focus on natural selection. It also reviews other writer’s books and papers on the subject to provide alternative perspectives. There has been a slowly growing awareness of these issues. Technology billionaire Elon Musk recently warned that research into artificial intelligence was “summoning the devil” and that artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat. World famous physicist Stephen Hawking expressed his concerns that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”.

The survey considered several possible advances over the next fifty years ranging from organ transport to space colonization, even teleportation. But the much more likely possibility of developing a truly intelligent machine was not even mentioned. However, this is beginning to change. In October 2014 technology billionaire Elon Musk warned that research into artificial intelligence was “summoning the devil”, that artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat, and that we were already at the stage where there should be some regulatory oversight. Musk is CEO of Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX and co-founder PayPal. He has recently invested in the DeepMind AI company to “keep an eye on what’s going on”.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

Although the service was available to every retailer and consumer, he found a niche market where many online transactions were occurring and he decided to build his monopoly there: eBay customers. Why shouldn’t every eBay customer use PayPal to settle their transactions? Only two things stood in his way: eBay could compete and Peter had one competitor, X.com, run by Elon Musk. So rather than try to directly destroy his competitors, Peter reinforced that PayPal was a monopoly. First off, he paid customers who signed up ten dollars. This basically killed off eBay’s efforts almost immediately. Second, he merged with X.com. Why merge with a company he could potentially defeat?

So instead of letting me sell the other 50 percent, they had to go in and buy the other 50 percent less than five months after we launched our deal. The other company they invested in around the same time ended up going out of business. TheStreet.com only owned 10 percent of them. So Peter Thiel naturally figured, why fight Elon Musk’s X.com and destroy each other in the process plus waste a ton of time and money when they could just merge and become a monopoly and go public and create real value, even if meant they all had lesser stakes? Once they merged they had twice as many ideas — which meant that their stakes would be worth more than twice as much, since we now know that ideas are more valuable than money.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Newer machine learning systems are looking for more than patterns in the data: they utilize feedback data in a more nuanced, differentiated way, devaluing older data for instance, a bit like human memory does. Feedback is central to any such system, especially when the system is used to assist in critical decision-making. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, boasted on Twitter in late 2016 that his company’s cars logged many hundreds of millions of miles using Autopilot, Tesla’s semiautonomous driving system. Likely, it wasn’t simple numbers-bragging that drove Musk to tweet. Autopilot generates and accumulates valuable feedback data that gets sent to Tesla and is used to “train” the next software release of the Autopilot system.

UBI, as it is affectionately called by its proponents, has garnered surprising support, particularly among leading figures in the high-tech sector. “Superangel” investor Marc Andreessen, the coauthor of Mosaic, one of the first widely used Web browsers, is in favor of it. And so are New York–based Albert Wenger, another highly successful venture capitalist; start-up incubator impresario Sam Altman; and Elon Musk, the brash but congenial cofounder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla. Silicon Valley isn’t alone in its enthusiasm for UBI, but it is Silicon Valley’s digital and data-driven innovations that have given rise to the idea. There are innumerable variations, but the core idea is similar. Everyone receives a monthly check for a fixed amount that would be sufficient to pay for food, clothing, basic education, a warm, dry home, perhaps even some form of health insurance.


pages: 296 words: 78,631

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry

23andMe, 3D printing, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, chief data officer, computer vision, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, ransomware, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, systematic bias, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, trolley problem, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, William Langewiesche, you are the product

There’s little doubt that their system has had a net positive impact, making driving safer for those who use it – you don’t need to look far to find online videos of the ‘Forward Collision Warning’ feature, recognizing the risk of accident before the driver, setting off an alarm and saving the car from crashing.64 But there’s a slight mismatch between what the cars can do – with what’s essentially a fancy forward-facing parking sensor and clever cruise control – and the language used to describe them. For instance, in October 2016 an announcement on the Tesla site65 stated that ‘all Tesla cars being produced now have full self-driving hardware’.# According to an article in The Verge, Elon Musk, product architect of Tesla, added: ‘The full autonomy update will be standard on all Tesla vehicles from here on out.’66 But that phrase ‘full autonomy’ is arguably at odds with the warning users must accept before using the current autopilot: ‘You need to maintain control and responsibility of your vehicle.’67 Expectations are important.

v=SnRp56XjV_M. 65. https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware. 66. Jordan Golson and Dieter Bohn, ‘All new Tesla cars now have hardware for “full self-driving capabilities”: but some safety features will be disabled initially’, The Verge, 19 Oct. 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13340938/tesla-autopilot-update-model-3-elon-musk-update. 67. Fred Lambert, ‘Tesla introduces first phase of “Enhanced Autopilot”: “measured and cautious for next several hundred million miles” – release notes’, Electrek, 1 Jan 2017, https://electrek.co/2017/01/01/tesla-enhanced-autopilot-release-notes/. 68. DPC Cars, ‘Toyota Guardian and Chauffeur autonomous vehicle platform’, YouTube, 27 Sept. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Envy: The Ulcer of the Soul (and of Business Growth) Socrates said that envy is the ulcer of the soul, meaning that we can easily become negatively affected by the success of others. Who we are and what we actually want become overshadowed when we internally compare ourselves to others. We idolize people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Oprah and think that their path to success—creating massive empires—is our own key to happiness and career fulfillment. For some reason, when our business is just us, or when it isn’t growing, we feel a societal pressure to keep up with other, larger businesses in order to be seen as “making it.”

Word of mouth happens, Google links to you favorably, you’re invited to speaking gigs, and so on—all because your expertise is valued. But how do you build authority? And how does it work? If you think of the leaders in your industry, you can see that those people have an image of authority—like Debbie Millman in the field of graphic design, or Elon Musk in the field of electric cars. We look to these people for answers, we learn from them, and if we’re part of the audience they’re teaching, we probably buy from them as well. In business these days, it’s not enough to just tell people you’re an authority—you’ve got to demonstrate your actual expertise by sharing what you know and teaching others.


pages: 286 words: 77,039

The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway by Ben Mezrich

Elon Musk, independent contractor, private spaceflight

CHAPTER 22 * * * NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, AUGUST 2008 Jeff Foust The fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one. The thought wasn’t original; in fact, Robert Bigelow had borrowed it from his sometime colleague, sometime competitor in the private, commercial space race, Elon Musk, but at the moment it seemed particularly apropos. Standing in the center of the command center of Bigelow Aerospace Mission Control—surrounded by millions of dollars in equipment, caught in the glow of multiple giant screens hanging from the ceiling, above row after row of oblong workstations, staffed by dozens of the top aerospace engineers money could drag to his secure, somewhat fortresslike fifty-acre compound in a residential/commercial suburb ten miles north of the Las Vegas Strip—Bigelow couldn’t help but think about hard numbers.

The steps that had led Bigelow from Budget Suites to Bigelow Aerospace, and Genesis—by way of the NIDS, it could be said—had been a mixture of accident and applied imagination. Although space had always been his goal—for what he assumed to be very different reasons from the ones that possessed men like Elon Musk and those who ran his competitors in the industry—he had at first approached his dream like the real estate mogul he was. The ideas he’d first advanced, dutifully documented by awed and amused local and national journalists, had been met by much skepticism: hotels in space, a resort on the Moon, even an orbital cruise liner.


pages: 271 words: 79,367

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

The single most important figure in the battery industry today is Elon Musk, the head of Tesla. Working with battery manufacturer Panasonic, Tesla is building a vast ‘Gigafactory’ in Nevada that will produce battery packs for Tesla cars and also for the company’s new residential and grid storage systems. By building a factory of this size Tesla is expected to reduce the cost per watt of storage to about half the level of just a couple of years ago. This will accelerate electric car sales and the use of lithium ion batteries in static storage as well. Elon Musk unveils Tesla’s ‘Powerwall’ battery storage at an event in California, April 2015.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

In another case involving a China autonomous vehicle company, Apple charged an engineer also leaving for China of stealing its driver-less car secrets.4 NIO in Road Race with Tesla From another corner of China’s fledgling electric market, premium maker NIO is coming on strong as a Tesla challenger with Star Trek-y looking cars and a starting price tag of around $70,000, much less than Tesla in China. The founder, William Li, has been called the Elon Musk of China. His company’s slogan is “Blue sky coming.” Tech-savvy Chinese customers can link their mobile phone to NIO and tap on a screen for repairs, maintenance, and quick power boosts by battery swapping and mobile charging vans. Like at Xpeng, Li has poured some of his own money into the startup, which is backed by China tech titans Baidu and Tencent plus veteran investors Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, and Temasek.

But Tesla got a slow start and has sold only an estimated 30,000 Tesla models since launching in China in 2013, compared to about 180,000 in the United States, where it is the dominant seller with about half of EV sales. The issues for Tesla in China have mainly been high prices due to tariffs and too few supercharging stations. Tesla’s China sales slid in 2018 in the wake of the country’s slowing economy, tariff swings, and multiple price shifts in the US-China trade war. To the rescue, visionary founder Elon Musk. He recently flew to Shanghai and shook hands with the mayor in a ceremony to debut Tesla plans to construct its own megafactory in the city, which could crank out 500,000 cars annually, as much as its Fremont, California, plant. With local production in China starting in a few years, Tesla could get around 25 percent tariffs on its models, which are priced at $78,000 to $150,000 for high-end sedans.


pages: 246 words: 74,404

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

There are some very smart thinkers who believe work is what gives our life meaning because without it we accomplish nothing and make no mark upon history. Without work, we might die and it would be as though we had never lived. Since evolution is fueled by a desire to leave a lasting legacy, this argument can be quite compelling. Elon Musk once wondered how people could find meaning without a job. “A lot of people derive meaning from their employment,” he warned. “If you’re not needed, what is the meaning? Do you feel useless?” It seems the answer to his question might be yes. In the United States, the number of people still working past retirement age has risen by almost 35 percent in recent years.

Here’s the bottom line: The average of answers from a large, independent, and diverse group of people will often be more accurate than the answer arrived at by a smart individual or a small group of smart people. In our culture, which focuses on personal achievement and sometimes worships charismatic individuals like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, this advice can seem counterintuitive, but it’s backed by decades and decades of evidence from a wide variety of industries. I know it feels more efficient to work alone, but the point of this book is to encourage you to ask more questions about efficiency. Does your current process really save time, or are you taking that on faith?


pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

The website Which Face Is Real demonstrates this, placing a computer-generated portrait beside a real photo.29 They are frighteningly hard to distinguish. Audio deepfakes have already been put to malicious use, with scammers using speech samples of a CEO to replicate his voice digitally, with which they ordered a junior employee to urgently transfer €220,000 into the con artists’ account.30 A research company backed by Elon Musk, OpenAI, created an algorithm that writes coherent text independently, creating the prospect of automated trolls able to do more than just spam; they could engage people in argument, push conspiracy theories and dilute meaningful public discussion. Fearful of misuse, OpenAI decided not release the research.31, 32 While deepfakes are a threat, we can inform ourselves, prepare and respond.

pfmredir=sm 16 www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/narrative-war-coming 17 news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1032811 18 www.transparency.org/news/feature/regional-analysis-MENA www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/richest-countries- in-the-world 19 www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/gun-control-yemen-style/273058/ 20 www.acleddata.com/2019/06/18/press-release-yemen-war-death-toll-exceeds-90000-according-to-new-acled-data-for-2015/ 21 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278080/ 22 news.un.org/en/story/2019/03/1035501 23 mwatana.org/en/day-of-judgment/ 24 yemen.bellingcat.com/work 25 www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2019/04/22/the-yemen-project-announcement/ 26 yemeniarchive.org/en 27 www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0 28 www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDOo5nDJwgA 29 www.whichfaceisreal.com/ 30 www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice-in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402 31 amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction?__twitter_impression=true https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ 32 www.vice.com/en_us/article/594qx5/there-is-no-tech-solution-to-deepfakes 33 lab.witness.org/projects/synthetic-media-and-deep-fakes/ 34 www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Qh_6cHw50l0 35 amp.axios.com/deepfake-authentication-privacy-5fa05902-41eb-40a7-8850-5450bcad0475.html?


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

AEEII (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/182669). 2 It is a disturbing reality that the science fiction of the past defines present-day visions of the future. As Jill Lepore, professor of American History at Harvard University, has demonstrated, Elon Musk’s plans and investments appear to have been shaped by the works of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams. Excellent writers, but not representatives for humanity in all its diversity. (You can listen to Lepore discuss this in her 2021 BBC radio series ‘Elon Musk: the evening rocket’, available at https://bbc.in/3uo8xQZ). Figure 3. Homo transporticus: a convenient fiction of modern transport design. More precisely, transport designers have fabricated a new species: Homo transporticus, a cousin of economic man.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

I’m looking forward to it. It’s like being afraid of nuclear power—you know, if we designed nuclear technology knowing what we know now, we could make it safe, probably.” Yet critics like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have raised concerns that AI could evolve more quickly than we could control it—that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. “Oh, it’s great,” Gruber says of the discussion. “We’re kind of at the stage now where the Elon Musks of the world are saying, ‘Look, this is going to be powerful enough to destroy the earth. Now how do we want to deal with the technology?’ And I don’t like the way that we have dealt with nuclear, but it hasn’t killed us.

A sustainable modern society must return to harvesting its energy from sunlight and wind. Plants harvest sunlight but are needed for food. Photovoltaic cells and windmills can provide electricity without polluting the air, but this electric power must be stored, and batteries are the most convenient storage depot for electric power.” Which is exactly why entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are investing heavily in them. His Gigafactory, which will soon churn out lithium-ion batteries at a scale never before seen, is the clearest signal yet that the automotive and electronics industry have chosen their horse for the twenty-first century. The lithium-ion battery—conceived in an Exxon lab, built into a game-changer by an industry lifer, turned into a mainstream commercial product by a Japanese camera maker, and manufactured with ingredients dredged up in the driest, hottest place on Earth—is the unheralded engine driving our future machines.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

An introvert by nature, Camp enjoyed tinkering with ideas for startups or solving problems in his head as he walked the sloped streets of San Francisco. Even at thirty years old, Camp still looked like a college student with his close-cropped cut of dirty blond hair and button-down oxford shirts. He was cerebral, a little geeky, able to explain the intricate architecture of the internet, but lacking the polish and showmanship of, say, an Elon Musk. His wide, toothy grin made him look more goofy than dashing—something like “the entrepreneur next door.” Camp was fun to hang out with, though. He enjoyed traveling, loved experimenting with fine dining in the Bay Area. He was always game for a hot tub hang, enjoyed theme parties that obliged one to rent a tux.

Graves caught the entrepreneurial bug early. He worshiped entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, idolizing the way they built something enormously successful out of nothing but an idea and a computer. Graves’s Tumblr was filled with photos of Jeff Bezos, quotes from Albert Einstein, articles about Elon Musk. One personal favorite was an iconic quote from Shawn Carter, better known by hip-hop fans as Jay-Z: “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” In 2009, he was bored of his job as a database admin at GE’s health care unit in Chicago. He wanted a cool job, perhaps at one of the startups whose apps populated his iPhone home screen.

Headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other major publications admired the progress achieved by tech’s boy geniuses. Mark Zuckerberg was a visionary whose social network connected friends and family worldwide. Twitter had enabled democracy to flourish in the Middle East. Google wunderkinds had built beautiful maps that made life easier, and given everyone a free email account. Elon Musk’s ambitions were transcendent: he would save the world with electric Teslas and conquer the stars with SpaceX. Though many had written about the negative aspects of tech, the American press and public often overlooked Facebook’s towering monopoly on social media, Amazon’s takeover of internet infrastructure, the disappearance of privacy enabled by Google’s advertising technology, the noxious, racist trolls enabled by Twitter, and the outlandish and harmful theories fed to users by YouTube’s automated algorithms—the earth is flat, vaccinations cause autism, 9/11 was an inside job.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Despite the obvious challenges, the exponential productivity boosts, dramatic cost savings, and rising profits attainable through artificial intelligence systems are so great there will be no turning back. AI is here to stay, and never one to miss an opportunity, Crime, Inc. is all over it. Al-gorithm Capone and His AI Crime Bots We need to be super careful with AI. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes. ELON MUSK As we learned in previous chapters, the malicious use of AI and computer algorithms has given rise to the crime bot—an intelligent agent scripted to perpetrate criminal activities at scale. Crime bots are foundational to Crime, Inc. and are responsible for its vast rise in profitability. These software programs automate computer hacking, virus dissemination, theft of intellectual property, industrial espionage, spam distribution, identity theft, and DDoS attacks, among other threats.

The Final Frontier: Space, Nano, and Quantum The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. JOHN F. KENNEDY Though the space shuttle program has ended, much research and activity in the field of space science continues, particularly with private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercializing space transportation. Another space company, Planetary Resources, founded in 2012 by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, intends to bring the natural resources of space to within humanity’s reach by landing robots on asteroids and mining them for raw materials, using ultralow-cost 3-D printed spacecraft.

But they are not alone, and there is indeed a new breed of “techno-philanthropists” out there, committed to using their wealth to better the world. eBay’s first president, Jeff Skoll, has worked tirelessly crusading against pandemics and nuclear proliferation, endowing his foundation with nearly $1 billion of his own funds. Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Paul Allen, Steve Case, Larry Ellison, Mo Ibrahim, Sir Richard Branson, and Michael Bloomberg have all incredibly generously signed “The Giving Pledge,” committing to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. These individuals have personal passions that they are actively supporting with their wealth, ranging from good governance to child development.


pages: 280 words: 82,355

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

Obsession may not be healthy, but it describes a core attribute of great companies and teams. The downside of obsessive behavior is the price to pay for doing something extraordinary. Let’s start with the obsessive nature of those who lead cutting-edge firms. Justine Musk is the former wife of Elon Musk, the highly respected founder of the car company Tesla and other ventures such as PayPal. She describes Elon’s obsessive personality as a key to his extraordinary success: Extreme success is different from what I suppose you could just consider “success,” . . . you don’t have to be . . . Elon to be affluent and accomplished and maintain a great lifestyle.

Also see Max Chafkin, “Airbnb Opens up the World,” Fast Company, February 2016. 20Merriam-Webster’s definition of obsession: “A state in which someone thinks about someone or something constantly or frequently especially in a way that is not normal; someone or something that a person thinks about constantly or frequently; an activity that someone is very interested in or spends a lot of time doing.” 21“What It Takes to Be As Great As Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Richard Branson,” Inc. Aug 31, 2015 22See Geoff Colvin, (New York: Portfolio, 2008). 23Andre Agassi, (New York: Vintage, 2010). 24See the group’s website, www.workaholics-anonymous.org/. 25Xiao-Ping Chen, “Company Culture and Values Are the Lifelines of Alibaba: An Interview with Jack Ma, Founder and Executive,” Executive Perspectives, August 2013, www.iacmr.org/V2/Publications/CMI/LP021101_EN.pdf. 26Graham describes the best founders as being cockroach like—in that they will survive anything, including a nuclear winter, while others perish.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

Those options seemed like logical next steps for a world that had recently been transformed by railroads, automobiles, urbanization, and many other highly visible shifts in what was built, how we got around, and how things looked. But over the last few decades, the interest in those kinds of transportation-based, landscape-transforming projects largely has faded away. Elon Musk’s hyperloop plans will remain on the drawing board for the foreseeable future, and the settlement of Mars is yet farther away. Urban progress is less transformational and more a matter of making more neighborhoods look and act like the nicer neighborhoods—namely gentrification. When it comes to transportation, mostly we are hoping to avoid greater suffering, such as worse traffic, cuts in bus service, or the rather dramatic declines in service quality experienced in the Washington, DC, Metro system.

But since the 1970s, most travel around the United States has become slower—due to traffic—rather than faster. We’ve stopped increasing travel speeds and even have given up on supersonic jet transport. The Concorde, rather than proving to be the wave of the future, has been retired. Entrepreneur Elon Musk stands as the most visible and obvious representative of the idea of major progress in the physical world. For all of his admirable confidence and unapologetic ambition, most of his projects have yet to succeed. The hyperloop talk seems like more of a publicity stunt than anything else, as we will not be transporting people by whipping them in capsules through reduced-pressure tubes, not anytime soon at least.


pages: 287 words: 81,014

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

airport security, Boeing 747, cognitive dissonance, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Hawkins, Lao Tzu, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, social intelligence, Steve Jobs

We’ll see how each of these is perceived, how to develop it, and when to use it. There are, of course, other kinds of charisma we could consider, but these four are the most practical for daily life, the easiest to access, and thus the most useful to study. Focus Charisma: Presence and Confidence Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors, embodies focus charisma. As he’ll tell you himself, Musk is very much an introvert. In Tesla’s open office space, his nearly empty desk is in the far right corner, two huge monitors arranged to create a cocoon, shielding him from the rest of the office.

Many of these great business minds were so kind as to contribute insights: Chris Ashenden, Gilles August, Hayes Barnard, Sunny Bates, Steve Bell, Charles Best, Michael Feuer, Tim Flynn, Scott Freidheim, Matt Furman, Carl Guardino, Catherine Dumait Harper, Ira Jackson, Ken Jacobs, Randy Komisar, Jim Larranaga, Jack Leslie, Maurice Levy, Dan’l Lewin, Angel Martinez, Jeff Mirich, Farhad Mohit, Peter Moore, Elon Musk, Tom Schiro, Nina Simosko, Kevin Surace, Peter Thiel, Duncan Wardle, Bill Whitmore, and Bill Wohl. With great skill, dedication, patience, kindness, and generosity, Courtney Young led Penguin’s impressive team effort. Adrienne Schultz worked wonders, making the writing clearer and more concise, and greatly improving the flow.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

AI Anxieties We’ve told you how excited our students are about AI, and how the world’s largest firms are rushing to embrace it. But we’d be lying if we said that everyone was so bullish about these new technologies. In fact, many people are anxious, whether about jobs, data privacy, wealth concentration, or Russians with fake-news Twitter-bots. Some people—most famously Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX—paint an even scarier picture: one where robots become self-aware, decide they don’t like being ruled by people, and start ruling us with a silicon fist. Let’s talk about Musk’s worry first; his views have gotten a lot of attention, presumably because people take notice when a member of the billionaire disrupter class talks about artificial intelligence.

After all, just because we can dream it and make a film about it doesn’t mean we can build it. Nobody today has any idea how to create a robot with general intelligence, in the manner of a human or a Terminator. Maybe your remote descendants will figure it out; maybe they’ll even program their creation to terrorize the remote descendants of Elon Musk. But that will be their choice and their problem, because no option on the table today even remotely foreordains such a possibility. Now, and for the foreseeable future, “smart” machines are smart only in their specific domains: • Alexa can read you a recipe for spaghetti Bolognese, but she can’t chop the onions, and she certainly can’t turn on you with a kitchen knife


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Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

Hustlers tend to gravitate toward entrepreneurial activities, correctly recognizing that trading time for money has a natural ceiling on how much you can earn. You only have so many hours a day, so tying your earnings to time limits your potential. If you become an entrepreneur, on the other hand, there is no upper limit on your earnings, so these people tend to work for themselves. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are examples of successful Hustlers. Hustlers see the world as endlessly full of opportunities to make money, and if given the chance they will talk your ear off about their next venture (or ventures). They tend not to put much emphasis on controlling their spending, as they view money as an infinitely renewable resource.

They tend not to put much emphasis on controlling their spending, as they view money as an infinitely renewable resource. After all, if they run out of money, they can make more! Hustlers also tend to be very comfortable with risk and are willing to bet everything if they believe in a business they’re creating. This tendency to risk it all is the source of much of their success—but also their failures. Elon Musk, after selling PayPal to eBay, at one point had over $200 million in cash. He invested all of it in Tesla, and in a divorce filing in 2010 was forced to publicly admit he was broke. From $200 million to broke. It boggles my mind how anyone can spend that amount in a lifetime. Tesla, of course, became a global phenomenon and a household name, but that’s how risk-seeking Hustlers can be.


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Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In 2021, the collective gain of the richest was a staggering $1.6 trillion, a swelling of 55 percent, while millions of Americans were at risk of losing their homes. After the debut of the annual Forbes billionaires list in April 2021, the Washington Post wrote, “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with an estimated fortune of $177 billion, topped the list for the fourth year running,” while Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive, “came in at No. 2” at $151 billion and Zuckerberg, CEO and cofounder of Facebook, came in fifth with $97 billion. There was little guilt in evidence among those who were making out like bandits during the pandemic. All that seemingly mattered was that their own metaphorical boots continued to be the newest and most expensive and that they stayed healthy and safe: some of the ultrarich scampered off to their New Zealand farms, to Scotland, or to competitive frenzies in formerly neglected towns to nab the rare estate, getting their toro salmon and Pelotons sent to them, their personal needs met by “quarantine assistants.”

Possessed by anti-government mania, Cato and others argue that we are supposed to take care of ourselves, and we should be neither assisted nor empathized with in our downward descents. According to Subsidy Tracker, Tesla received nearly $2.5 billion: Or, as Jerry Hirsch’s Los Angeles Times headline reads, for all of Musk’s companies at that time, according to their data: “Elon Musk’s Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies” (May 30, 2015). individual effort in success: In a similar vein, Ivanka Trump’s “motivational quotes” during her father’s presidential tenure included “If you are content, that’s probably not good enough,” faulting women for not being able to surmount obstacles, as if they were ne’er-do-wells creating roadblocks for themselves, the glass ceiling all in their heads.


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Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, cognitive bias, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, financial engineering, follow your passion, global macro, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, microcredit, oil shock, performance metric, planetary scale, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, yield curve

A shaper is someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others. Jobs built the world’s largest and most successful company by revolutionizing computing, music, communications, animation, and photography with beautifully designed products. Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr.

I started by exploring the qualities of Jobs and other shapers with Isaacson, at first in a private conversation in his office, and later at a public forum at Bridgewater. Since Isaacson had also written biographies of Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin—two other great shapers—I read them and probed him about them to try to glean what characteristics they had in common. Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hour’s worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches.

They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world. Take Elon Musk. When he had just come out with the Tesla and showed me his own car for the first time, he had as much to say about the key fob that opened the doors as he did about his overarching vision for how Tesla fits into the broader future of transportation and how impor-tant that is to our planet. Later on, when I asked him how he came to start his company SpaceX, the audacity of his answer startled me.


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The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

What we need are ways to judge just how speculative it really is, and a very useful starting point is to hear what those working in the field think about this risk. Some outspoken AI researchers, like Professor Oren Etzioni, have painted it as “very much a fringe argument,” saying that while luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates may be deeply concerned, the people actually working in AI are not.103 If true, this would provide good reason to be skeptical of the risk. But even a cursory look at what the leading figures in AI are saying shows it is not. For example, Stuart Russell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the most popular and widely respected textbook in AI, has strongly warned of the existential risk from AGI.

“Astrophysical Ionizing Radiation and Earth: A Brief Review and Census of Intermittent Intense Sources.” Astrobiology, 11(4), 343–61. Menzel, P. T. (2011). “Should the Value of Future Health Benefits Be Time-Discounted?” in Prevention vs. Treatment: What’s the Right Balance? (pp. 246–73). Oxford University Press. Metz, C. (June 9, 2018). “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud Over Killer Robots.” The New York Times. Milanovic, B. (2016). Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Harvard University Press. Minsky, M. (1984). Afterword, in True Names. Bluejay Books. Mnih, V., et al. (2015). “Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning.”

Derek Parfit (2017b, p. 436): “What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and we are discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.” Elon Musk (2018): “… it’s important to get a self-sustaining base. Ideally on Mars because Mars is far enough away from Earth that a war on Earth, the Mars base might survive, is more likely to survive than a moon base.” Carl Sagan (1994, p. 371) implicitly suggested it when saying: “In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least—the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out.


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Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Those greedy bankers, by contrast, may be insatiable in their demands for personal wealth but cautious in assuming personal risk. The senior executives who led financial institutions towards collapse in 2008 largely walked away from the wreckage as rich men. But their bonus plans pale into insignificance beside that of Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX, who demanded and received from the car company a scheme which could net him $55 billion – his current wealth is estimated at $20 billion, enough for most people. But Musk is the greatest business risk-taker of our age – and with his own money as well as other people’s. Anticipating risk In a world of radical uncertainty, there are limits to the range of possibilities we can hold in our minds.

The exchange between Samuelson and his colleague was not capable of being settled by any demonstration that one answer was ‘better’ or more rational than another. If some of the examples we have cited seem extreme, and they are, they reinforce that central Knightian insight into the links between radical uncertainty and creativity. If St Francis and George Orwell and Elon Musk defy the precepts of rationality as described by expected utility theory, we might reasonably wish there was more such ‘irrationality’. At a more mundane level, people we like and admire buy lottery tickets, drive fast cars and climb mountains; they insure their bags against loss, the College silver against theft, and their oil wells against blowout.

And it is that interpretation – risk as failure to fulfil the central elements of the reference narrative – which we will continue to use, in this book and in our everyday lives. In earlier chapters we described some risk lovers who have changed society – Richard Branson, Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, George Orwell. Ignaz Semmelweis, whose dogmatic conviction of his own rightness drove him to insanity but helped save the lives of millions of women. Barry Marshall, who changed medical practice and won a Nobel Prize by infecting himself with bacteria. None of this behaviour has anything to do with the utility of wealth functions of these individuals.


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The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

But the analysis of cyberlibertarianism is getting at something subtler: the way that a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right. Certainly, many leaders in the digital technology industries, and quite a few leaders who do not work for corporations, openly declare their adherence to libertarian or other right-wing ideologies. Just a brief list of these includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Raymond, Jimmy Wales, Eric Schmidt, and Travis Kalanick. Furthermore, the number of leaders who demur from such political points of view is small, and their demurrals are often shallow. But the group of people whose beliefs deserve to be labeled “cyberlibertarian” is much larger than this.


pages: 292 words: 92,588

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

We live in a rapidly accelerating technological age, with new iPhones every year that make the old ones seem as primitive as a brick, where robots perform surgery and computers fly 757s. Scientists are unraveling the mysteries of DNA and plotting the circuitry of the human brain. Techno-optimists like Ray Kurzweil talk openly about immortality. Elon Musk aspires to create a “multiplanet civilization” in the very near future. It seems only natural that a slow-moving force like sea-level rise would have a technological solution too. Why not build a thermostat for the planet? We are already engineering the Earth’s operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year.

Snowmass: “Workshop on Critical Issues in Climate Change.” Energy Modeling Forum. July 25–August 3, 2006. Details of event reconstructed from interviews with many participants, including Lowell Wood. 2. “multiplanet civilization”: Quoted in Ross Andersen. “Exodus.” Aeon, September 30, 2014. Accessed March 12, 2017. https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation 3. research project: Henry Fountain. “White House Urges Research on Geoengineering to Combat Climate Change.” New York Times, January 10, 2017. 4. Davos: The Global Risks Report 2017. World Economic Forum, Geneva, 43. Accessed March 12, 2017. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GRR17_Report_web.pdf 5.


pages: 304 words: 88,495

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve Levine

colonial rule, Elon Musk, energy security, Higgs boson, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Yom Kippur War

If the Department of Energy sought to hold on to Envia, a federal grant recipient with a significant apparent breakthrough, it was acting no differently from Chamberlain himself. Wasn’t he forever speaking of saving America? Wasn’t that what the Hub was all about? The Hub was industrial policy. Sitting in his office, Chamberlain conceded that this was true. • • • Argonne and Envia were not the sole U.S. actors in the race. While they fought for prominence, Elon Musk, the South African chairman of Tesla Motors, became the popular face of electric cars in the country. A lithe, distant, and tall man with furry patches around the perimeter of his face, Musk had earned a fortune by cofounding and selling PayPal. Now, with his exquisitely designed Tesla, he had made electrics cool.

He said he was “highly confident” that he would do so and thus create a new paradigm for American manufacturing. It would be Bell Labs 2.0. He said, “I’m hoping in five or ten years to be touring the country saying, ‘This is how it can be done.’” He watched electrics quietly moving ahead. The Volt for sure was a pioneering vehicle, but Elon Musk had pushed further—he had made electrics indisputably cool. With Tesla, Musk himself was now the most celebrated technologist in Silicon Valley. Toward the end of 2014, a mini-rivalry erupted: Musk hurtled into a contest with GM to produce the two-hundred-mile electric. He did not say he was in competition with GM—in his eyes, that would be demeaning.


Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor

AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, deep learning, driverless car, Elon Musk, industrial robot, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, life extension, Menlo Park, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, popular electronics, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing test

As the vengeful god’s AI agent, Pandora executed her mission to unseal a jar of disasters to plague humankind forever. She was presented as a wife to Epimetheus, a man known for his impulsive optimism. As we saw, Prometheus warned humankind that Pandora’s jar should never be opened. Are Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other prescient thinkers the Promethean Titans of our era? They have warned scientists to halt or at least slow the reckless pursuit of AI, because they foresee that once it is set in motion, humans will be unable to control it. “Deep learning” algorithms allow AI computers to extract patterns from vast data, extrapolate to novel situations, and decide on actions with no human guidance.

Pharmaka “animates” the statues with a kind of “soul” or life but does not necessarily make them move. Hollow statues as vessels that are vivified by being filled with substances, Steiner 2001, 114–20. 19. Asimov’s laws, Kang 2011, 302. Future of Life Institute’s Beneficial AI Conference 2017; FLI’s board included Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, Elon Musk, and Nick Bostrom. https://futurism.com/worlds-top-experts-have-created-a-law-of-robotics/. See also Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence: http://lcfi.ac.uk/. 20. Martinho-Truswell 2018. 21. Four-wheeled carts, Morris 1992, 10. A small, shallow bronze basin-cart on three wheels, an ancient example of pen, bonsai basin, was excavated in a sixth/fifth century BC archaeological site in China, indicating that the idea of a wheeled tripod was put into practice elsewhere in antiquity, Bagley et al. 1980, 265, 272, color plate 65.


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Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 2017); Derek Thompson, “Can Science Cure Aging?” The Atlantic, September 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/can-science-cure-aging/570121/. 86 For just two examples, John Koetsier, “Elon Musk’s 42,000 Star-Link Satellites Could Just Save the World,” Forbes, January 9, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/09/elon-musks-42000-starlink-satellites-could-just-save-the-world/; and Navneet Alang, “As the Robots Arrive, We Have to Remember: Another Future is Possible,” Toronto Star, February 27, 2021, https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2021/02/27/as-the-robots-arrive-we-have-to-remember-another-future-is-possible.html. 8.


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The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

But it became clear that setting up an account on the PayPal website, which enabled transactions with anyone who had an e-mail address, was a far more popular way to send money than trying to get Palm Pilots to mate on a restaurant table (the mobile Internet was in its earliest, glitch-ridden stage). The e-mail idea seemed so simple that it would be only a matter of time before competitors figured it out. The pace grew even more frantic, with hundred-hour workweeks. The most dangerous competitor, X.com, founded by a South African immigrant named Elon Musk, was located just four blocks up University Avenue. Confinity held daily meetings on the war with X.com. One day, an engineer displayed a schematic of an actual bomb that he’d designed. The idea was quickly shelved. With his funding Thiel went on a hiring spree. He wasn’t looking for industry experience but for people he knew, people who were incredibly smart, people who were like him, Stanford friends like Reid Hoffman, Stanford Review alums like David Sacks and Keith Rabois, and Confinity’s cramped, spartan offices above a bike shop soon filled with carelessly dressed, badly groomed men in their twenties (Thiel was one of the oldest at thirty-two), chess players, math whizzes, libertarians, without distracting obligations like wives and children or time-wasting hobbies like sports and TV (one applicant was turned down because he admitted to enjoying shooting hoops).

He assumed that the more optimistic candidate would always win. He assumed that things were still fundamentally working. For example, what about the information age? Wasn’t it working unbelievably well? Thiel, whom it had made rich, no longer thought so. At Café Venetia in downtown Palo Alto—the spot where Thiel and Elon Musk had decided over coffee in 2001 to take PayPal public, five blocks up University Avenue from the original offices of PayPal, which were across the street from the original offices of Facebook and the current offices of Palantir, six miles from the Google campus in Mountain View, less than a mile in one direction and half a block in the other direction from that secular temple of the new economy known as an Apple Store, in the heart of the heart of Silicon Valley, surrounded by tables full of trim, healthy, downwardly dressed people using Apple devices while discussing idea creation and angel investments—Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and said, “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough.”

Biology joined with computation to extend life: that was the kind of radical future where Thiel was placing his effort and money. In the deadly race between politics and technology, he was investing in robotics (robot-driven cars would put an end to congestion, and not one more road would have to be built in America). After the sale of PayPal, Thiel’s old colleague Elon Musk had gone on to found a company called SpaceX, to make commercial space exploration affordable, and Founders Fund became the first outside investor, with $20 million. Through his foundation, Thiel funded research in nanotechnology. He gave $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, whose goal was to reverse human aging, and he supported a nonprofit called Humanity Plus, dedicated to transhumanism—the transformation of the human condition through technology.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

Paul Krugman “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon.” Seldon was the inventor of the science of psychohistory in the Foundation series. Paul Krugman, “Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics,” The Guardian, December 4, 2012. Elon Musk “[Musk] was influenced, he says, by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, a science fiction saga in which a galactic empire falls and ushers in a dark age.” Rory Carroll, “Elon Musk’s mission to Mars,” The Guardian, July 17, 2013. Newt Gingrich “While Toynbee was impressing me with the history of civilizations, Isaac Asimov was shaping my view of the future in equally profound ways. . . .

Campbell’s magazine counted Albert Einstein and the scientists of Bell Labs among its subscribers, and it made an indelible impression on such fans as the young Carl Sagan, who stumbled across it in a candy store: “A glance at the cover and a quick riffle through the interior showed me it was what I had been looking for. . . . I was hooked. Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding.” Public figures of all political persuasions—from Paul Krugman to Elon Musk to Newt Gingrich—have confessed to being influenced by its stories. Campbell and his writers were creating nothing less than a shared vision of the future, which inevitably informs how we approach the present. Science fiction’s track record for prediction is decidedly mixed, but at its finest, it was a proving ground for entire fields—such as artificial intelligence, which frequently invokes the Three Laws of Robotics—that wouldn’t exist for decades.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

These are huge questions, as enormous and perhaps as difficult to answer as whether or not computers will ever be capable of genuinely experiencing emotions. As it happens, the two questions may be intimately interlinked. Recently a number of notable luminaries, scientists, and entrepreneurs have expressed their concerns about the potential for runaway AI and superintelligent machines. Physicist Stephen Hawking, engineer and inventor Elon Musk, and philosopher Nick Bostrom have all issued stern warnings of what may happen as we move ever closer to computers that are able to think and reason as well as or perhaps even better than human beings. At the same time, several computer scientists, psychologists, and other researchers have stated that the many challenges we face in developing thinking machines shows we have little to be concerned about.

This brings us full circle in the possible plots for this long-playing buddy movie. Rather than fighting this extensive, highly successful coevolution, perhaps our best course of action is to embrace and continue it, which would essentially mean our eventual merging with technology. Such hybridization would result in what Elon Musk has referred to as “an AI-human symbiote.” While many people will balk at such a development, recall that we have been merging with technology for a very long time already. Spectacles, ear trumpets, and crutches made out of tree limbs have given way to corneal transplants, cochlear implants, and bionic limbs.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

It’s about being willing to engage in a battle of ideas—during and, more importantly, between elections—that will take on the corrosive, and deeply bipartisan, wealth-worshiping worldview that created the backlash in the first place. Unless progressives learn to speak to the legitimate rage at the grotesque levels of inequality that exist right now, the Right is going to keep winning. There is no superhero enlightened billionaire coming to save us from the villains in power. Not Oprah, not Zuckerberg, and not Elon Musk. We’re going to have to save ourselves, by coming together as never before. And in 2016 we caught a glimpse of that potential. CHAPTER SEVEN LEARN TO LOVE ECONOMIC POPULISM Bernie Sanders is the only candidate for US president I have ever openly backed. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with candidate endorsements.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, came out strongly against Clinton during the primaries, arguing that her track record on criminal justice and welfare meant she did not deserve the Black vote. But she also chose not to publicly endorse Sanders. The most urgent message of the 2016 election, she told me, is: “If progressives think they can win in the long run without engaging meaningfully with Black folks and taking racial history more seriously, they better get Elon Musk on speed dial and start planning their future home on Mars, because this planet will be going up in smoke.” It’s a message we need to learn fast. Because if Left populist candidates keep missing the mark, and Democrats keep putting up establishment candidates in their place, there is every reason to expect an increasingly belligerent Right to keep on winning.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

In “An Account of My Hut,” a memoir of Bay Area house-hunting and climate-apocalypse-watching in the 2017 California wildfire season—which was also the season of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and Maria—Christina Nichol describes a conversation with a young family member who works in tech, to whom she tried to describe the unprecedentedness of the threat from climate change, unsuccessfully. “Why worry?” he replies. “Technology will take care of everything. If the Earth goes, we’ll just live in spaceships. We’ll have 3D printers to print our food. We’ll be eating lab meat. One cow will feed us all. We’ll just rearrange atoms to create water or oxygen. Elon Musk.” Elon Musk—it’s not the name of a man but a species-scale survival strategy. Nichol answers, “But I don’t want to live in a spaceship.” He looked genuinely surprised. In his line of work, he’d never met anyone who didn’t want to live in a spaceship. * * * — That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled.


pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

Drew and I brainstormed with an intern Drew had roped into the effort, Albert Ni, and together we decided to create a referral program like the one PayPal had implemented to great success. The only catch was that the PayPal program had offered to deposit $10 into the user’s PayPal account, in exchange for referrals, and though the total cost had not been disclosed (cofounder Elon Musk has since revealed that it amounted to some $60 to $70 million), there was no way Dropbox could afford to “buy” users to achieve the level of growth they were looking for.6 Then it hit us: What if we could offer people something else they clearly valued highly—more storage space—in exchange for referrals?

Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth (WND Books: 2012), 35–40. 5. Josh Elman, “3 Growth Hacks: The Secrets to Driving Massive User Growth,” filmed August 2013; posted on YouTube August 2013, youtube.com/watch?v=AaMqCWOfA1o. 6. “Conversation with Elon Musk,” online video clip, Khan Academy, April 17, 2013. Accessed September 13, 2016. 7. LeanStartup.co, “Dropbox @ Startup Lessons Learned Conference 2010,” July 2, 2014, youtube.com/watch?v=y9hg-mUx8sE. 8. Douglas MacMillan, “Chasing Facebook’s Next Billion Users,” Bloomberg.com, July 26, 2012, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-25/chasing-facebooks-next-billion-users. 9.


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

Delving into the details of algorithmic auditing may be dull compared to drafting a Bill of Rights for robots, or devising ways to protect humanity against Terminator-like superintelligent machines. But to address the problems that AI is creating now, we need to understand the data and algorithms we are already using for more mundane purposes. There is a vast gulf between AI alarmism in the popular press, and the reality of where AI research actually stands. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal, warned US state governors at their national meeting in 2017 that AI posed a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Around the same time, Fast Company fueled those fears with an article headlined “AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand.

London: Longman and Co., 1864. Bloudoff-Indelicato, Mollie. “Have Bad Handwriting? The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back.” Smithsonian. December 23, 2015. Bradley, Tony. “Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language in Creepy Preview of Our Potential Future.” Forbes. July 31, 2017. Domonoske, Camila. “Elon Musk Warns Governors: Artificial Intelligence Poses ‘Existential Risk.’ ” National Public Radio. July 17, 2017. Emery, David. “Did Facebook Shut Down an AI Experiment Because Chatbots Developed Their Own Language?” Snopes.com. August 1, 2017. Ginsberg, J., et al. “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data.”


pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Nor do they rely on shaming and first mover advantages as in fast fashion conflicts. Instead, they can use secrecy and scale to control genetic resources without ownership. Secrecy is straightforward: the industry doesn’t publish its gene databases; it licenses access instead. Here secrecy substitutes for copyright; it can replace patents, too. For example, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, says, “We have essentially no patents. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.” Savvy entrepreneurs often rely on discretion, not law. Scale also matters, wholly apart from ownership.

Kristen Brown, a Bloomberg: Kristen Brown, “Deleting Your Online DNA Data Is Brutally Difficult,” Bloomberg, June 15, 2018. Today roughly two of every three: Murphy Heather, “Most White Americans’ DNA Can Be Identified Through Genealogy Databases,” New York Times, October 11, 2018. “We have essentially no patents”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012. “a sublicensable, worldwide”: AncestryDNA Terms and Conditions, accessed June 5, 2020. These terms change without notice—and that’s part of our point. “The average customer who”: Erin Brodwin, “DNA-testing Companies Like 23andMe Sell Your Genetic Data to Drugmakers and Other Silicon Valley Startups,” Business Insider, August 3, 2018.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Investors in the crypto space use leverage, up to one hundred times capital on some exchanges, meaning small fluctuations can wipe out positions. As these practices proliferate, a new species of debt may elevate systemic risk. If nothing restrains the mining of cryptocurrencies, collateral social costs may pile up. Creating cryptocurrency already consumes so much energy that Tesla founder Elon Musk, who briefly embraced bitcoin as payment for his electric cars, reversed policy. The high environmental cost of the data mining that bitcoin demands clashes with the mission of a car company that is weaning automobiles off fossil fuels. Crypto assets are energy hogs, using as much energy as the Netherlands or Argentina.

Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, the author of Superintelligence, ranks artificial intelligence next to giant asteroid strikes and nuclear war as an existential threat to humanity. The late mathematician Stephen Hawking worried that AI “could spell the end of the human race.” That is why he suggested that humans should move to other planets—as the machine will take over not only all jobs but also the human race. Tesla founder Elon Musk welcomes AI that controls electric cars his company makes, but putting AI in ultimate charge worries him. “It’s fine if you’ve got Marcus Aurelius as the emperor,” Musk told The Economist, “but not so good if you have Caligula.”44 No one knows how long it will take for severe structural technological unemployment to make most workers irrelevant.


pages: 311 words: 17,232

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

The Indian-born entrepreneur has his own investment firm, Khosla Partners, which has a portfolio of renewable energy investments from cellulosic ethanol to solar technology, plastics, building materials and electrical efficiency. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are investors in Nanosolar, a solar-film technology group, and are promoters of plug-in cars as well as trying to make the company carbon-neutral. PayPal founder Elon Musk, who sold his electronic payments company to Ebay for $1.5 billion, has become the major financier of Tesla, the electric sports car. Craig Venter, pioneer of the human genome that cracked the DNA code first, is applying the same technique to plants in an effort to make biofuels from plants more effectively.

This is the spearhead of General Motors’ campaign to catch up with Toyota Motor Company, the maker of the hybrid pioneering car, the Prius. Launched in Japan in 1997, the Prius is a hit in Europe and the US. With ‘green technology’ the new economy of the 21st century, entrepreneurs see an opportunity for electric vehicles including Telsa Motors, founded by internet mogul Elon Musk, as do university research departments at points around the US, the UK, Europe and Japan; all of which will require more copper. Motor vehicles are big polluters; combined with air travel, transport as a whole accounts for 14% of global emissions each year. It has been 192 | LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD the fastest growing source of emissions because of continued increases in car transport and the rapid expansion of air travel (Stern, 2006).


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

When AlphaGo convincingly beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, it fueled a reaction that had been building over the last several years concerning the 24 Chapter 1 dangers that artificial intelligence might present to humans. Computer scientists signed pledges not to use AI for military purposes. Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates made public statements warning of the existential threat posed by AI. Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs set up a new company, OpenAI, with a one-billion-dollar nest egg and hired Ilya Sutskever, one of Geoffrey Hinton’s former students, to be its first director. Although OpenAI’s stated goal was to ensure that future AI discoveries would be publicly available for all to use, it had another, implicit and more important goal—to prevent private companies from doing evil.

Although the optimal solution would be a judicious balance between profit and fairness, the trade-off must be made explicit in the cost function, which requires that someone decide how to weight each goal. The ethical perspective of those in the humanities and social sciences should inform these trade-offs. But we must always keep in mind that choosing a cost function that seems fair may have unintended consequences.29 Calls to regulate the use of AI have come from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking as well as legislators and researchers. An open letter signed by 3,722 AI and robotics researchers in 2015 called for a ban on autonomous weapons: In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Read it if you want to stay human.’ DR ANASTASIA DEDYUKHINA, Founder of Consciously Digital and author of Homo Distractus ‘When the crowd at Comic Con talk of Robot Overlords, it can be disregarded as a fantasy far detached from real life. When you hear that a crowd of world-class technologists and scientists, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have publicly voiced their concerns that advanced AI technologies could pose an existential threat to humanity – trouble on the scale of climate change, bioplague and large asteroids – you really have to wonder what’s going on. Rage Inside the Machine is a guide to how we got here, conceptually and historically.

One theory is that personal computers were essentially gaming systems and marketed specifically to men, but a more likely explanation may be that once the role shifted from relative obscurity to a high-profile, highly paid career, then entrenched social bias deemed the role better suited to (mainly white) men, fostering a ‘brogrammer’ culture, with alienating fringe elements like the ‘manosphere’, which has probably played a substantial role in moving women out of the field, and implicitly shifting perceptions towards computer science being something women shouldn’t (and perhaps can’t) do. Computer scientists like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now not only enormously rich, but world famous. They have a position in society that far exceeds that of Edwards, Wollstonecraft, Lovelace or Taylor-Mill, and there are no contemporary female equivalents to them. In opening a 2005 debate on the issue of the relative abilities of men and women in science, then Harvard University President (and former Treasury Secretary under US President Clinton) Larry Summers made comments that were interpreted as endorsing the idea that women may be innately inferior to men in that regard, prompting widespread outrage and condemnation.12 However, far more interesting was the content of the actual debate, which pitted two Harvard psychologists against one another.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

The California High Speed Rail (CHSR) is budgeted at US$68 billion and projected to be in operation by 2029. The journey time between its headline destinations will be about three hours. Its locomotives and carriages will be painted in the California state colours of blue and gold. The project, however, has had a spoke thrown in its wheels in the form of a counterproposal by Elon Musk, a forty-two-year-old South African-born entrepreneur, who co-founded PayPal and is now CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Tesla is the first-ever electrical car manufacturer to turn a profit, and SpaceX the first private company to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. Musk’s success is down to flair and lateral thinking.

There would be arrivals and departures at each station every second, and ramps on and off at every road intersection. Auto-commuting and rapid transit would be yin and yang – two parts of the same unity. Perhaps a golden age of commuting is on its way. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful that it will be with us before Elon Musk retires to Mars. If basic comforts are unlikely to appear on public transport before Generation Now turn into pensioners, might it not be better to wish for, and work towards, an end to commuting altogether? If it can’t be perfect, then why have it at all? Two distinct schools of thought have prophesied the death of rush hour in centuries to come.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

Another reason was that SpaceShipOne provided a real-world demonstration of cheap commercial spaceflight. A number of commercial spaceflight companies have popped up in the last decade, most funded by billionaires looking for a new challenge and/or some ego food. Some are beginning to do serious business. Los Angeles-based SpaceX (founded in 2002 by PayPal founder Elon Musk) has already secured launch contracts from NASA and commercial satellite developers. The company claims it has developed all the flight hardware for its Falcon 9 orbital rocket, the Dragon spacecraft that is designed to sit on top of it, as well as three launch sites for less than the cost of one of NASA’s launch towers – all while making a profit.

As we talk, it starts to rain, the downpour drumming loudly on the corrugated metal roof. ‘Not everyone has picked up on the David and Goliath aspect of XCOR,’ says Jeff. ‘Richard Branson is pouring more money into Virgin Galactic in a month than we’ve spent in our history. You’ve got NASA doing billions and billions of dollars of its thing. Elon Musk pouring all of his money into SpaceX. Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos is funding Blue Origin …’ And yet, despite their underdog status, XCOR keeps being mentioned in the same breath as its far better-funded rivals. Talking to Jeff you don’t get any sense of ego. He’s trying to run a business – it just happens to be one that wants to make spaceplanes.


pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Many commentators delighted in echoes of today’s Saudi Arabia in the film’s story: It’s about a young king who must decide whether to hide his jungle kingdom from, or engage with, the outside world. That was one side of a frenzied 2018 for Mohammed, a year in which he would push through social and economic transformation plans at a dizzying pace and in full public view. In the coming months he would meet with presidents, CEOs, and tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Bill Gates, publicly proclaiming an open and innovative future for Saudi Arabia. He would make massive commitments to virtual reality and solar power and cutting-edge urban planning. “The most influential Arab leader. Transforming the world at 32,” blared the cover of an unfamiliar magazine titled The New Kingdom (priced at $13.99) that showed up on newsstands across the United States just ahead of the prince’s visit.

They told Ambassador Dennis Horak, who was on vacation in Toronto, that he wasn’t welcome back. Then they canceled trade deals with Canada, withdrew Saudi students studying there, and publicly accused Canada of meddling in local affairs. Controversy continued to surround Mohammed and his initiatives through the summer of 2018. In August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was considering taking the company private and later said that he was discussing the deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). Federal officials suspected Musk was trying to juice his company’s stock price, and the US Department of Justice called in PIF chief Yasir al-Rumayyan for an interview.


pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

The ISS is a floating lily pad, one of many which will be built as we hop further from home. The lessons learnt there are part of the journey. Space travel is no longer only the domain of powerful states. Getting out there is becoming cheaper and within reach of private companies, so we can expect competition for the Moon’s resources. Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal and the entrepreneur behind Tesla cars, is fanatical about getting humans to Mars within his lifetime (possibly in this decade). His company SpaceX has been carrying cargo to the ISS for years and in 2020 took two NASA astronauts there. Musk figured out how to reduce costs by introducing reusable rockets.

Rushdie) 52 satellite technology/networks xv–xvi, 30–1, 132, 303, 304, 306, 313, 314, 315, 316–18 Saud, Crown Prince 84 Saud, King Abd Allah al 80 Saud, Muhammad ibn 74, 78, 79 Saudi Arabia xiii, xiv, 44, 47, 57, 58, 61, 69, 186 Al-Qaeda 88–90 anti-television protests 85 Covid-19 99 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman 90–1, 92–7, 102–4 Crown Prince Saud 84 early Saud dynasty 74–5, 78–82 Eastern Province 77, 82, 97, 99, 104 employment 98–9, 101, 104 Empty Quarter 76 Fahd of Saudi Arabia 87 Faisal I of Saudi Arabia 84–5 First Saudi State 79–80 foreign population/workforce 98–9 geography 75–7 Ibn Saud 80–3 investment in the Sahel 219, 233–4 Islamist terrorism 88–90, 104 Jeddah 77, 99 Khalid of Saudi Arabia 85–7 land borders 76 Libyan Civil War 92 Mecca 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 99 Medina 77, 79, 81, 84 murder of Jamal Khashoggi 94–5 Najd 78–9, 80, 81 National Guard 87, 88, 96 Neom city project 99 oil supplies 75, 76, 77, 82–3, 84, 85, 93, 96, 97–8, 99–100, 101–2, 104 Osama Bin Laden 75, 87, 88–9, 104 population size 75, 83, 98–9 Rashidi dynasty 80–1 relationship with China 102 relationship with France 86 relationship with Iran 91–2, 93, 94, 103 relationship with Israel 102–3 relationship with Lebanon 93–4 relationship with post-war Iraq 91 relationship with Qatar 92, 258 relationship with Syria 91–2 relationship with United Kingdom 81–3 relationship with USA xiv, 75, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 religious extremism 75, 85, 88–90, 104 renewable energy 101 resignation of Saad al-Hariri 93–4 Riyadh 77, 80–1, 99, 177 Saud family arrests at the Ritz Carlton 96–7 Shia Islam 77, 79, 97, 99, 104 siege of the Grand Mosque 86–7 slavery 84 Sunni Islam 77, 79, 91 (see also Wahhabism) Vision 2030 98–9 Wahhabism 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 water supplies 100–1 Yemen Civil War 93 Saudi Aramco 83, 85, 98, 100 SAVAK 50 Schinas, Alexandros 151 Scotland Act of Union (1707) 116 alliance with France 117, 118 colony in Panama 117–18 independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7 Scotti tribe settlement 114 wars with England 115, 117 Second Balkan War 151–2 Second World War ix–x, 23–4, 49, 83, 84, 122–3, 126, 136, 153–4, 181, 249, 303 Serbia x, 151, 152, 185, 293–4 Shammar, emirate of 74, 79, 80 sharia law 88, 186, 213, 214 Shatt al-Arab waterway 39, 42 Shia Islam xi, xiv, 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 104 Iran 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 94 Saudi Arabia 74–5, 77, 79, 93, 97, 99, 104 Sidi Yahya mosque 213–14 Sisi, General Abdel Fattah el- 92, 187, 261–2 SKY Perfect Corporation 318 slavery 84, 121, 208, 209, 249, 261 Society of Pathseekers of the Islamic Revolution 54 Soleimani, Qasem 62 Solomon Islands 28 Solomon, King 246 Somalia 242, 243, 244, 250, 251, 252, 258–9 South China Sea 26, 31–2 South Korea 31, 32 South Pacific 27–9 South Sudan 210, 242, 262 Southeastern Anatolia Project 192–3 Soviet Union 17, 25, 49, 50, 87, 123, 154, 161, 304 see also Russia space xv–xvi Artemis Accords 302–3, 309 asteroid 3554 Amun 324 astropolitical theory/space geography 311–14 Chinese exploration 314 colonizing the Moon 302 commercial companies 308 development of rocket technology 303–4 Earth boundaries 310 Earth Space/low Earth orbit 312–14 Elon Musk/SpaceX 308, 319–20 extraterrestrial life forms 322–3 first moon landing 303, 304, 305 governmental frameworks 302–3, 309–11, 324–5 imagining the future 319–25 International Space Station (ISS) 303, 306, 307–8 Jeff Bezos/Blue Origin 308 junk/debris 318 Laika the dog 304 meteor strikes 325 militarization of 314–19 mining the moon 302, 309 Moon ‘safety zones’ 309 Moon Treaty (1979) 310–11 Neil Armstrong 304, 305 Outer Space Treaty (1967) 309–11, 315 the Pioneer Plaque 323 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking (1975) 306, 325 Space Shuttle missions 305–6, 307 speed of travel 321–2 Sputnik satellites 304 travel to Mars 308, 313 water-recovery system 307 Yuri Gagarin 304–5 Spain xv, 118, 119, 210, 219, 234 attempted coup (1981) 288 attempted invasion of England 278–9 Basque Country 269, 279, 284, 289–90 Catalan referendums for independence 292–3, 294 Catalonia 269, 279–80, 282, 284, 287, 289, 291–6 Civil War 282–4 colonialism 277, 280–1 Columbus, Christopher 276–7 ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna) 290–1 EU and NATO 289, 293–4, 297 Francisco Franco 282–7 geography 268, 270–2 historical invasions 273–4 hydroelectric power 272 Inquisition 275–6 internal tensions 268–9, 272 see also Basque Country; Catalonia Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain 275–6, 277 King Juan Carlos 287–9 King Philip II 278 Latin American gold 277 Latin American rebellions 280–1 La Guerra dels Segadors 279 maritime vulnerability 277–8 medieval fortresses 268 migrants and refugees 297 military force and conflicts 271, 274–5, 277–81 military support in the Sahel 297 Moors 271–2 Muslim invaders/settlement 273–4, 275, 276 naval defence 271, 296–7 population size 270, 280 Reconquista Iberia 274–5 relationship with France 279–80 relationship with the USA 286–7 Roman occupation 273 Visigoths 273 water supplies 271–2 Spartacus film 46 Sputnik satellites 304 Stafford, Thomas P. 306 Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL) 83 Starshot/space sails project 322 Stolen Generation, Australian 12 Strait of Hormuz 43–4, 61 Suarez, Adolfo 288 Sudan 210, 242, 262 Suez Canal 120, 151, 180 Sunni Islam xi, 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64, 174, 187 Fulani 222 Iran 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64 Muslim Brotherhood 186 Salafists 223 Saudi Arabia/Wahhabism 75, 77, 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 91, 97 Sweden 126, 131, 218 Syria xii, 57, 61, 68, 69, 81, 85, 103, 143, 166, 192, 193, 195–6, 198 Civil War xi, 47, 58, 63, 91–2, 131, 173, 177, 187–8, 233 T Taiwan 28, 30, 231 takfiri ideology 223 Taliban 89, 232 Tamerlane 40 Tasmania 20 Taylor, Griffith 7–8 Tehran, Iran 42 Tejero, Lieutenant-Colonel 288 Temple of Jerusalem 45 Ten Pound Poms 17 Tesla 101 Tewodros II, Emperor 248 The Times 227 Thessalonika (Salonika) 151, 153, 154 Thiele, Heike 219 Thomas, Bertram 76 Those Who Sign in Blood 215 Thucydides 142 Timbuktu 213 Tomyris 45 Tonga 29 Torres Straight Islanders 13–14 Treaty of Lausanne (1923) 153, 189–90 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) 277 Troy, siege of 158 Truman, Harry S. 286 Trump, Donald xii, 25, 61–2, 93, 315–16 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 303–4 Tuareg people 205, 211, 212, 213, 214, 219, 234–5 Tudors 115 Tunguska meteor 325 Turkey xiii, xv, 42, 48, 92, 94–5, 96 Aegean Sea 142, 143, 191 Anatolia 172, 173, 174, 175, 191–3, 197 Arab Uprisings (2011) 185–6 Armenian genocide 164, 180, 188 arms manufacture 198 attempted coup (2016) 188–9 Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul 148–9, 152, 174–5, 178, 179 dams and water supplies 192–3 defence 172, 175–7 General Kemal Atatürk 152–3, 179–81, 196, 199 geography 172, 173, 176 Hagia Sophia 196–7 industrialisation 180–1 languages 179–80 Lausanne Treaty (1923) 189–90 Mavi Vatan/Blue Homeland strategy 189–90, 198 Mediterranean gas fields 142, 162–3, 190 migrant/refugee crisis 157, 188 military coups 182 and NATO 163, 164–6, 181, 188–9, 191, 197–8, 199 Osman Ghazi 174 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 183–9, 191, 194, 195–7, 198–9, 258 relationship with Cyprus 143, 161–2, 198 relationship with Egypt 186–7, 198, 258, 259 relationship with Ethiopia 259 relationship with France 164, 198 relationship with Greece 142, 143, 147, 152–3, 158–60, 161–3, 179, 190, 198 relationship with Israel 185–6 relationship with Russia 190–1 relationship with Somalia 259 relationship with Syria 187–8, 192, 193, 195–6 relationship with the Kurds 175, 181, 182, 187, 192, 193–5 relationship with UAE 258 sanctions 191 Second Balkan War 152 Second World War 181 Seljuk Empire 173–4 War of Independence 152–3, 179 Westernization 179–80 see also Ottoman Empire Turkmen, Iranian 42 U Ukraine xi, 175 unipolar decade (1990s) x United Arab Emirates (UAE) 44, 57, 76, 80, 92, 102–3, 186, 198, 219, 258–9, 262 United Kingdom xiii Acts of Union (1707) 109, 116, 117–18, 133 Anglo-Persian Oil Company 48, 49 Anglo-Saxons 110, 114 armed forces 131, 134–5, 136, 165, 218, 219, 249 (see also Royal Air Force; Royal Navy) Brexit xv, 108, 127, 136 British Empire 118–22, 123–4, 148, 150–1, 161, 210, 308 Catalonian independence 295–6 Celtic Britain 112–13 colonialism 108, 117, 121, 210 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (1900) 15 defeat the Spanish Armada 278 dialects 110–11 east–west divide 111, 113–14 education system 132–3 EEC and EU 125–7, 129, 131–2, 136, 164 EFTA membership 295 English language 132 geography 108, 109–10, 111 German invasion plans 122–3 historical invasions 113–15 industrial revolution 111 intelligence network 30, 129, 135 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Ireland 109–10 LEJOG cycle route 110 London 112, 113, 115, 249 Magna Carta 115 MI6 49 military support in the Sahel 218, 219, 235 Napoleonic wars 119–20 Norman invasion 114–15 nuclear submarines 134–5, 136 place names 110–11 population distribution 112 Reformation 116 relationship with Australia 22, 23 relationship with China 128, 130 relationship with France 130–1, 133 relationship with Germany 121–2, 133 relationship with Iran 40 relationship with Poland 130 relationship with Saudi Arabia 81–3, 84 relationship with Scotland 109 relationship with USA 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 Roman occupation 112–13 Scottish independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7, 296 Second World War 122–3 terrain and infrastructure 111–12 trade deals 128–30 Tudors 115 Vikings 110–11, 114 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 United Nations 28, 53, 60, 68, 84, 132, 161–2, 204, 218, 219, 225, 231, 249, 285, 310, 311 United States of America x Apollo space missions 303, 305–6 armed forces 23, 24, 30, 31, 61–2 assassination of Qasem Soleimani 63 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 30–1, 49 commercial space travel 308 Constitution 115 embassies burnt 86 embassy siege, Iran 60–1 Greek Civil War 154 intelligence network 30–1, 61, 129 International Space Station 307 invasion of Iraq (2003) 57 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Louisiana Purchase 119 militarization of space 314–19 military coup, Cyprus (1974) 161 National Space Policy 319 Pact of Madrid 286–7 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue 32 rare-earth supplies 229–30, 231 relationship with Australia 23, 24–5, 30 relationship with Ethiopia 249, 251, 261 relationship with Greece 154, 165–6 relationship with Iran 39, 44, 49, 60–2, 63, 68–9 relationship with Saudi Arabia xiv, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 relationship with the UK 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 relationship with Turkey 189, 191 resignation of Lebanese prime minister 94 Russian ‘stalking’ satellites 316–17 Sahel Alliance commitments 219, 220–1, 232 satellite-killer systems 317–18 Second World War 23 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking 306 Space Force 303, 314–16 stock-market crash (1929) 181 Strategic Petroleum Reserves 22 in the West Pacific 24–5 uranium production 227–8, 230 V V-2 rockets 303 Van Allen radiation belts 314 Vanuatu 28 Velayat-e faqih 52 Versailles Treaty (1919) 303 Victoria, Queen 15, 150 Victory, HMS 119 Vienna 176–7 Vietnam 24, 30, 32 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ 17 Vikings 110–11, 114 Visigoths 273 Vision 2030 98–9 von Braun, Wernher 303 voting rights 12–13, 50 Voulet-Chanoine expedition (1898/99) 209–10 Voulet, Paul 209–10 W Wahhab clan 79, 86 Wahhab, Muhammad ibn Abd al- 79 Wahhabism 79, 81, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 ‘walkabout,’ Australia 6–7 Wall Street Journal 231 ‘White Australia’ Policy 16–17 Whitson, Peggy 307 William the Conqueror 114–15 Wilson, Edward 12 Witiza, King 273 women’s rights 52, 65, 97, 98, 283 World Bank 219, 225 Y Yemen 44, 57, 61, 68, 69, 76, 77 Civil War 47, 93, 258 Yugoslavia x, 154, 160 Yugoslav Wars 17, 182–3 Z Zagros Mountains 39, 42, 44–5, 53 Zayed, Prince Mohammed bin 102 Zenawi, Meles 252 Ziyad, Tariq ibn 273–4 Zoroastrianism 45, 46 First published 2021 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 2 John Street London WC1N 2ES www.eandtbooks.com ISBN: 978-1-78396-538-0 Copyright © Tim Marshall 2021 The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

It was a great invention for a Silicon Valley libertarian boys’ club but of limited use to the rest of the country. Confinity was also not the only digital-payments company around. It wasn’t even the only digital-payments company in its office building. Across the hall was X.com, an online bank founded by Elon Musk, whose city-directory platform, Zip2, was bought by Compaq for a touch over $300 million and no good reason. Musk, like Balwani and Kalanick and Graham and Cuban and such, was one of those lucky late-1990s founders who cashed out on an ultimately worthless web start-up, in his case for a personal share of around $20 million.44 Confinity and X.com raised tens of millions of dollars each, but they were pissing it all away on referrals, bribing users in cash to sign up and again to rope other people in.

The peak of Thiel’s power came when he assumed the role of White House liaison to Silicon Valley, sitting at the president’s left hand while executives kissed the Trump ring. In the room were the industry’s elite: Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook, Eric Schmidt for Google, and the CEOs of Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle. Thiel also invited reps from a couple of smaller firms: Karp from Palantir and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX. It was a classic Hoover-style meeting, bringing a sector’s corporate leadership together with federal leadership, not to command but to pat backs and work out their common interests, which centered on competition from China. After this meeting, these firms grew willing and even eager to deal with the government directly: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft pursued and won tens of billions in security contracts, edging into the territory of traditional prime contractors.71 Trump gripped his adviser Thiel’s right hand awkwardly, with both of his.

To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”i Today, capital’s ambition extends farther than Rhodes dared to hope: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are leading the capitalist charge into space with their respective Blue Origin and SpaceX firms. Musk hopes to colonize Mars, and Bezos told a morning news show that “we can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space.”7 There is always another frontier, if you know where to look.


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Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

The next Marie Curie is a college senior right now, waiting to be talked out of applying to law school. But first things first. Every feared rapper is in a beef, nerds need to be called out too. START A BEEF: Stop writing “Dad lost his battle with cancer.” Instead, cast some blame in the obit: “Elon Musk failed to cure Dad’s leukemia.” “Peter Thiel did nothing as Mom’s heart gave out.” Neither statement is incorrect. Let’s see if those two fight back, with a cure. MONEY MAKE PATIENTS PAY A “YOU SAVED MY LIFE” COMMISSION: A doctor or a scientist gives a sick person 5, 10, maybe 40 more years of life.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

Scott Heiferman, the CEO and founder of Meetup, sees another advantage of DRIs at all levels: making sure that everyone is aligned on how their role within the company matters. As Scott explained to me over lunch one day in downtown New York City, “I love the idea of every person understanding how their small role aligns with the broader mission. . . . Elon Musk says that you can stop anyone on the SpaceX factory floor and ask them what they’re doing and why it’s important. Someone could be making bolts and you could say, ‘Why do you do it? What’s your job?’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m making these bolts so that we can have a landable vehicle, because if we do a landable vehicle, then we can get to Mars.

When you launch a new product or service, presenting unanswered questions may be a more effective means of engaging prospective customers than explicitly explaining your product, which leaves customers with no questions at all. Movies achieve this level of intrigue with trailers, showing us a glimpse of great characters and scenes without context and leaving us wondering what happened in between. For companies like Elon Musk’s electric-car empire Tesla, a sense of mystery has been achieved with features like “ludicrous speed,” which has drawn customers in without much explanation as to how it is turned on, never mind what it means. Perhaps the most famous corporate purveyor of mystery is Apple, whose penchant for secrecy around new products and carefully curated publicity causes millions of people to tune in live to huge product-reveal events to learn about the next iPhone’s features.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

If you can argue from first principles, then you can more easily approach unfamiliar situations, or approach familiar situations in innovative ways. Understanding how to derive formulas helps you to understand how to derive new formulas. Understanding how molecules fit together enables you to build new molecules. Tesla founder Elon Musk illustrates how this process works in practice in an interview on the Foundation podcast: First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. . . . You kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” . . . and then reason up from there. . . .

Specialized skills or business processes that take a long time to develop (for example, Apple’s vertically integrated products and supply chain, which meld design, hardware, and software) Exclusive access to relationships, data, or cheap materials A strong, trusted brand built over many years, which customers turn to reflexively Substantial control of a distribution channel A team of people uniquely qualified to solve a particular problem Network effects or other types of flywheels (as described in Chapter 4) A higher pace of innovation (e.g., a faster OODA loop) Elon Musk notably sparred with Warren Buffett on the concept of moats. In Musk’s words from a May 2, 2018, Tesla earnings call: “Moats are lame,” and “If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long.” He was pointing out that, in his opinion, the most important sustainable competitive advantage is creating a culture that supports a higher pace of innovation, because that higher pace of innovation can overcome traditional moats.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

In an interview I conducted with Bezos in 2000, I asked him what he was reading. He talked about Robert Zubrin’s books Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization and The Case for Mars. At the end of the conversation, I wondered when some brave Silicon Valley entrepreneur would start a private space company (this was two years before PayPal cofounder Elon Musk started his rocket company SpaceX). Bezos’s answer seemed particularly convoluted. “It’s a very hard technical problem and I think it’s very hard to see how you would generate a return in a reasonable amount of time on that investment,” he said. “So the answer to your question is probably yes, there probably is somebody doing it, but it’s not… when you go to venture capital conferences, it never comes up.

“Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard,” Bezos wrote in a blog post on the Blue Origin website.13 A year after that, the company successfully tested the spaceship’s crew-capsule escape system. It has received two grants from NASA worth more than $25 million to develop technologies related to human spaceflight. Internet magnate Elon Musk, with SpaceX, and billionaire Richard Branson, the founder of an enterprise called Virgin Galactic, are pursuing some of the same goals. Bezos does not allow the public or media to tour his space facilities. In 2006, the company moved to larger headquarters in Kent, Washington, twenty miles south of Seattle.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Now he was switching from lust to greed, also correcting an initial mistaken hypothesis he had absorbed from the gaming world, that people would not want to join online communities under their real names. PayPal became enduringly important in the lore of Silicon Valley because it launched several important careers—not just Hoffman’s and Thiel’s, but also that of Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX—and helped establish a set of guiding principles for the Internet generation of technology companies. One of these principles was extreme adaptability. PayPal began as a security system for PalmPilot, a short-lived handheld device, and evolved into a system for processing transactions on eBay, the world’s first successful online marketplace.

Obama was friendly to a number of the Valley’s political causes, such as permitting generous allotments of H-1B visas, under which technology firms can hire engineers from abroad; net neutrality, which forbade Internet service providers from charging higher prices to heavy users of video, music, and gaming services; and a new law, opposed by Obama’s own financial regulators, that permitted online sales of stock in technology start-ups. The Obama administration gave a $465 million loan to Tesla, the electric car company founded by Hoffman’s friend Elon Musk. When the White House gave a state dinner for Xi Jinping, the president of China and therefore the person who controlled access to the most important growth market for LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman (in a tuxedo!) and Michelle Yee were among the guests. On Hoffman’s office wall were framed photographs, impossible for any visitor to miss, of himself with Obama, Bloomberg, and Bill Clinton.


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

He joined them in good spirits and they celebrated détente with a series of large gin and tonics. The question of the fee for their public relations efforts was settled: a six-figure sum each for the father and son. As the evening wore on, Marsalek talked about his interests, his fascinations with technology and security, name-dropping as he went. He’d met Elon Musk, he said, and was a firm believer in Tesla: ‘Buy that stock and tuck it away,’ he advised them. Marsalek’s idea of relaxation was a little different to the Kilbeys’. ‘My leisure time is more work in Libya.’ He talked about his stake in three cement plants which once belonged to an Austrian conglomerate, but were sold after the country descended into chaos.

To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader. 1A Mauritius fund 79–89, 115, 134, 250 advisors’ fees 88 Ernst & Young investigation 135 7995 transaction codes 16, 19, 42, 101 Absolute Poker 30 acai berry sellers 61 Acai Berry King see Willms, Jesse Achleitner, Paul 224, 231–2 Adyen 175 AIM market 91 Akhavan, Hamid ‘Ray’ ix, 118 and Animo Associates 278–9 and Marsalek 227, 278, 285 arrested USA 285 sentenced 304 Al Alam Solutions 245, 246, 249, 258, 272, 276–7, 301 and Allied Wallet 210 and Third-Party Acquiring 200–202, 221 rebrands as Symtric 277 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 Wirtschaftswoche on 261 Al Alawi, Kumail 69–70 Ali, Marsalek’s bribery contact 184 Alken Asset Management 119, 140 Allied Wallet 210–11, 304 Allscore Beijing, Wirecard and 250 Alphaville blog (FT) 52–3, 54, 91, 258 Camp Alphaville 52–3, 55–6, 96, 112–13 House of Wirecard series 91 and Ingenico/Wirecard 108 ‘Rabble’ 54, 96 Schillings on 119 Anderson, Pamela 223 Angermayer, Christian 198–9, 239 Animo Associates, Wickford 278–9, 283–4 APG Protection 255, 257n Arafat, Yasser 266 Ardiss, Katherine, and 1A/Hermes deal 83–4 Ashazi Services, Bahrain 67–71, 72–7 Asian Internet Gaming conference 57–8 Assion, Rüdiger, KPMG report meeting 290 Austrian coalition government collapse 2019 263 Austrian Interior Ministry, and refugees/stabilization 265–9 Austrian People’s Party 196 Aykroyd, Dan 21 Badel, Antoine 119, 140 BaFin and Earl 208–10, 294 and Palos 116 ban Wirecard shorting 180, 182, 186, 226, 240–41 blamed by MPs 302 criminal complaint against McCrum and Palma 195 on market manipulation 139, 172 reforms 305 Baker Tilly 85 Banc de Binary 211 Banco de Oro (BDO) 274 declares Wirecard documents spurious 294 Bandits xii ‘Bank of Oman’ 181 Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) 274 declares Wirecard documents spurious 293–4 Barber, Lionel xii, 54, 107, 141, 143–4, 169, 175, 176, 177, 205, 206, 224, 225, 247, 257, 259, 270, 299 and FTI 261–2 on FT bribery accusation 207 on Nick Gold tapes 220–23 on Novichok story 244–5 on Wirecard story 1–6 reviews McCrum and Zatarra 132 Barclay Brothers, Sunday Business 53–4 Barth, Hubert 167, 305 Batson, Chris 173 Bauer, Christopher ix, 45, 62, 249 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 denies running PayEasy 193–4 in Manila 58 meets KPMG 275–6 on Ashazi Services 70–71 Palma seeking 191–4, 207 reported dead 303 Bauer-Schlichtegroll, Paul ix, 14 and Electronic Billing Systems (EBS) 12–14, 17 and Flynt Publications 11–12 and InfoGenie reverse takeover 17 and Wagner 10 buys Wirecard for porn billing 12–13 moves to supervisory board 27 divests from Wirecard 31, 46 Bäumler-Hösl, Hildegard 183–6, 209–10 Bavarian police, 2015 Wirecard raid 101–3 Bayerische Wirtschaft 31 Bellenhaus, Oliver x, 10, 44, 261 and EBS 18–19 and prepaid credit cards 18 CardSystems Middle East 200–202 Al Alam meeting 276–7 and Allied Wallet 210 and Wirecard special audit 252 driving 39–40 personal habits 199–200 surrendered/co-operated 303 BellTrox 298–9 Bergermann, Melanie, on Al Alam 261 Roland Berger 233 Bergman, James, PayEasy 62 Berntsen, Gary 178 Bharara, Preet, hedge funds prosecution 35–6 Bijlipay card reader 80–81 Bill (purported Wirecard source) 244, 282 Bitcoin, Braun on 250 Blank Rome, and Wirecard self-review 102–3 Block, Carson xi, 93, 99 Doing Business in China for Dummies 37 Marsalek tries to bribe 118 on Casino supermarkets 112–13 on NMC Health 261 on Sino Forest 36–7 Bloomberg, Ali on bribing 184–5 Blue Ridge hedge fund 121 Bluetool 97 Bosler, Tobias 107 and the Turkish boxers 33–4 on Wirecard accounts 32–4 Bournewood (BVI entity) 97 Boyd, Roddy, ‘Great Indian Shareholder Robbery’ 146–7 Branston & Gothard 53–4 Braun, Dr Markus, Wirecard CEO ix, 25–34, 46–7, 60, 103, 110, 111, 145, 154, 172, 176, 229, 231, 234 on Ashazi 76–7 and Deutsche Bank 232 loan 147 and FT imaginary clients story 248–52 offers interview 259–60 orders Marsalek to get FT onside 230 intimidates short sellers 31–4 in French Riviera 197 and visit by heavies 197 Ingenico, revives purported bid 117–18 and IT systems 41–4 and KPMG report blames KPMG for delay 289 cash loan January 2020 288 Gill on 301–2 KPMG meeting 290 on publication 291 rejects supervisory board advice 289 suspicions of 287 not fired 294–5 resigns 296 arrested 303 management style 64 and McKinsey report 234–5 on Project Tiger 174, 175 SoftBank, and Wirecard 197–200, 203, 205, 237, 238 Vienna weekends 196–7 on Wirecard and Bitcoin 249–50 on Wirecard Asian non-offices 93 on Wirecard Brazil/Turkey MCAs 236 and Wirecard DAX Index membership 156, 159–60 on Wirecard total integrity 74–7 Zatarra Report 107 Kroll to investigate 117–19 Earl on 124 Wirecard London presentation 111 Braun, Sylvia 64 Bribery Act 207 Brinken Merchant Incorporations 44 British Virgin Islands and shell companies 44 Wirecard and 31 Bub Gauweiler 183 Buckminster Fuller question 75 Budde, Andreas 203 Buffett, Warren 65, 95 Bundestag, Wirecard inquiry 302 critical report on EY 305 MPs apologize to FT 302 Burtnick, Nelson, Marsalek on 62–3 Cambridge Analytica story 150, 241 Camp Alphaville 52–3, 55–6, 96, 112–13 CardSystems Middle East 200–202 Casino supermarkets 112–13 CellarDoor 53 CenturionBet 102n Cerberus 231 chargebacks nutraceuticals scam 47–9 Visa 2009 crackdown 49 China, Wirecard buying Allscore Beijing 250 Chinese frauds exposure 36–7 Chuprygin, Andrey xi and GRU 268 Citadelle Corporate Services, uncooperative 271, 272 Citigroup AsiaPacific deal with Wirecard 145–6, 152–3 Project Tiger summary papers sent to 167–8 Click2Pay (Wirecard online wallet) 13–19 Clifford Chance, and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 Cloudflare 109 CMS lawyers 17, 243 CNBC, Braun interview on FT and accounts 203–4 Coathanger King 244, 257, 282 Cobb, Oliver, on Wirecard 144–5, 236–7, 298 Cohodes, Marc 226 ‘Colin’ (Marsalek’s friend) x, 86–7, 88–9, 277, 278, 301 at P61 116 in Singapore 133–4 on Dr Rami 278 barbecue 279–80 Commerzbank 157, 292 accuses FT of market manipulation 172 retracts 174 losses 304 Committee to Protect Journalists 187 ConePay, purported creditor, non-existent 187–90 Connaught outsourcing company 94 Control Risks, and R&T information flow 202–3 Covid, travel issues 276 credit cards high-risk processing 43–4, 47 payments, post–2008 scrutiny 47 prepaid/unbranded, for Click2Pay e-wallets 17–19 Credit Suisse 23 and Wirecard/SoftBank bond 238 Crypto currency, Braun on 250 Dahmen, Martin (EY) 292 and Singapore audit 202–3 Al Alam meeting 277 and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 on Third-Party arrangements 251–2 ‘Dale’, whistleblower, on Wirecard UK & Ireland 245 Dallas investigation 227, 282 Daniel Stewart stockbroker 134n Dave the IT guy 109, 113, 123 Davies, Paul 238 DAX 30 28, 236, 287, 288 Dennis, Jonathan 213, 215, 216, 217, 241 Der Spiegel 195, 263 Deutsche Bank 3, 183, 196, 224, 305 and Braun loan 288 Samt and Marsalek decide to buy 231 Wirecard and 27 Dialectic Capital hedge fund 105 Dolan, Shane 261 Döpfner, Mathias 177 Dowson, Simon x, 44, 97, 278–9 Reuters investigation 122 Dun & Bradstreet 233 Duterte, Rodrigo 187, 221, 251, 273 Dyer, Geoff 194 Earl, Matthew xi, 94–5, 109–12, 185–6 and BaFin on Zatarra 109 case dropped 141–3 explains Wirecard to 208–10 avoiding Perring 123–4 Kroll on 119, 130 on Markus Braun 124 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 reports to FBI on Wirecard critics hacking 208 reports to Mastercard on Wirecard 208 talks on Sky News 298 Toronto University on hacking gang 208, 298–9 under siege 127–31 faked photo of 257 outed on Twitter 127 phished/attacked online 131–2 shadowed 127–9 VisMas Files 124 EasyJet 233 Eaze 285 Edelman, KPMG report meeting 290 Eichelmann, Thomas 233, 235, 249, 294, 296 backs Braun and special audit 271–2, 283, 288–9 El Obeidi, Rami xi, 218–19, 301 Elder, Bryce 108, 117–18 Electronic Billing Systems (EBS) 12–14, 17, 18–19 Elvins, Hayley xi, 255, 256–7, 257n Emery, Bruce 144–5, 236 Enderle, Franz 183, 242 Ennismore hedge fund 91 Epsilon Investments 134 Ernst & Young 76, 77, 237, 248, 249 and CardSystems 201 litigation against 305 and NMC Health 261 and Wirecard Singapore 154, 167–8, 201–3 Wirecard/1A/Hermes investigation 135–8, 144 Wirecard special audit 249–50, 251–2 alerts BaFin 294 and Al Alam Solutions 201, 277 and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 completing audit 292–4 on Third-Party arrangements 251–2 Ernst & Young Canada 37 European Securities and Markets Authority 180 Exxon, on BellTrox 299 Federal Trade Commission, and Allied Wallet 210 Fieldfisher, and Singapore audit 203 financial crisis 2008 23–4 financial markets betting schemes 61 Financial Conduct Authority 99, 109, 255 Financial Times Alphaville see Alphaville Festival of Finance 112–13 Lex column 21–2 North American edition, Lex column 22–4 office, London 1–2 people xii moves back to Bracken House 205, 206–7 newsroom 169 surveillance discovered 173–4 office New York 20–24, 35–8 scepticism culture 37–8 Wirecard investigations/stories 1–7 and short-sellers set-up 212–19, 220–25, 228 blamed for Wirecard short attack 107 Braun orders Marsalek to get FT onside 230 declines Braun interview offer 259–60 FT’s QC blocks Project Tiger story 4–6, 168 puts questions to Wirecard 218 Singapore investigation story published 170–71, 174 accused of market manipulation 172 blames Zatarra 107 Wirecard suing for misuse of business secrets 194–5 Singapore/Philippines stories 236 Wirecard imaginary clients story 248–52 Wirecard action vs. 242–3 internal investigation 240–42 see also specific FT people Fleep messaging service 82 Flutter group 213, 241–2 Flynt, Larry, and Bauer-Schlichtegroll 11–12 Foster Mitchell, Victoria 261 Foulis, Patrick 21 Frankfurt stock exchange (Deutsche Börse) 25 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 180, 305 Freedom Party Austria 178, 263 Freis, James 294–6 Friend Finder 43 Fritsche, Klaus-Dieter 250 Froehlich Tours 191 FTI Consulting 111, 261–2 Full Tilt 30, 62–3 G2Pay payment processor 29–31, 102 G2Pay Dublin 39, 42–4 G2Pay Toronto 30, 42 begins to shrink 45–6, 59–60 ICC-Cal issues 49–51 Mastercard fines 42 miscoded 7995 transactions 42 upfront payment to Wirecard 30–31 Gattringer, Wolfgang, and Libya refugee project 266–9 General Electric 153 German civil legal system 242–3 German institutions, investor confidence in 93 German press supports Wirecard 110 Geschonneck, Alexander 251, 290 Getnow 278 GI Retail 105 GI Technology 86 Gibraltar, Wirecard and 31 Gill, Evelyn (Pav’s mother) 160, 162, 166–7, 168, 171, 306 Gill, Pav, Wirecard AsiaPacific legal counsel x, 152–60 and Ng investigate finance team 155–8 and whistleblower 154–5, 156, 158 Ng & Steinhoff, Telegram chats 157–8, 163 on Braun/Marsalek 301–2 on Wirecard Singapore 161–5, 171 ousted 158–60 Project Tiger copies 158–60 thriving 305–6, 307 Gold, Nick xii, 212–13, 229, 254–5 El Obeidi on 219 IVA agreed 306 Kroll to investigate 117–19 on FT about to expose Wirecard 213–17 recorded/quoted 221–2, 241–2 Goldman Sachs 249 Goomo travel firm 87, 88, 133, 135, 137 P61 HQ 116 Görres, Andrea, and Wirecard x self-review 102–3 special audit 252 Graham and Dodd, Security Analysis 95 Grant Thornton 30 Greenvale Capital 144–5, 236–7 GRU (Russia Military Intelligence) 263–70 Guardian 53 Gupta, Varun 89 Gustenau, Brigadier, on refugee project 267 Guttenberg, Karl-Theodore zu 250 Hallbergmoos, Wirecard office 9–11 Hamilton, Ben (re Kroll), fishing visit to Earl 129–30 Handelsblatt 177, 186, 219, 222, 229 Hanson, Nigel xii, 3–6, 106, 125, 170, 171, 175, 194, 205, 243 on McCrum’s correspondence hacked 121–2 on FT/short-sellers set-up 220–22 reviews McCrum and Zatarra 132 Harper Gray 174 Harris, Daniel, and Wirecard shorting rumour 182–3 Harris, James 115 Helms, Matthias (Wirecard due diligence) 135–7 Hempton, John xi, 55–6, 74, 188–9 Henseler, Alfons 234 Herbert Smith Freehills (law firm) 175, 220, 221, 223, 224 Hermes i-Tickets 78–89 Earl on 95–7 Ernst & Young investigation 135–8 Ramasamy on 111 Hodgson, Camila 149 ‘Hollins, Ian’ 96, 112, 123–4, 127, 226, 305 Honourable Artillery Company 52 House of Wirecard Alphaville series 91 HSBC 185 Hufeld, Felix 294, 305 Hume, Neil 54 Hustler, Flynt Publications, Bauer-Schlichtegroll and 11–12 ICC-Cal 27, 48 miscoded 7995 transactions 42 Merchant IDs crackdown 50–51 Wirecard cash stolen 50–51 IIFL Wealth 82 Inatec 46, 61, 63, 97, 116 InBev and Budweiser story 54 Indo-German Chamber of Commerce 250 InfoGenie reverse takeover 17 Ingenico purported bid for Wirecard 108, 117–18 Investors Chronicle 21 Israeli security Wirecard executives and 50–51 Iwersen, Sönke 219, 222 J-Capital Research 92–4, 98, 113, 121 ‘Jack’, whistleblower 166, 188 Jakab, Spencer 23 Jenkins, Patrick 141 Jilson (photographer) 187 Jon, on short sellers surveillance 254–7 Jones Day 130 Jones, Sam xii, 126 on FT office surveillance 173 on Marsalek, Libya, GRU and Wagner 263–70 Kalixa, Senjo buys 138 Kaminska, Izabella 223–4 Kepler Cheuvreux 292 Khalaf, Roula 173, 259–60, 270, 302 Khan, Imran 1 Khawaja, Ahmad ‘Andy’ 210, 304 Kilbey, Gary xii, 115, 306 and Marsalek 147–51 on Wirecard shorting rumour 181 on Wirecard story news leak 170–71 Kilbey, Tom xii, 147, 148–51 and Marsalek 182 Kirch, Leo 183 Kirch Media 109–10, 142 Kirk, Stuart (US Lex team) 35 Kleinschmidt, Kilian on Marsalek 264–5 reaction to Marsalek and Libya 269–70 testifies 302 Klestil, Stefan 232–3, 234 Knöchelmann, Dietmar x, 29–31, 45 KPMG 26 on 1A/Hermes 85, 88 Wirecard special audit 249, 250–51 Al Alam meeting 277 complains of obstructions/delays 287 Manila trustee meeting 272–5 on PayEasy client non-existence 276 PayEasy meeting 275–6 seeking Wirecard Singapore cash 271–6 draft report to supervisory board 286–90 enforces deadline 290 final report, no evidence for Third-Party Acquiring 291 Braun’s spins on 285, 287, 291–2 Kramp-Karrenbauer, Annegret 231 Krisper, Stephanie, on Marsalek contact 264–5 Kroeber, Susannah, on Wirecard Asian offices 92–4 Kroll investigations 58 accusatory letter to Earl 129–30 seeking Zatarra, 117, 119 Kukies, Jörg 231, 249–50 Kurniawan, Edo x and Ernst & Young 135–8, 154 on cash definition issues 259 FT and 6–7, 174 head of Wirecard Asia Pacific finance team 138, 153–8, 161, 170, 172, 210, 246, 301 and Hong Kong unit accounts 154 on ‘round tripping’ funds 155–8 paperwork 258 Wirecard supports 170 and Project Tiger 158, 165–6 vanished 176, 303 Kurz, Sebastian 196, 266 Lauterbach, Anastassia 233–4, 235, 249, 287 Lehman Brothers 22–3, 47 Leitz, Sven-Olaf 251 Ley, Wirecard CFO ix, 28, 31, 46, 50–51, 60, 64, 78, 79, 136, 142, 153, 236, 291 on Deutsche Bank 239 and Hermes 84, 85 and Kirch Media 109–10 on Wirecard Asian non-offices 93 Wirecard cash flow statement 90–91 and Wirecard self-review 102–3, 104 confronts Greenvale 144–5 KPMG report meeting 290 arrested 303, 304 Liao, Bob 139 Libya Marsalek and 116 cement plants 116, 135, 151, 247, 267, 268 creating strong border force 269 refugees as guest workers 266–9 Kleinschmidt’s reaction to 269–70 GRU and 268–9 Rami El Obeidi 255–6 Lincolnshire police 125–6 Linklaters 88 Lipscomb, Dashiell 200 Lordship Trading blog 95 Louis XIII project 231, 239 M’Cwabeni, Vuyiswa 233, 234 Macquarie, on Wirecard 139 Madoff, Bernie, Ponzi scam 23–4 Mail on Sunday 261 Majali, Yousef 105, 121 Manager Magazin allegations 261 Eichelmann interview 271–2 on forensic audit 249 on FT bribery 207 on Wirecard board 234–5 Maria, Tolentino’s paralegal 273 Marques, Eduardo xi, 299 on Senjo and 1A 146 on Wirecard and SoftBank 210 shorts Wirecard stock 59 Marsalek, Jan (Wirecard chief operating officer) ix, 39, 40, 46–51, 64, 153, 154, 172, 226 and 1A fund 115 Al Alam meeting 276–7 on Ali, FT and Bloomberg bribery scam 183–6 and Akhavan 278 whistleblower on 285 and Animo Associates 278–9 on Burtnick hiring 62–3 on Cambridge Analytica 150 and CardSystems Third-Party Acquiring 200–203 and Chuprygin; Gustenau; Gattringer 268–9 and Click2Pay 11, 13–16 ATM cards for e-wallets 17–19 on Deutsche Bank 239 and Dr Rami 278 on Elon Musk/Tesla 151 and Nick Gold tapes 217–19 Kilbeys, pays off 151 suspected of story news leak 170 G2Pay pressured 46 and Gold 213–14 and Goomo travel firm 87, 88–9 and Hermes i-Tickets/1A 78–89 and fake clients special audit 251–2 at Colin’s barbecue 279–80 crying drunk 279–80 and FT fake clients story 248–52 Third-Party Acquiring cover story 258–9 defends Third-Party business 234, 235–6 on Inatec 61 on Ingenico purported bid 108 and IT systems 41–4 on Israeli politics 178–9 on KPMG report publication 291 KPMG report meeting 290 post-audit, offers raw data 287–8 stalls 294–5 suspended not fired 294–5 fired, police charge 296 disappears to Minsk 300 and Kurniawan 136–8 on Libya 151 and refugees as guest workers 266–9 cement plants 116, 135, 151, 247, 267, 268 on creating strong Libya border force 269 Manila trustee meeting 273–5 management/lifestyle 64 extreme Covid precautions 277–8 extravagance, employee on 177–8 new information on 263–70 office 115–16 office, Samt on 252–3 P61 villa 115–16, 269, 277, 278, 280 questions about 247 Sabines (two assistants) 115, 116, 269, 279, 300 on McCrum 149 McKinsey report on 234, 235 and Novichok documents 303 recipe 179–80 story 244 and nutraceuticals chargebacks scam 47–9 PayEasy meeting 275–6 police take inbox archives 101–3, 104 Rami El Obeidi link 256 ‘Ray’, correspondence from 178 and Samt 229–30 decide to buy Deutsche Bank 231 on Senjo 138 in Singapore 134–5 and Singapore audit 201–3 in Project Tiger papers 166 on Singapore cash new Manila trustee 272 Turkey money replaces Singapore 278 and Smaul 65–6 nutraceutical processing deal 59–63 on Syria visit with Russian military 266 on Telegram 150 on Wirecard misunderstood 149 and Zatarra Report 114–19 suspects UK leak 116–17 targets McCrum and Palos 116–19 tries to bribe Carson Block 118 Marsalek, Viola 252, 253 Martiradonna, Francesco 102n Mastercard 43 fines G2Pay 42 Project Tiger summary papers sent to 167–8 compliance person 118–19 on Wirecard 208 Mateschitz, Dietrich 15 Mattias, Wulf 232–3, 249, 271 MCA Mathematik (Greenvale alias) 236–7 on forensic audit 249 McCrum, Charlotte (author’s wife) 22, 55, 126–7, 165, 174, 205, 256, 285, 297 targeted by Wirecard 175 McCrum, Dan early career 20–24, 35 New York FT office 20–24, 35–8 joins Alphaville 55–6 moved to FT Lex 141, 143–4 FT internal investigation 240–41 personal life 22–3, 105, 120, 140–41, 165, 205, 225, 227–8, 285, 297–8, 299 improves home security 126–7, 131–2 surveillance fears 257–8 and Nick Gold tapes 220–25, 228 Wirecard investigations/stories Animo Associates 283–4 and Ashazi Services, Bahrain 67–71, 72–7 blog post on Wirecard short attack 106 Exocet on fake clients 247–8, 272, 300 and Macquarie Wirecard meeting 139–40 following-up Wirecard Third-Party Acquiring 221 Marsalek said to intend bribe 147–50 and Palma, accused of bribery and threats 207 criminal case dropped 302 and Pav Gill 161–5 Singapore story publication 1–7 telephone interview with Braun 74–7 testifies to Bundestag inquiry 302 and Zatarra accusations against 127, 132 correspondence hacked 121–2, 125–6 decides to move on 132 Kroll to investigate 117–19 Marsalek’s security to investigate 116–19 meets with Earl and Perring 100 Schillings on 119 on whistleblowers protection 302–3 see also specific people or stories McKinsey 35, 233 Wirecard compliance review 252 on Wirecard Third-Party business 234, 235 and Wirecard/Deutsche Bank 239 Merchant Category Codes 16 Merchant ID (MID) 16 Visa/Mastercard and 43 Merkel, Angela 250 Metropolitan Police 208 Mishcon de Reya 127, 142, 143 Moody’s 237 Mubadala, takes over SoftBank loan to Wirecard 238 multilevel marketing pyramid schemes 61 Munich public prosecutor 183 Munich Security Conference 231 Murphy, Gary 226–7 Murphy, Paul xii, 52–5, 106, 115, 143–4, 170, 171, 172, 177, 194, 211, 225, 228, 237, 245, 246–7, 263, 278, 297, 298, 299, 302, 306 and Ashazi Services story 67, 68, 69, 73 has Alphaville IT secured 125 at Alphaville’s vaudeville 223–4 and Coathanger King/Bill 282–3 on FT/short-sellers set-up 220–22 denies shorting rumour 181 frightens Animo Associates director 279 FT internal investigation 241–2 Marsalek said to intend bribe 147–51 on SoftBank and Wirecard 205–6 spy story published 260 and surveillance informers 254–8 and Wirecard source 243–4 on Wirecard story 1–6, 100 Naheta, Akshay 198, 210, 237, 238 Narayanan, Veerappan 88 Nasdaq exchange 24 Neteller 16, 29 Neuer Markt Frankfurt 17 Neukeferloh, Grasbrunn, Wirecard move to 14 Newcastle Building Society prepaid card unit 66 Newton, Helmut 14 Ng, Royston 153, 154, 209 and Gill investigate finance team 155–8 Marsalek implicates in Bloomberg scam 185–6 Nikkei 144, 194, 205, 206, 222 Nix, Alexander 241 NMC Health 261 Novichok documents leaked 303 GRU and 268 Marsalek story 244 recipe, Marsalek and 179–80 Novum stockbroker 134n nutraceuticals charges scam 47–9 Marsalek deal with Smaul 59–63 O’Connor, Sarah 149 O’Murchu, Cynthia xii, 149, 261, 282 O’Sullivan, Henry x, 117, 249, 250, 271, 278 arrested 304 and Hermes i-Tickets 78–89 and Senjo loan 138 in Singapore 133–4 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 WalPay 102 Odey, Crispin 257 Öner, Ahmet 33–4 online casinos/gambling and banks 16 and Click2Pay 14–16 and Wirecard 14–17 countries outlawing 45–6 USA bans 2006 29 online poker legal grey area 29 US indictment 2011 62–3 7995 transactions 42–3 online porn billing, Bauer-Schlichtegroll and Wirecard 12–13, 43 online wallets 13, 16–17, 29 Orbit travel agency 87, 88 Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons 179 Ortiz, Carlos, and Wirecard self-review 102–3 Osterloh, Martin 47–9, 57–8, 199, 301 P61 (Marsalek’s villa) 115–16, 269, 277, 278, 280 Pacha club 15 Pacquiao, Manny 304 Pago (Deutsche Bank) 27 Pal, Alasdair 298 accusations against 127 on Dowson paperwork factory 122 Palldium phase 2 surveillance dossier 257 Palma, Stefania (FT) xii, 176, 243, 276, 299, 300 accused of bribery and threats 207 criminal case dropped 302 finds whistleblower Jack 166 in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur 165 meetings with Gill and Evelyn 163–4 hostile-environment training 193 seeking Christopher Bauer 191–4 seeking ConePay 187–90 Palos, Brett 116–19, 257 Paolucci, Paul 208 Pauls, Heike, analyst xii, 292, 304 accuses FT of market manipulation 172 retracts 174 on ‘buying opportunity’ 175 Paulson, John, and Sino Forest 36–7 PayEasy Solutions 58, 62, 70–71, 258, 272, 301 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 KPMG and 249, 275–6 no information 191–4 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 PayPal 2 Perring, Fraser xii, 95, 96–7, 109–13, 179, 226, 257 faces prosecution for Zatarra 141 further activities 305 on ‘Ian Hollins’ 96, 112, 123–4, 127, 226, 305 Kroll on 119 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 outed on Twitter 127 reports demand to name Zatarra people 124–5 wants expenses 123–4 Perry, Leo xii, 210, 299 on Wirecard 67, 73, 90–92, 139–40 Philippines Wirecard new trustee meeting 272–5 Wirecard purported partners 187–94 Palma’s story published 195 Poker Stars 30, 42n Pollard, Brett 261 Ponzi scam (Madoff) 24 Portsea Asset Management 226 Prima Vista Solusi 66 Project Panther 239 ‘Project Tiger’ 155–8 Gill saves copies 158–60 information flow 202–3 summary papers sent to banks/auditor 167–8 taken over by Marsalek 157–9 ProtonMail 178, 227 Puck, Wolfgang 134, 148 Putin, Vladimir, foreign policy speculative 269 matryoshka doll 252 Quadir, Fahmi 225–7 on Akhavan and Marsalek 285 attacked 281–2 and Marsalek whistleblower 226–7 Safkhet Capital, FBI source 281–2 on Wirecard Pennsylvania 226 Quintana-Plaza, Susana 233, 289 Quirk, Mark 278–9, 284 Rajah & Tann, Project Tiger 155 Gill seen with McCrum 162 interim report 167 information flow 202–3 Report 177, 243 Braun on 287 Ramasamy, Ramu and Palani ‘The Boys’ x, 79–80, 81–9 at London presentation 111 blamed for Hermes accounts 137 Wirecard falling-out 155 Rami El Obeidi, Dr and Marsalek 278 and short sellers surveillance 255–6 sends FT flowers 260–61 Randall, Jeff 53 Raynor, Greg xi, 255, 257n Mancunian facilitator 213–17 refugees/stabilization, Austrian Interior Ministry, and 265–9 Reichert, Jochen, on Zatarra weaknesses 109–10 Reserve Bank of India 83 Reuters, on Dowson paperwork factory 122 Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC, law firm) 107, 222, 224–5, 228, 240–2 on Zatarra Report 107 FT internal investigation 240–2 Robert Smith 261 Roddy 95–7, 112–13, 123 at Wirecard London presentation 111–12 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 seeks advice 99, 100 sees vehicles shadowing Earl 129 Roland Berger 233 RP Richter (auditor) 30 Rubie, Saif 213, 216, 217 Russian diplomat, at Colin’s barbecue 279–80 Russian military in Syria 266 Novichok 179–80, 244, 268, 303 Wagner Group soldiers 268–9 Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) 263–70 Sabines (Marsalek’s two assistants) 115, 116, 269, 279, 300 Safkhet Capital 281–2 Samt, Mr (Marsalek’s PR) x, 217–19, 229–30, 231, 252–3 Santego Capital 81 SAP 233 Schäfer, Daniel 177 Schillings law firm 91 blames FT for Wirecard short attack 107 letters to FT on Zatarra 132 on McCrum/Alphaville 119 on Wirecard story 4–6, 170–71 replaced 175 Schneider, Dagmar 279 and KPMG special audit 251, 252 KPMG report meeting 290 Manila trustee meeting 273–5 Schneider, Klaus (SdK), on Wirecard accounts 34 Schütt, Michael 59, 97 Schütz, Alexander 196–7, 198 on FT 196–7 apologizes 304–5 Schwager, Market Wizards 95 SdK (Schutzgemeinschaft Der Kleinaktionäre) on Wirecard 31–4 Sender, Henny 24 Senjo 134, 138, 258, 272, 301 and Third-Party Acquiring 200, 202 buys Kalixa 138 KPMG to consider 249 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 Sewing, Christian 231, 232 ShadowFall Research 185, 209 Shah, Amit 82–8 Shanmugaratnam, R.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Delivery drones like Amazon's Prime Air programme are at advanced stages of testing; startups in Germany, the US, China and New Zealand are trialling flying quadcopter cars; solar-powered planes circumnavigate the Earth, and prototype jetpacks are available to buy if you have enough money. Space is reopening thanks to a generation of buccaneering entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. In addition to the old heavyweights of NASA, Russia and the European Space Agency, China and India have booming space programmes. The Chinese Tiangong programme will soon have fully fledged space stations in orbit. Ambitious lunar and Martian missions are planned for the near future.

Academic advances dovetail with technology: neuroprosthetics will let people control wheelchairs or artificial limbs. Neurotechnology from the likes of the BrainGate research project can restore movements or communicative functions to the paralysed or those suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. Elon Musk's Neuralink and ARPA's Brain Initiative are just two leading efforts pursuing brain-to-machine interfaces: scalable, high bandwidth systems plugging brains into computers via microelectrode threads robotically sewn into the brain. This work is still at an early stage and involves opening the skull, always a delicate procedure.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

However they will ultimately leave the port, most containers are carried into the container yard, the place where they idle between being taken off a ship and being put on some sort of intermodal transport, like a train or truck. (The Port of Hamburg is exploring using a Hyperloop, the ultrafast transport system proposed by Elon Musk, as a form of intermodal transport, but such a system would be hugely expensive and take decades to complete.) Not far from where the autostrads picked up their containers, they place them on the concrete a second time. Here, they’re picked up by a different sort of gantry crane, known as an automated stacking crane.

Whichever of these companies succeeds, the implications for trucking are even more profound—although not, perhaps, in the ways that are immediately obvious. TuSimple’s goal is not to build a vehicle that can go anywhere under any circumstances. That’s an end so unachievable with present technology that only Elon Musk regularly claims to be anywhere near reaching it. (And, to be blunt, almost no one who is deeply involved in this industry, outside of Tesla, believes him.) TuSimple’s goal is to build a vehicle that spends 90 percent of its time on the highway, an environment well marked and relatively predictable.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Most significantly of all, hydraulic fracking—which involved the high-velocity injection of millions of gallons of liquid into bedrock to release the natural gas within—vastly increased domestic energy production and drove down prices, taking away the market incentives to use alternative fuels. On top of this came the cable-news-stoked political scandal of Solyndra, a solar energy company that collapsed after receiving $500 million in federal subsidies. (As staggering as the sum appeared, it was small potatoes in the world of green energy. Elon Musk’s various ventures together received close to $5 billion in government subsidies by 2015.) Under fire, the Obama Administration scaled back their ambitions for a green-tech future, and Kleiner did as well.19 Doerr and Gore had made a gamble that fell far short of its promise, even though in another, less divided and less austerity-minded political moment it might have indeed been another successful moon shot.

CHANGE THE WORLD Although tech’s shortcomings attracted increasing attention, it was hard not to be dazzled by the grand visions coming out of Northern California and Seattle. Government was enfeebled and polarized. Tech had flash, ambition, and billions to spend. The CEO of Google’s advanced research laboratory was the Rollerblade-wearing grandson of H-bomb developer Edward Teller; his corporate title was “Captain of Moonshots.” Elon Musk’s Tesla produced roaringly fast roadsters that featured a button allowing drivers to enter “ludicrous mode.” When he wasn’t building cars or jokingly repurposing welding tools to sell as $500 flamethrowers to adoring fans, Musk was literally shooting the moon with his SpaceX commercial space venture, beating out Lockheed and others for prime contracts.

Ellen McGirt, “Al Gore’s $100 Million Makeover,” Fast Company, July 1, 2007. 17. John Doerr, “Salvation (and profit) in Greentech,” TED2007, March 2007; Marc Gunther and Adam Lashinsky, “Cleanup Crew,” Fortune 156, no. 11 (November 26, 2007). 18. Jon Gertner, “Capitalism to the Rescue,” The New York Times, October 3, 2008. 19. Jerry Hirsch, “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies,” The Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2015; Sarah McBride and Nichola Groom, “Insight: How cleantech tarnished Kleiner and VC star John Doerr,” Reuters Business News, January 15, 2013. 20. David Streitfeld, “Kleiner Perkins Denies Sex Bias in Response to a Lawsuit,” The New York Times, June 14, 2012; Ellen Huet, “Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and Ellen Pao: A Mentorship Sours,” Forbes, March 4, 2015. 21.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Hawkins, “Tesla Didn’t Fix an Autopilot Problem for Three Years, and Now Another Person Is Dead,” The Verge, May 17, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629214/tesla-autopilot-crash-death-josh-brown-jeremy-banner; Edward Niedermeyer, “Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ Pricing Controversy Misses the Point,” The Drive, March 5, 2019, https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26790/teslas-full-self-driving-pricing-controversy-misses-the-point; Nick Lum and Edward Niedermeyer, “How Tesla and Elon Musk Exaggerated Safety Claims About Autopilot and Cars,” Daily Beast, April 13, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-exaggeraged-safety-claims-about-autopilot-and-cars. 652019 survey of leading AI researchers: Baobao Zhang et al., Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from a Survey of Machine Learning Researchers (arXiv.org, May 5, 20210), 40, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.02117.pdf. 65survey respondents supported Google’s decision: Zhang et al., Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence, 42. 65researchers trusted the military with AI significantly less than the U.S. general public: Zhang et al., Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence, 6–7, 31. 65Defense Innovation Board convened roundtable discussions with experts: “Defense Innovation Board’s AI Principles Project,” Defense Innovation Board, n.d., https://innovation.defense.gov/ai/. 65“resilient, robust, reliable, and secure”: Summary of the 2018 Department of Defense Artificial Intelligence Strategy (U.S.

.), https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf. 120“too dangerous” theme was echoed in other outlets: Delip Rao, “When OpenAI Tried to Build More Than a Language Model,” deliprao.com, February 19, 2019, http://deliprao.com/archives/314 (page discontinued); Alex Hern, “New AI Fake Text Generator May Be Too Dangerous to Release, Say Creators,” The Guardian, February 14, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction; Aaron Mak, “When Is Technology Too Dangerous to Release to the Public?” Slate, February 22, 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-generating-algorithm-ai-dangerous.html; James Vincent, “OpenAI has Published the Text-Generating AI It Said Was Too Dangerous to Share,” The Verge, November 7, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/7/20953040/openai-text-generation-ai-gpt-2-full-model-release-1-5b-parameters. 120pre-briefing the press “got us some concerns that we were hyping it”: Jack Clark, interview by author, March 3, 2020. 120more careful about the phrasing around potential dangers: “Better Language Models.” 121realistic-looking fake videos: Samantha Cole, “We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now,” Vice, January 24, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley. 121swap the faces of celebrities: Samantha Cole, “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked,” Vice, December 11, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gydydm/gal-gadot-fake-ai-porn. 12114,000 deepfake porn videos online: Henry Adjer et al., The State of Deepfakes: Landscape, Threats, and Impact (DeepTrace Labs, September 2019), 1, https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/10/08/deepfake_report.pdf. 121The videos didn’t only harm the celebrities: Cole, “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here.” 121revenge porn attacks: Kirsti Melville, “The Insidious Rise of Deepfake Porn Videos—and One Woman Who Won’t Be Silenced,” abc.net.au, August 29, 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-30/deepfake-revenge-porn-noelle-martin-story-of-image-based-abuse/11437774. 121“Deepfake technology is being weaponized against women”: Adjer et al., The State of Deepfakes, 6. 121AI assistant called Duplex: Jeff Grubb’s Game Mess, “Google Duplex: A.I.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

As a cofounder of the Intercept, it only made sense for her to be there. But in a surprising snub, Bralow — the same First Look attorney we’d encountered earlier — barred her from attending. Four months later, things got weirder. First Look Media announced more layoffs. Rumors spread that the company was buying Passionflix, a website owned by Tosca Musk — Elon Musk’s sister — that streams adaptations of romance novels. (Viewers are invited to rank the videos using a “barometer of naughtiness.”) Had management lost its collective mind? Dozens of employees wrote the board of directors, demanding to know what was going on. A New York magazine reporter asked First Look about Passionflix.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Geraci is one of a number of authors who have painted Moravec as the intellectual cofounder, with Ray Kurzweil, of a techno-religious movement that argues that humanity will inevitably be subsumed as a species by the AIs and robots we are now creating. In 2014 this movement gained generous exposure as high-profile technological and scientific luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking issued tersely worded warnings about the potential threat that futuristic AI systems hold for the human species. Geraci’s argument is that there is a generation of computer technologists who, in looking forward to the consequences of their inventions, have not escaped Western society’s religious roots but rather recapitulated them.

If someone believes that technology will likely evolve to destroy humankind, what could motivate them to continue developing that same technology? At the end of 2014, the 2009 AI meeting at Asilomar was reprised when a new group of AI researchers, funded by one of the Skype founders, met in Puerto Rico to again consider how to make their field safe. Despite a new round of alarming statements about AI dangers from luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, the attendees wrote an open letter that notably fell short of the call to action that had been the result of the original 1975 Asilomar biotechnology meeting. Given that DeepMind had been acquired by Google, Legg’s public philosophizing is particularly significant. Today, Google is the clearest example of the potential consequences of AI and IA.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Or electronic intelligence might permanently be constrained to running whatever people allow such devices to be connected to. But danger is real. Three generations ago, the advent of thermonuclear explosions appeared to doom humanity; instead, the world has grown more peaceful since then. In the next generation, artificial intelligence may become an existential threat. In 2015, Elon Musk, Martin Rees, Francesca Rossi, Steve Wozniak, and other luminaries of the tech and physics realms warned that artificial intelligence could be a great benefit but also could cause society great harm. The time to impose regulation on artificial intelligence, they said, is now—before chips are capable of thinking for themselves.

Japan, the nation with the longest life spans: See the “Life Expectancy” page maintained by the World Health Organization, detailing life expectancy around the globe, at http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/situation_trends/en/. The Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter forecast: David Gelernter, The Tides of Mind (New York: Liveright, 2016). Elon Musk, Martin Rees, Francesca Rossi, Steve Wozniak, and other luminaries: See “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence,” an open letter with over 8,000 signatories to date, available at Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/. Alan Robock of Rutgers University and Owen Toon of the University of Colorado calculate: Alan Robock and Owen Toon, “The Climate Impacts of Nuclear War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2012.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Bloomberg “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s thoughtful, well-researched work elucidates the staggering impact of technology on our daily lives, as well as what surprising and incredible developments the future may hold. Readers might be left with more questions than answers, but that’s the idea—we are at our best when we ask ‘What’s next?’ ” —Elon Musk, cofounder of Tesla Motors and PayPal THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2013 by Google Inc. and Jared Cohen All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Our gratitude to all our friends and colleagues whose ideas and thoughts we’ve benefited from: Elliott Abrams, Ruzwana Bashir, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Chris Brose, Jordan Brown, James Bryer, Mike Cline, Steve Coll, Peter Diamandis, Larry Diamond, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, James Fallows, Summer Felix, Richard Fontaine, Dov Fox, Tom Freston, Malcolm Gladwell, James Glassman, Jack Goldsmith, David Gordon, Sheena Greitens, Craig Hatkoff, Michael Hayden, Chris Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Dean Kamen, David Kennedy, Erik Kerr, Parag Khanna, Joseph Konzelmann, Stephen Krasner, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Lander, Jason Liebman, Claudia Mendoza, Evgeny Morozov, Dambisa Moyo, Elon Musk, Meghan O’Sullivan, Farah Pandith, Barry Pavel, Steven Pinker, Joe Polish, Alex Pollen, Jason Rakowski, Lisa Randall, Condoleezza Rice, Jane Rosenthal, Nouriel Roubini, Kori Schake, Vance Serchuk, Michael Spence, Stephen Stedman, Dan Twining, Decker Walker, Matthew Waxman, Tim Wu, Jillian York, Juan Zarate, Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman.


pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

When you enter the realm of Magical Thinking, you leave the world of evidence and logic and enter the weird Twilight Zone of psychology . The mind of the ideologue sees space as a blank screen upon which they project their greatest hopes, deepest fears, strangest quirks, favorite philosophies and preferred political persuasions. Space Cadets have read way too much Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein and Elon Musk (in his most exuberant states) and not enough Greg Easterbrook or Greg Klerkx. They tend live in an echo chamber of like-minded sentiments and ideas. Sound familiar? Neither reasoned nor seasoned, what little knowledge they possess is broad but hardly ever deep. They are the epitome of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

I simply don’t have any idea whether or when NASA will return humans to the Moon. Right now, it seems improbable. In your mind, what is a likely scenario and timeline for manned space? The mindset seems to be to go to Mars. Overly optimistic projections claim that will happen in the 2030s. Elon Musk has fantastic dreams that make no sense to me. The problem as I see it is that NASA will need to spend a good part of its budget doing technology development and demonstration at Mars for more than 20 years just to have the capability to mount a human mission to Mars. When you look at the NASA budget, about 2/3 is so fully committed that the money is simply not there for this development.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Through his branding and advertising campaigns, Samsung overtook Sony in brand value and sales by the mid-2000s. Todd Pendleton. Chief marketing officer at Samsung’s American mobile unit from 2011 to 2015. Led advertising efforts against Apple during the Samsung-versus-Apple smartphone wars. Daren Tsui and Ed Ho. Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who got their start working with Elon Musk and later sold their music software, mSpot, to Samsung in May 2012. After the sale, they joined Samsung as vice presidents for content and services; they ran the grand experiment Milk Music until its closure in September 2016. Paul Elliott Singer. Founder and CEO of Elliott Management, an ultrasecretive hedge fund in New York.

Daren was the deal maker, running around and impressing partners and signing deals, while Ed was the programmer at the computer, the one who attended to the product’s coding. Daren kicked off his career in 1994, that allowed publications to bring their classified advertising and articles to the Internet. In late 1997, Pantheon was acquired by Elon Musk and bundled into his first company, an online city guide called Zip2. It offered “door-to-door directions and Yellow Pages and so forth,” Daren told me. It was at Zip2 that Daren and Ed met, developing the door-to-door technology that Nokia used on an early mobile phone. They went on to co-found a mobile advertising company called SkyGo that was also acquired.


pages: 411 words: 119,022

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

And if you’re going to devote that much time to gathering information, then learn about something you’d be interested in even if you weren’t trying to get a job doing it. Follow your curiosity. Once you’re armed with that knowledge, then you can start hunting down the people who are the best of the best and trying to work with them. And that doesn’t mean stalking Elon Musk if you’re into electric cars. Look at who reports to him. And who reports to them. And which competing company would kill to hire those people. Understand the subdisciplines and see who leads the one you’re most interested in. Find the experts on Twitter or YouTube, then send them a message, a comment, a LinkedIn connection.

They generally oversee the growth of existing products that they inherited and don’t take risks that might scare executives or shareholders. This invariably leads to the stagnation and deterioration of companies. Most public company CEOs are babysitters. 2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove. 3.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. I’m really inside, and it’s like I gain a form of meditation, because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time.” ✸ Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? He mentioned several people, including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali, but his final addition stuck out: “Cincinnatus. He was an emperor in the Roman Empire. Cincinnati, the city, by the way, is named after him because he was a big idol of George Washington’s. He is a great example of success because he was asked to reluctantly step into power and become the emperor and to help, because Rome was about to get annihilated by all the wars and battles.

You do not want to be the twelfth thin-panel solar company in the last decade. And you don’t want to be the nth company of any particular trend. So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere. “When Elon Musk started SpaceX, they set out the mission to go to Mars. You may agree or disagree with that as a mission statement, but it was a problem that was not going to be solved outside of SpaceX. All of the people working there knew that, and it motivated them tremendously.” TF: Peter has written elsewhere, “The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system.

[For example,] I’ve spent my entire life thinking that I want to go to Mars . . . it was on The Brady Bunch. I thought this was the best thing ever. “At some point, if I structure my life correctly, maybe I’ll get to go. I think it’s just so important for humanity to be able to do that . . . and I talked to Elon [Musk] a couple of times and was vastly inspired by everything that he and SpaceX are doing. . . . “I ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was saying I just got to talk with Elon, and I’m superexcited about Mars. I really hope that one day I can go. And Bezos looks at me and goes, ‘Mars is stupid.’ And I say, ‘What?’


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“The universe does not allow waste”: Reeves Wiedeman, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork (New York: Little, Brown, 2020), 136. “maybe in the way”: Lanier, author interview, March 12, 2019. geodesic domes on Mars: John Brownlee, “Elon Musk Wants to Build a Martian Colony out of Geodesic Domes,” Fast Company online, last modified October 24, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3064918/elon-musk-wants-to-build-a-martian-colony-out-of-geodesic-domes. “where employees can think”: The Spheres, https://www.seattlespheres.com (accessed January 2021). “Ideally,” Brand said: Stewart Brand, “The Clock and Library Projects,” https://longnow.org/about (accessed January 2021).

It held staff meditation sessions in a dome and announced a “future cities initiative” by the Israeli designer and artist Dror Benshetrit, who consulted on redeveloping the Montreal Biosphere, but a fumbled public offering resulted in the ouster of Neumann, who had warned his employees, “The universe does not allow waste.” As Jaron Lanier noted, during his lifetime, Fuller had been famous “maybe in the way of a figure like Elon Musk.” Fuller and Musk both promoted themselves as outsiders who disrupted established fields—including the automotive industry—and presented a dream of innovation to counter the inability of existing systems to effect change. Both were also contemptuous of critics, obsessed with their press coverage, willing to pull projections out of thin air, and eager to portray themselves as martyrs, although Fuller concealed his flaws more capably than Musk, who has occasionally spoken of using geodesic domes on Mars.


pages: 158 words: 46,353

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

So-called quantum computing, if fully realized, will make cryptography impossible, allowing a quantum computer to break any code. Imagine a world, especially a military one, in which nothing can be kept secret. The enormous size and complexity of software systems will make understanding them difficult and may lead to unsafe assumptions about their provenance. Such luminaries as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have sounded alarm bells over the continuing push for artificial intelligence. While the media often raises fears of apocalyptic scenarios with intelligent robots taking over the world, their concerns also include the more prosaic. They, too, worry about artificial intelligence systems going beyond humans’ ability to control, but also include in their concerns such issues as how to determine system trustworthiness, and how to detect errors in algorithms.


pages: 170 words: 46,126

The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams by Tommy Baker

Cal Newport, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs

For us, I’d been in the union for ten years and been slugging it out, and Ben for eleven years.” Behind every overnight success are years of focused effort, struggle, challenge, and rejection. The myth of overnight success plays well in a highlight-reel culture, yet when one pulls back the curtain, it’s easy to see the 1% Rule in effect. Whether it’s Elon Musk, Peyton Manning, Gary Vaynerchuk, or your favorite band, once you look deeper, you realize they were all overnight successes of a certain kind: To achieve overnight success will require a decade of consistency. It’s incredibly easy to take a snapshot out of context. For example, take your favorite musician.


pages: 153 words: 45,721

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow by Dominica Degrandis, Tonianne Demaria

cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, loose coupling, microservices, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, transaction costs, two-pizza team

While many of our business role models are in fact driven by a seemingly superhuman work ethic supported by 100+ hour work weeks, they nevertheless have an advantage over us mere mortals. While the number of minutes available to us each day might be the same, control over what we do with those hours differs significantly. When Elon Musk is faced with too much work-in- progress (WIP), he has the authority to delegate, deprioritize, or simply say no. When variation rears its head and a well-thought- out strategic plan no longer aligns with the organization’s needs, Sheryl Sandberg has the ability to switch gears. And when Jeff Bezos is confronted with conflicting priorities, it is likewise doubtful he needs to seek direction via a convoluted bureaucracy to gain clarity over which course to follow.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

It is partly because of this technological feasibility that the billionaire-geoengineer is a well-worn trope of speculation: within the geoclique, it is called the ‘Greenfinger’ scenario, an allusion to James Bond introduced, I think, by David Victor, a political scientist now at the University of California, San Diego. After all, billionaires building spaceships – either very publicly, as Richard Branson does with Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk does with SpaceX, or more privately, as Jeff Bezos does with Blue Origin – is almost a commonplace. In its pure form – a billionaire who tries to take over the climate more or less by him or herself – I think the Greenfinger idea is highly implausible. Consider the case of Bill Gates (as many do, in this regard).

But the fact that Bond villains don’t exist does not mean that rich people do not seek out technological interventions that will leverage their wealth in world-changing ways. By funding vaccination programmes, Bill and Melinda Gates have played a part in saving millions of people; programmes they have paid for are saving lives on a scale similar to that on which Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong brought death, an accomplishment which strikes me as utterly remarkable. Elon Musk really does intend to make human space travel much cheaper and thus more routine – which I think he may well achieve – and sincerely believes that by doing so he will change the course of history. The idea of a Greenfinger motivated by a particular conception of the greater good rather than megalomania, and operating from and on behalf of a small group of sovereign states that is aiming only for a modest effect, is not something to dismiss out of hand.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Together, the Tapscotts have achieved this comprehensively and in doing so have captured the excitement, the potential, and the importance of this topic to everyone.” —Blythe Masters, CEO, Digital Asset Holdings “This is a book with the predictive quality of Orwell’s 1984 and the vision of Elon Musk. Read it or become extinct.” —Tim Draper, Founder, Draper Associates, DFJ, and Draper University “Blockchain is a radical technological wave and, as he has done so often, Tapscott is out there, now with son Alex, surfing at dawn. It’s quite a ride.” —Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School “If you work in business or government, you need to understand the blockchain revolution.

Once machines have intelligence and the ability to learn, how quickly will they become autonomous? Will military drones and robots, for example, decide to turn on civilians? According to researchers in AI, we’re only years, not decades, away from the realization of such weapons. In July 2015, a large group of scientists and researchers, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak, issued an open letter calling for a ban on the development of autonomous offensive weapons beyond meaningful human control.53 “The nightmare headline for me is, ‘100,000 Refrigerators Attack Bank of America,’” said Vint Cerf, widely regarded as the father of the Internet.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Degrees of separation are calculated as the average path lengths or number of hops between any two people in six different social media networks and whether those social media networks used friend-suggestion algorithms to recommend new connections. The Hype Loop (the Process) A narrative playing out in the cultural zeitgeist today demonizes technology as if it’s designed, in some way, to disrupt and destroy us. Elon Musk has warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence, claiming that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” The idea that robots are coming to “steal our jobs” implies a seemingly conscious intent on the part of technology to invade and pillage our economy. The U.S. Congress has blamed Facebook for the erosion of American democracy.

The Structure of the Twitter Follow Graph,” in Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (New York: ACM, 2014), 493–98. The average path lengths between people: Data compiled from and compared across Ugander et al., “Anatomy of Facebook Social Graph,” and Myers et al., “Information Network or Social Network?” “AI is a fundamental risk”: “Elon Musk Talks Cars—and Humanity’s Fate—with Governors,” CNBC, July 17, 2017. Experts have testified that bots: Clint Watts, testimony before U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, March 30, 2017, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/​sites/​default/​files/​documents/​os-cwatts-033017.pdf. rooted in and supported by research: Wanda J.


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

He often managed on only a few hours’ sleep a night. Yet he never seemed tired. He was endlessly energetic, characterized by an unflagging drive. His head was a fountain of ideas constantly overflowing. Many were not terribly well thought out, nor did they receive much follow-up. He told staff he was eager to collaborate with Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, on his plans for Mars, which Musk aspired to travel to and settle. Later, in 2017, Neumann ended up securing a meeting with the entrepreneur. After waiting for more than two hours for an audience at SpaceX’s headquarters in Los Angeles, Neumann spent his fifteen minutes pitching Musk on how he wanted to build a community on Mars—when Musk’s space transport firm eventually got there.

Through the first half of 2020, the electric car manufacturer Tesla—led by an eccentric, unpredictable founder known for overpromising and exciting investors—surged in value as backers saw near-infinite potential in its future. Little had changed in its business, but it started a climb that made it worth more than two times the valuation of Toyota, despite producing a fraction of the cars. CEO Elon Musk would become the richest person on the planet by the beginning of 2021. That rise had a ripple effect. In the summer of 2020, Nikola Corporation, a six-year-old electric truck company founded by a charismatic entrepreneur named Trevor Milton, went public and its stock soared. Even though Nikola wasn’t yet manufacturing trucks, Milton inspired investors by painting a picture of how its design would remake the whole enormous trucking sector.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

If you look at the current head coaches in the NBA or NFL, the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of them usually have common roots in apprenticing with 20% of the head coaches of the past generation. Technology startups have started to develop “mafias,” or groups of successful entrepreneurs that can trace their roots back to a common source. Elon Musk (Currently of SpaceX and Tesla), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Peter Thiel (Palantir) all worked together at PayPal.42 Trajectory Theory—A Guide to Hiring an Apprentice (or Getting Hired) Three-time New York Times bestselling author Tucker Max has hired a lot of people to work in an apprentice-type position, and they’ve almost always gone on to be successful in future projects and companies.


pages: 173 words: 53,564

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

And by tweaking and expanding it, we could make it possible for all American families to make ends meet. 4 The Precariat Over the past couple years, many technology and business leaders have come to believe we need a guaranteed income because of the threat of artificial intelligence. Elon Musk and Richard Branson, for instance, believe that “intelligent” machines may soon create a new era of mass unemployment. In that world, they argue, there will be no choice but to help people meet their basic needs. These leaders aren’t contemplating a future of wholesale job destruction in order to be contrarian or controversial.


pages: 183 words: 54,731

Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John Lewis

3D printing, cosmic abundance, Elon Musk, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, zero-sum game

The rockets and space systems we thought reserved for the use of governments and soldiers have found new purposes, and new masters, people who want to use them to go beyond the purposes of science and state and turn them into tools that can be used for other goals, such as flying people and machines out to the frontier for fun and profit – oh, and to live. Weapons of mass destruction morph into both weapons of mass protection and heavenly chariots delivering untold wealth to Earth and Earth’s children. Well before the idea that an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos could build and own their own fleets of spaceships, in fact well before either of them had the idea they could own their own car, John Lewis was exploring the solar system from his office at MIT and then the University of Arizona, and coming to the realization that the solar system was not some neatly arranged set of planets with a well-placed band of asteroids in its middle, but was full of errant chunks of rock and ice flying in all directions and wreaking havoc on these celestial objects in often unpredictable and sometimes incredibly spectacular ways.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

. • I doubt that it was super sexy selling books to nerds online when Jeff Bezos and Amazon started 24 Page 24 Svane c01.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:14 P.M. The Honeymoon their adventure back in 1994. But that “bookstore” is currently changing the world of commerce. • You can’t really call space rockets boring, but with the determined goal of making space flight affordable— democratizing it—suddenly Elon Musk is making the industry sexy again. All of these show us: boring is sexy. Or rather, sexy is not only about colored feathers, appearance, and glamour. Remember, Marilyn Monroe did marry Arthur Miller. We spent six months sketching out this product while we kept our consulting gigs on the side. It wasn’t intense work.


pages: 222 words: 54,506

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

At that time, the cost of developing this first stage was estimated at $30 million. Crazy? It’s not the first time that adjective has been applied to Bezos as an epithet. But in the age of scaled-back NASA budgets and missions, Bezos is one of a few super-rich entrepreneurs (including Sergey Brin from Google, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, and Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airways) who are pursuing or funding private alternatives to NASA. Blue Origin is also filled with former NASA engineers and other space scientists. The company’s slogan is the Latin phrase “Gradatim Fero-citer,” which may be translated as “Step by Step, Courageously.”


She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

Urashima, Tadasu, Sadaki Asakuma, Fiame Leo, Kenji Fukuda, Michael Messer, and Olav T. Oftedal. 2012. “The Predominance of Type I Oligosaccharides Is a Feature Specific to Human Breast Milk.” Advances in Nutrition 3:473S–482S. Urban, Tim. 2015. “My Visit with Elon Musk at SpaceX.” Business Insider, May 11. http://www.businessinsider.com/my-visit-with-elon-musk-at-spacex-2015-5 (accessed March 22, 2017). US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health. 2017. “Asthma and Hispanic Americans.” http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=4&lvlid=60 (accessed August 24, 2017). US Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 1944.

“I want to understand the uses and implications of this amazing technology,” the pig-faced Hitler told her. Doudna woke up with her heart pattering. What, she asked herself, have we done? * * * — Doudna was hardly the only person getting visits from Hitler. In 2015, a reporter asked the inventor Elon Musk if he was considering getting into the business of reprogramming DNA. Musk is the sort of entrepreneur who blithely sets out to replace the world’s fleet of gas-powered cars with electric ones while simultaneously building the first recyclable rockets. But gene editing gave him pause. “How do you avoid the Hitler Problem?”


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Entrepreneurs think that devices could go beyond simply replacing lost functions: they dream of connecting the brain directly to computers and to the internet to give it entirely new functions that are beyond human beings’ abilities today. Imagine Google searches that deliver their result to the brain before the question is consciously asked; or direct, brain-to-brain communication, in which messages are sent using thought alone. Elon Musk, with his new company Neuralink, and Bryan Johnson, with a slightly older company called Kernel, are leading the charge. For the time being, the function of the brain is not understood in enough detail to read and write information at this level of linguistic communication. But for the optimists of Silicon Valley, avid readers of science-fiction novels in which such devices are commonplace, it is only a matter of time.


pages: 177 words: 56,657

Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone

Albert Einstein, benefit corporation, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, fear of failure, job-hopping, Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, white picket fence

There can be no choices and no options. Yes, victory comes at a price—so does settling. Sure, you might be totally and completely insane. But you’re not going to stop. Because history shows that only the obsessed make it—people like Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Howard Schultz, Oprah, Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Christopher Columbus, Charlie Chaplin, Mozart, Michelangelo, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Jay Z, Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and on and on. There is no shortage of these people, and like them or hate them, admire them or detest them, we all know them!


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

He had planned to complete his ride in Boston but, instead, it was ingloriously aborted in Connecticut where the Tesla ran out of power and was towed away on the back of a truck. He photographed the power-sapped Tesla and reported having had a very bad experience in his Times review. Like Lutz, Elon Musk, Tesla founder and CEO, chose to blog his side of the story. Although Lutz had to count on his own credibility and persuasive abilities when writing his blog, Musk had a credible eyewitness to everything that happened between Broder and the Tesla. Like most luxury cars today, the Tesla collects and stores data on where it has been and what happened to it in a little-known device called an Event Data Recorder (EDR].


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

He wants to ‘play the game of business as if people matter’.4 To work out how to do that, O’Reilly variously cites Jonathan Hall (an economist at Uber), Professor Andrei Haigu (in the Harvard Business Review), Simon Rothmans (venture capitalist), Tom Perez (secretary of labor under Obama), Steven Hill (of the Google-backed New America think tank), and Jose Alvarez (ex-CEO). His positive examples of social change are those luminaries of human emancipation, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.5 His argument represents, in short, the ideas of the bleeding-heart ruling class. His analysis of working conditions at a global platform like Uber begins with a very specific element of US employment law: that when employees work for over 30 hours a week, employers have a responsibility to pay a full-time benefits package.


Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

He typically has detailed plans for how things should be and is capable of effecting that change. On the other hand, he has very little interest in how things get done to implement his plan as long as it does. Real-world examples include Fidel Castro, Gandhi, and Joseph Stalin. In technology, we see people like Julian Assange, Elon Musk, and in particular Steve Jobs who was famous for being able to bend reality to his view. The archetypal revolutionary is the turnaround CEO who comes in with a lot of ideas about how things should be and little interest or time to understand how they are. In general, this type is often in a senior management position.


pages: 192 words: 59,234

Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by Tim S. Grover, Shari Wenk

COVID-19, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, TikTok

I’m not just talking about athletes here, I’m talking about innovators and groundbreakers in business, entertainment, science, technology, education, medicine, parenting… every walk of life. Bill Gates personally checking every line of code for the first five years of Microsoft’s existence. Jeff Bezos shipping books out of his garage. Sara Blakely cutting the feet off her pantyhose. Elon Musk gazing up at Mars. They weren’t afraid to think originally, they weren’t worried about what others would think about their “crazy” ideas. That whole BS about thinking outside the box is just that: BS. Winners don’t see the box. They see possibilities. They use their own decisions, successes, and failures as a springboard to elevate their thinking and results.


pages: 276 words: 59,165

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

I can see great similarities between the disruption that high-tech brought to business and the disruption that impact is bringing today. I know we will see impact entrepreneurs that match the scale of the tech entrepreneurs’ ambition and success, but surpass them in terms of the positive impact they have on the planet. To date, the best-known impact entrepreneur is Elon Musk. For all his idiosyncrasies and the challenges Tesla, his high-end electric car company, has faced, Musk has single-handedly changed the automobile industry for the better. According to Tesla’s most recent impact report, the company has sold more than 550,000 electric vehicles, which have driven more than 10 billion miles between them.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

As an aside, I must note that there were plenty of email payment services springing up around that time too. Does anyone remember Citibank’s c2it service, which was shuttered in 2003, or Yahoo!’s PayDirect, which launched at the same time?4 Or, indeed, eBay’s Billpoint service? In 2000, Confinity merged with Elon Musk’s online banking start-up X.com, which soon terminated other operations to focus on its money-transfer business. The company, at that point renamed PayPal, went public in 2002 and was soon acquired by eBay (at a time when around a quarter of eBay auctions were paid for via PayPal). In 2005, by which time 1 in 10 British people had a PayPal account, the company acquired VeriSign.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

Unfortunately, it remained an idea and I never saw him again. Panavision continued to sink and abandoned its 3D camera project. I am not bitter. I wish James the absolute best and I hope he is well—after all, I note with a certain concern that he has not released a movie since he last met me. Speaking of tall and rich men, I introduced Elon Musk at one of our research retreats at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he spoke twice. It was probably 2011, because he was about to launch the Tesla Model S and the second version of the Falcon 9 rocket, and he was a lot thinner. Whether it is the job or the weed, I would not know since I am neither working nor smoking pot.


Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Simple changes to market microstructure can often lead to significant changes in your P&L and can turn profitable strategies into duds. Now, let’s move to the next step. In Chapter 9, I will tell you how I stay in touch with the narrative, and how that helps me forecast future moves and come up with trade ideas. 101. If you are a huge Elon Musk fan or if you really can’t stand him for some reason, don’t trade TSLA. You need to be equally prepared to trade a stock from the long or short side or you should not be participating. If you Stan for Elon, trading TSLA is like a Real Madrid fan betting on a Real Madrid / Barcelona game. Do you think he’s going to make an unbiased bet on the team he thinks has the best chance of winning?

Then, suddenly, the new supply runs into falling demand and prices whoosh lower. Furthermore, depending on the market, the higher price can also have other macroeconomic impacts that will lead to lower prices in the future. For example, a rise in the euro might lead to more accommodative ECB policy or a huge ramp up in Tesla stock might spur Elon Musk to sell stock in a secondary offering. Be sure to understand what price levels in your market might lead to major or non-linear changes in supply or demand. If you are expert in your market and keenly attuned to its driving narrative, you will recognize moments when the story has changed but price is not yet paying attention.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

However, they don’t fully capture the values or design principles that researchers and tech companies should articulate when building computers, robots, or software tools in the first place. Nor do they speak about the capabilities humans must bring into this next era when AI and machine learning will drive ever-larger parts of our economy. Asimov was not alone in contemplating the risks. Elon Musk, the inventor and entrepreneur, went so far as to say that if humans don’t add a digital layer of intelligence to their brains—high bandwidth between your cortex and your computer AI—we may all become little more than house cats. And computer pioneer Alan Kay quips, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”


pages: 204 words: 66,619

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking

It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.” Sir James Dyson, Founder of Dyson Company “The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.” Elon Musk, CEO & CTO of Tesla CEO & Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors Engineering is old; as old as human civilisation itself. It was born out of the need of humans to modify their environment to provide their basic needs such as food, shelter and security. It has always been largely motivated by the human desire to have a better, easier and more comfortable life.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

He was able to maintain his previous wage and live the flexible “vacation on a moment’s notice” lifestyle that had lured him in the first place. And yet, the last time I talked with him, in July of 2016, he was about to sign an employment contract with Silicon Valley’s golden child, SpaceX, a Los Angeles–based startup created by Elon Musk that builds rockets and spacecraft. It was a surprise to both of us. “It’s the only company I would want to work for instead of freelancing,” Curtis said. “It’s pretty much a dream company.” On a live video feed in 2013, he’d watched SpaceX test its first reusable rocket, Grasshopper, and he’d kept tabs on its progress ever since.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

The alphabet was one of humanity’s greatest innovations, the sort of everlasting achievement that the company intends to foment again and again. Bluster pours forth from the tech elite, and much of the world tends to look at their lengthy inventory of grandiose projects as vanity. If Jeff Bezos wants to launch rockets into space, then Elon Musk will do him one better and colonize Mars. But Silicon Valley is hardly distinguished by the hegemonic egos of its leaders, especially relative to finance or media. What makes Big Tech different is that it pursues these projects with a theological sense of conviction—which makes its efforts both wondrous and dangerous.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

And with all the dramatic improvements we’re seeing in manufacturing and 3D printing, maybe a whole new crop of automobile start-ups will be able to batch-print their own vehicles in Chinese factories (just like cell phones!), right? Wrong. As it turns out, it is really hard to build a safe, great car at scale. Just ask Elon Musk. Or Apple. Or Google. SILICON VALLEY VERSUS DETROIT? BET ON DETROIT As it turns out, the Big Three have some distinct institutional advantages over Silicon Valley when it comes to building the future of the automobile industry. First, they have the distribution. The vast dealer networks these companies operate are commanding assets.


The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth

23andMe, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, Alvin Roth, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, general-purpose programming language, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, ImageNet competition, Lyft, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, p-value, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, personalized medicine, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, short selling, sorting algorithm, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, telemarketer, Turing machine, two-sided market, Vilfredo Pareto

If you extrapolate a little from the kinds of technology we have today to the kinds we might have in a hundred years, you might even arrive at the thought that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. And many high-profile people have. Stephen Hawking said that superintelligent AI “could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk views artificial intelligence as “our greatest existential threat.” And Google DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg has said that he thinks that artificial intelligence poses “the number one risk for this century.” In fact, when Google negotiated the purchase of DeepMind in 2014 for $400 million, one of the conditions of the sale was that Google would set up an AI ethics board.


pages: 241 words: 70,307

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

But, at the same time, they do provide us with valuable advice, since they outline how quickly our human desire to progress at any cost can escalate quickly into submission to a technology system that strips away our true human identity. Moreover, living a virtual life may not be a fantasy for that much longer. For example, Neuralink, a start-up founded by Elon Musk, is currently working on developing a brain-machine interface where human and AI can meet. On the surface, this does not need to be a problem, as long as AI is only used to augment human capabilities and the reality established is human. The point I want to emphasize here, however, is that humans need to have a strong moral compass in their search to continuously improve themselves with new technology.


Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

You can see how it turned out not to be an achievable goal in the short term as few were in a position to believe they could win and the risks and costs were deemed to be large. EXHIBIT 6.10 Source: Jonathan Bays, Tony Goland, and Joe Newsum, “Using Prizes to Spur Innovation,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009. Elon Musk's Hyperloop project is an attempt to rapidly advance transportation technology. The Hyperloop is a pod transportation system currently under development, designed to transport people over long distances at astonishing, near supersonic speeds. Given its clear, well‐defined goal, and a large, diverse population of problem solvers, many of whom are students willing to accept the risk and hungry for the experience, the SpaceX Hyperloop competition is a great example to test the power of crowdsourcing.


pages: 234 words: 63,844

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein by James Patterson, John Connolly, Tim Malloy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, corporate raider, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Murray Gell-Mann, Ponzi scheme, Stephen Hawking, WikiLeaks

It was one of the most romantic, generous gestures that Jeffrey Epstein had ever made. CHAPTER 61 Al Seckel: January 2012 Epstein’s partner in the Mindshift conference, a man named Al Seckel, was known for throwing fabulous parties that were said to have included the actor Dudley Moore, magician James “the Amazing” Randi, and future Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, as well as many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein would court in the course of his own climb up the social ladder. In certain Los Angeles circles, Al Seckel was a very good man to know. But, like Jeffrey Epstein, Seckel was a sort of illusionist. According to Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist who knew Seckel and followed his career for fifteen years, Seckel made his money by selling rare books and papers, often through his social and academic connections.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

Dow Jones & Company, October 25, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency-and-blunt-firings-unsettle-the-ranks-1540497174?mod=hp_lead_pos4. Ideas at Tesla come from the top: Duhigg, Charles. “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell.” Wired. Condé Nast, December 13, 2008. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory. Uber’s culture is famously troubled: Isaac, Mike. Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. CHAPTER 1: INSIDE JEFF BEZOS’S CULTURE OF INVENTION Bezos drives Amazon’s inventive culture through fourteen leadership principles: “Leadership Principles.”


pages: 205 words: 71,872

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

There was an uproar, and the #DeleteUber hashtag began to trend on Twitter. In the early days of #DeleteUber, an estimated 200,000 users deleted their accounts—a number that continued to grow as Twitter and the media covered Uber’s connections to the Trump administration. Alongside other CEOs like Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick had joined Trump’s economic advisory council shortly after the election; now, in light of the Muslim ban, Uber’s employees and customers were pressuring him to resign. Faced with growing employee unrest and unhappy users, Kalanick resigned from the council. #DeleteUber stopped trending.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Los Angeles alone has invested billions of dollars in recent years in constructing the Los Angeles Metro Rail system, which has less than a third of the ridership of smaller mass transit systems in much smaller cities like Budapest, Milan, Busan, Montreal, or Stockholm. Concurrently, major political stakeholders in American mass transit are relentlessly focused on the concept of innovation, with New York governor Andrew Cuomo announcing a flashy “genius” contest to improve transit. Elon Musk, when not colonizing Mars or trying to revolutionize the car industry, muses publicly about totally reworking American urban transportation. There’s something natural about this. The United States is bad at mass transit but good at innovation, so the idea that we need to apply some innovation to our transit problem has some appeal.


pages: 209 words: 64,635

For the Love of Autism: Stories of Love, Awareness and Acceptance on the Spectrum by Tamika Lechee Morales

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Hangouts, neurotypical, stem cell, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, TikTok

You have helped me to laser focus on my key interests of sports and theater, which has helped me turn some of those interests into a career. And autism, you may not know this, but you’ve even become more well-known now than when I was a kid. Dan Aykroyd once mentioned you and said that you, in part, made him successful as an actor. Other celebrities, like Elon Musk, Wentworth Miller, Anthony Hopkins, Daryl Hannah, and Susan Boyle, also have mentioned they are autistic, too. There are even people like Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Mozart rumored to be autistic as well. As we learn more about you, I’m excited for our society to try and find more ways to help autistics find more of the strengths it can bring while working with those who have additional needs and may need lifetime care.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

As one tech analyst commented: ‘The rise in unprofitable IPOs reflects the general preference in both public and private markets for growth over profitability.’18 Silicon Valley’s unicorns attracted higher valuations at each funding round, even as losses outpaced sales. A fortunate few, such as Uber and Lyft, made it to the public markets, where they jostled for attention with another company that had long promised, or rather over-promised, the imminent arrival of self-driving cars. In 2017, the market capitalization of Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. accelerated past General Motors.19 Three years later, Tesla was valued at more than Toyota, even though the Japanese car maker produced over twenty times as many vehicles. For this valuation to hold, Musk would have to produce millions more cars every year, and to achieve that Tesla required a great deal of investment.

Hayek concluded his speech with a warning: The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.fn6 Postscript The World Turned Upside Down As long as other countries are receiving the benefits of Negative Rates, the US should accept the “GIFT”. Big numbers! Donald Trump tweet, May 2020 Actually, doesn’t feel quite right. Elon Musk, March 2021 (on turning down an offer of $1.1 million for a nonfungible token of a tweet) Towards the end of 2019, Mervyn King gave a speech in which he pointed out that global debt relative to GDP was much higher than in 2008. High levels of debt and elevated uncertainty were depressing consumption, said the former Governor of the Bank of England.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

A singularity, technically speaking, is the point at which a function takes an infinite value, such as what happens to space and time at the center of a black hole. What happens after a technological singularity? According to Kurzweil we enter a period of blissful transhumanism, in which the line between human and machine becomes indistinguishable, and the superintelligences that roam the planet solve all of mankind’s problems. Others—Elon Musk, Paypal alum and the inventor behind Tesla Motors, for one—believe the machines will rightly see humans as a kind of metastasizing cancer infecting the planet, and zap Homo sapiens out of existence. We encourage a broader view: Maybe AI’s good, maybe it’s bad. Or just maybe that’s beside the point when measured against the other threats and positive outcomes that might develop in the coming century.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

“We need a program that can provide a temporary cash cushion,” they write, “because no matter what strategies we implement, work … will sometimes fail.”4 In the face of fears that automation promises a jobless future, a cash assistance plan, the universal basic income (UBI) is enjoying a resurgence. Experiments in UBI are currently being conducted in Finland and in Ontario, Canada. In May 2017, Hawaii adopted a bill declaring that “all families … deserve basic financial security” and began to explore instituting a UBI. High-tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, believe that a UBI will provide a cushion allowing everyone to innovate and try new ideas. UBI plans usually offer between $8,000 and $12,000 a year. In principle, a UBI would be truly universal—offered to every citizen—but in political practice, guaranteed adequate income programs tend to be offered to those who are unemployed or who fall below a minimum income line.


pages: 237 words: 76,486

Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account From Curiosity's Chief Engineer by Rob Manning, William L. Simon

Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong

This would not only put MSL above the launch vehicle’s lift capability, but we would also need to develop a whole new technology of flying our rocket engines backward supersonically against the flow, a technique that few had studied much less developed as a reliable way to land on Mars. (This technology, called “supersonic retropulsive decelerators,” is now being developed by NASA and by Elon Musk’s Space-X team.) Mike understood and quickly gave up his objections to the parachute. There are few things more satisfying than talking to a person who listens carefully to reasoning, weighs what you said, and is willing to change his mind on the spot if you’ve succeeded in convincing him. We were off to a good start.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

But this doesn’t translate, since (a) clearheaded McLaughlin was a speechwriter for Nixon, (b) one of the alleged liberals is often billionaire media mogul Mort Zuckerman, and (c) Pat Buchanan is on almost every single episode (and it would be impossible to find a public figure who’s as liberal as Buchanan is conservative, unless they suddenly hired Lena Dunham or Jello Biafra). To say The McLaughlin Group sometimes traffics in “outdated modes of thinking” is a little like saying Elon Musk sometimes “expresses interest in the future.” But this roundtable forces me to think about things I normally ignore—and not so much about politics, but about the human relationship to time. The McLaughlin Group pre-tapes its episodes on Friday afternoon. But they tape the show that runs during Thanksgiving weekend much further in advance, which means they have to ignore pressing current events (since something critical or catastrophic could transpire in the days between the taping and the broadcast).


pages: 265 words: 77,084

Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure by Alex Honnold, David Roberts

carbon footprint, do what you love, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, income inequality, risk tolerance, short squeeze, side project, trade route

Long before I started the Honnold Foundation, when people asked me which nonclimbers I most admired, I cited guys like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Billionaires who used their riches to address problems of environmental degradation and income inequality, and to provide educational opportunities to the disadvantaged. Today I’d add Elon Musk to the list—a business magnate and engineer who’s reinventing the world. With my Honnold Foundation, what I really hope to do in the coming years is to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in the world in a way that helps the environment. To support projects that both help the earth and help lift people out of poverty.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

Last year it emerged that Amazon paid £7.4 million in corporation tax despite having a UK turnover of £1.46 billion. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, says he sells a billion dollars’ worth of Amazon stock each year in order to fund his Blue Origin rocket firm. Bezos is engaged in a private race with another US tycoon, Elon Musk, to be the first to commercialise space travel. If Leicestershire wonders where the money for its NHS went, the answer is that some of it is on its way to Mars. Charlesworth, who works for the Health Foundation, doesn’t believe there’s a political appetite for radical changes to the way the NHS is funded, even among Conservatives.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

There was inevitably going to be a few decades where the costs of remaking our electrical lives would be prohibitive for most consumers, and hence would have to be subsidized by something like tax incentives. A lot of VCs talked a good game about cleantech, but most of the investments were lower-capital plays that only nibbled at the core problems, like a software system for better routing electricity around large retail chains. A glaring exception was Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal and an immigrant from South Africa. While his fel ow PayPal alums plowed their money back into the Web 2.0 world—funding or starting companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Slide, and Yelp—Musk built a rocket company cal ed SpaceX, a solar panel company cal ed SolarCity, and an electric car company cal ed Tesla.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

But what’s smallish for cars is still massive for everyone else. The Tesla factory occupies part of a building nearly a mile long. It will employ more than one thousand people. It is already the biggest factory in Silicon Valley. If you’ve seen the movie Iron Man, you’ll have a feel for it. The film’s protagonist, Tony Stark, was modeled after Tesla founder Elon Musk, and the factory looks like nothing more than the movie brought to life. Part of what makes this factory so innovative is that these are not your regular cars. For a start, the Model S, which the factory will start with, is pure electric, which means that it shares as much with a laptop computer as it does with a traditional gas-powered car.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

We unconsciously reject changes that might make our own jobs and lives more productive and fulfilled. But there is one group of people who do not seem to be hampered by this barrier. People who are often behind the success stories we have mentioned, and who hold out lessons for all of us. III Take a look at the following list of names: Estée Lauder, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Walt Disney and Sergey Brin. Can you see what they have in common? On the surface, they look like a list of famous entrepreneurs, people who have made an impact on American society. But dig a little deeper and you will note that they share a pattern with dozens of others, including Jerry Yang, Arianna Huffington and Peter Thiel, each of whom have helped to shape the modern economy of the United States.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Despite all the mystique surrounding deep learning and the dark web, our pop culture dystopias reveal a society well on its way to articulating a clear critique of what we don’t like about the Silicon Valley vision of the future.29 Our clarity is in part linked to the peculiar fact that many Silicon Valley visions about what technology should look like, and what our aspirations regarding technology should be, were originally located in science fiction. Star Trek fans say the smartphone is the real-life incarnation of the tricorder. Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who founded Tesla, named his two spaceport drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You in tribute to the “Culture” novels by the science fiction great Iain M. Banks. Many classic speculative fiction stories—for instance, The Winter Market, by William Gibson, and Ubik, by Phillip K.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

In order to escape, people retreat behind visors and gloves into a virtual-reality fantasy world. Is the world real or a simulation? The problem has vexed metaphysicians for millennia and many techno-optimists point to a future in which the virtual and real have become blurred. The tech magnate Elon Musk, a thought-leader in this area, claims that we may already be living in a simulation. ‘40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot,’ Musk told an audience at a tech conference. ‘Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year.

Duffy Toft, Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics, Boulder, Colo., 2012: Paradigm, pp. 252–67. 24. Coleman, ‘The changing face of Europe’, pp. 188–90. 25. Sophie Warnes and Anna Leach, ‘How a white baby can be born to a black mother – the statistics of skin colour’, Mirror, 1 September 2014. 26. Andrew Griffin, ‘Elon Musk: The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is “one in billions” ’, Independent, 2 June 2016. 27. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages, Stanford, Calif., 2001: University of California Press. 28. A. Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, 2016: Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press. 29.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Latterly, the idea has been taken up by Silicon Valley luminaries and venture capitalists, some putting up money for the cause, as we shall see. They include Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, Sam Altman, head of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, Albert Wenger, a prominent venture capitalist, Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, Elon Musk, founder of SolarCity, Tesla and SpaceX, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent. Some people have rejected basic income on the rather crude reasoning that support from this quarter means it must be wrong!


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Nigel Walton has dubbed “the Gang of Four” Internet companies—Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google—as fitting into the conglomerate model.74 Valley firms and investors, for example, now account for half of all venture funding invested in robotics; they also account for a whopping 90 percent of market cap in this sector. Facebook is making a similarly bold move, spending $2 billion on a startup that makes virtual reality gear.75 Others are turning to fields such as automobiles, which have been dominated in the past by older industrial firms. Elon Musk, billionaire co-founder of PayPal, founded Tesla, which has emerged as a dynamic player in the electric car market, with plans to build a $5 billion electric battery plant.76 Both Google and Apple have also made moves into the automotive market, focusing on driverless cars.77 In the long run, the most important drive by the Oligarchs is the one toward a field once dominated by one of the early Valley’s key contractors, NASA.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

So many of our largest anxieties have this retrospective, fictionalised quality to them, a dated twentieth-century kitschness that can make them feel somehow unbelievable. In circulation are Cold War pictures of Fifties children crouched under school desks. Scientists have just begun to show off broad-shouldered, humanoid robots that can do back-flips. It isn’t difficult to imagine them coolly armed and on a rampage. Elon Musk has called for a ban on ‘killer robots’, but isn’t this fear a back-flip to the storyline from Terminator? And, of course, the Nazis are regularly in the news again. These ironised, passé perils, which manage in their familiarity to feel both terrifyingly real and incredible, appear alongside omens of an unravelling reality.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Friedman thought that ends other than profit could be valuable for society, but in his mind those ends were better pursued through charity, nonprofit institutions, or government policy, as corporations could not perform those tasks efficiently or in accordance with their basic natures.14 Although I am a fan of Milton Friedman and I share his skepticism about socialist solutions, I think this article reflected significant ideological blinders. Goals other than simple profit maximization often end up boosting both business profits and social benefits. For example, the people who work at SpaceX, the Elon Musk company that launches satellites using advanced and sometimes revolutionary rocket technology, often really do believe in the dream of colonizing other planets and the stars. The founders of Skype and the managers who work there seem to believe in the ideal of bringing friends, families, and business associates together.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Joining a camp is like joining a team, and you’ll be taking on duties and contributing to the camp’s vision, whatever that might be. The experiences and entertainment that participants bring to life are almost beyond comprehension. Massive art installations, mutant vehicles, and elaborate parties celebrate the ideals and values of the community. You may find yourself. You may find God. You may run into Elon Musk (no relation). And the total cost to participate in this cashless economy where you’ll be totally reliant on the people around you? It could be $2,000 or more. Tickets for last year’s event sold out in just thirty-five minutes. This isn’t Lollapalooza. It’s not a few hours in the sun with your friends.


pages: 296 words: 86,610

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Garza appeared to have allegedly stolen money from both Fraser and his own company, led employees on, fired an employee he was having an affair with after his wife got jealous, had an estate sale before disappearing, sold his three cars, lied to others about how he obtained those cars (he said the Tesla was a “gift from Elon [Musk]” even though a purchase receipt was found in his email), and had trouble paying his business partners, among countless other improprieties. In most scenarios, this would be the end of a company. It would dissolve, everyone would go their separate ways and the customers would be left hoping the SEC investigation would get them some return on their investments.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

The easiest way to get attention To get more attention, invest more in a product, build something amazing and let the collective sentience take over. If we qualify in the awesomeness stakes, then our audience will do the talking for us. The old model of under-investing in the product we sell so we could afford the distribution and media costs is now being reversed. If the product is amazing, is advertising really needed? Just ask Elon Musk of Tesla Motors. Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley–based auto startup that makes all-electric vehicles. Tesla has no advertising, no agency and no chief marketing officer and it has no plans to run television advertisements any time soon. For 2012 and 2013 all of its production vehicles were presold.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Luxury-car makers like Infiniti, Mercedes, and Volvo are rolling out models that combine radar-assisted adaptive cruise control, which works even in stop-and-go traffic, with computerized steering systems that keep a car centered in its lane and brakes that slam themselves on in emergencies. Other manufacturers are rushing to introduce even more advanced controls. Tesla Motors, the electric car pioneer, is developing an automotive autopilot that “should be able to [handle] 90 percent of miles driven,” according to the company’s ambitious chief executive, Elon Musk.3 The arrival of Google’s self-driving car shakes up more than our conception of driving. It forces us to change our thinking about what computers and robots can and can’t do. Up until that fateful October day, it was taken for granted that many important skills lay beyond the reach of automation.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

CHAPTER SIX WE ARE ALL DYING Is it possible that in their voluntary communication and expression, in their blogging and social media practices, people are contributing to instead of contesting repressive forces? Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration Silicon Valley calculates with, and not against, the Apocalypse. Its ever-implicit slogan is: ‘Bring it on’ Geert Lovink, Social Media Abyss Humanity rocks! Elon Musk to Sam Harris, Twitter.com I. ‘I’m going to kill all Muslims,’ he shouted, as almost a dozen worshippers and pedestrians lay injured and, in one case, dead. Almost as quickly, he retreated to a more grimly realistic declaration: ‘I did my bit.’ Darren Osborne killed one Muslim, fifty-one-year-old Makram Ali.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Available at https://archive.org/stream/TheCallForAGlobalIslamicResistance-EnglishTranslationOfSomeKeyPartsAbuMusabAsSuri/TheCallForAGlobalIslamicResistanceSomeKeyParts_djvu.txt. 2Alex Hern, ‘New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators’, Guardian, 14 February 2019. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction. 3Paige Leskin, ‘The AI tech behind scare real celebrity “deepfakes” is being used to create completely fictitious faces, cats, and Airbnb listings’, Business Insider, 21 February 2019. Available at https://www.businessinsider.de/deepfake-tech-create-fictitious-faces-cats-airbnb-listings-2019-2?


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

The movie was stunningly prescient in understanding the greatest dilemma posed by artificial intelligence. In the film, the computer, HAL, chooses to kill its human masters so that it can proceed with its mission. In the end, the human, David Bowman, was able to outsmart the machine—but in real life it seems far more likely that the opposite would happen. That is why Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and a slew of other luminaries, usually optimistic about technology, have echoed the warnings of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom: they now worry that the development of general AI could threaten the human species itself. AI-powered computers are already black boxes. We know that they get to the right answer, but we don’t know how or why.


pages: 442 words: 85,640

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help by New Scientist, Helen Thomson

Abraham Wald, Black Lives Matter, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Flynn Effect, George Floyd, global pandemic, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lock screen, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, TED Talk, TikTok, ultra-processed food, Walter Mischel

Self-help manuals thrive on the desire of many people to get ahead in the world of work, providing all kinds of advice on the behaviours we need to adopt to maximise our potential and move onwards and upwards. The genre is often accompanied by a cult of celebrity. We love successful people, and often turn to the likes of Elon Musk, Richard Branson or Sheryl Sandberg to identify the secrets of success that we can apply to ourselves. Surely there must be some kind of rule, personality trait or way of working, we think, that we can emulate to achieve greatness? I hope I won’t be disappointing you at this stage if I say this isn’t that kind of book.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

This narrative relies heavily on the claim that technology will save us, in one way or another. For some, it is a simple matter of switching the global economy to renewable energy and electric cars; once we do that, there’s no reason we can’t keep growing for ever. After all, solar and wind power are getting cheaper all the time, and Elon Musk has shown that it’s possible to mass-produce storage batteries at a rapid clip. For others, it’s a matter of ‘negative-emissions technologies’ that will pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Still others bank on the hope of enormous geo-engineering schemes: everything from blocking out the sun to changing the chemistry of the oceans.


Know Thyself by Stephen M Fleming

Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, citation needed, computer vision, confounding variable, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, global pandemic, higher-order functions, index card, Jeff Bezos, l'esprit de l'escalier, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, patient HM, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, side project, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury

It was not long before other labs were able to decode these population codes and show that monkeys could be trained to control robot arms by modulating patterns of neural activity.16 Matt Nagle, a tetraplegic left unable to move after being attacked and stabbed, was one of the first patients to receive the benefit of this technology in 2002. After receiving an implant made by a commercial company, Cyberkinetics, he learned to move a computer cursor and change TV channels by thought alone. Companies such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink have recently promised to accelerate the development of such technologies by developing surgical robots that can integrate the implant with neural tissue in ways that would be near impossible for human surgeons. We might think that undergoing neurosurgery is a step too far to be able to control our AI devices.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

What would happen if you could iterate on your key experiences and workflows on a weekly basis? That’s the software mindset at work, beginning by digitizing your physical reality, and then applying the software mindset to problem-solving. Every kind of company can become a software company—all you have to do is internalize the value of rapid iteration. You don’t need to be Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey; you just need to believe in the power of iteration, and Darwin will be on your side. But of course, to iterate, you first need to build. You can’t iterate on something you’ve bought off the shelf. That’s why it’s Build vs. Die. Why Buying Software No Longer Makes Sense The problem is that, by definition, a one-size-fits-all piece of software doesn’t suit anyone very well.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

About 42 percent of billion-dollar startups in my study were capital light, about 28 percent were medium, and another 30 percent had high CapEx business models. 58 percent of billion-dollar startups had business models with medium or high capital requirements. Take a business like SpaceX. Elon Musk started the spacecraft company in 2002, after a botched attempt to buy refurbished rockets forced him to build his own. Musk had a vision of exploring Mars, growing plants on Martian soil, and eventually sending humans to live there. To do that, he needed rockets, and rockets cost millions of dollars.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

Traditionally, this scheme involved calling potential investors on the telephone. Today, it more often involves online trading message boards, social media groups, and spam emails. Whether it’s ringleaders on the Reddit finance forum r/WallStreetBets pushing retail investors to send GameStop’s price “to the moon” or Elon Musk tweeting about his bitcoin buys to millions of online followers, investors can use online communications to manipulate investor expectations and produce asset bubbles for their own profit (and others’ loss) with unprecedented speed and scale. The advent of online trading has made this particular hack even more profitable.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

— Welcome to PLATO. Turn the page to begin. Part I THE AUTOMATIC TEACHER Children seem to be such remarkable learners on their own, but then they enter school. —Seymour Papert There will always be naysayers. They’re the same people who go from saying it’s impossible to saying it’s inevitable. —Elon Musk Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission. —Peter Drucker 1 Praeceptor Ex Machina They sat in little wooden chairs in front of little wooden desks. Each desk had a hinged lid that opened to reveal a place to stash books, pencils, and papers.

Originally published in an unnamed 1951 children’s newspaper, then reprinted in the February 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Retrieved 2014-06-19 from http://visual-memory.co.uk/​daniel/​funtheyhad.html. PART I THE AUTOMATIC TEACHER Epigraph Drucker. Adventures, 255. Musk, E. “Elon Musk Interview at World Energy Innovation Forum,” May 4, 2016. Retrieved 2016-05-05 from https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=LllF6WsmzFU [this website is no longer active]. Papert, “Computer as Mudpie,” in Intelligent Schoolhouse. 1. Praeceptor ex Machina Interview Sources Author interviews: Eliot (2013), Gilpin (1997), Papert (1987), Skinner (1987).


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Instead of attempting to mitigate the destructive power of a now digitally charged corporation on the world by inserting a socially beneficial purpose, we may better look at the underlying financial premise: The corporation was invented to extract circulating currency from the economy and transfer it into profit. No stated social benefit is likely to compensate for the social destruction caused by the corporate model itself. In other words, even if someone like Elon Musk or Richard Branson creates an earth-shatteringly beneficial new transportation or energy technology, the corporation he creates to make and market it may itself cause more harm than it repairs. Yes, such corporations bail some water out of the sinking ship, but they are, themselves, the cause of the leak.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

In this way we are evolving, as Hayles and others have argued, in conjunction with our technical systems, slowly moving toward some consummation of the algorithmic love affair. The risk of disaster haunts us—the consummation might become a collision, an explosion of the kinds we linger on in stories like the Terminator series and through institutions like the Future of Life Institute (funded by Elon Musk and others to avert the Terminator AI apocalypse). But there is a more optimistic vision as well, one where humans engage in productive collaboration with computational systems: the Star Trek future, or a more ambitiously AI-fueled society like science fiction author Iain Banks’s Culture novels.


pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

He also met with his sources at other companies that had branched out: Jony Ive at Apple, and in probably the best, if aspirational, model for what Chesky is trying to do, Jeff Bezos, who had turned Amazon from an online bookseller into a mega-retailer. Chesky also says he took some advice from Elon Musk of Tesla. Musk cautioned him against becoming a company that gets so big that it enters what he calls the “administration era”: a phase of 10 or 20 percent growth that a company settles into after the “creation era” and then the “building era” and signals a mature business. “Airbnb will never be in an administration era,” Chesky vows.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

During the golden postwar era of research and development, two-thirds of research and development was publicly funded.10 Yet recent decades have seen corporate investment in high-risk technologies drastically decline.11 And with neoliberalism’s cutback in state expenditure, it is therefore unsurprising that technological change has diminished since the 1970s.12 In other words, it has been collective investment, not private investment, that has been the primary driver of technological development.13 High-risk inventions and new technologies are too risky for private capitalists to invest in; figures such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk slyly obscure their parasitical reliance on state-led developments.14 Likewise, multi-billion-dollar megascale projects are ultimately driven by non-economic goals that exceed any cost–benefit analysis. Projects of this scale and ambition are in fact hindered by market-based constraints, since a sober analysis of their viability in capitalist terms reveals them to be profoundly underwhelming.15 In addition, some social benefits (those offered by an Ebola vaccine, for example) are left unexplored because they have little profit potential, while in some areas (such as solar power and electric cars) capitalists can be seen actively impeding progress, lobbying governments to end green-energy subsidies and implementing laws that obstruct further development.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Dwight Eisenhower led the Allies to victory during World War II, and for that he was rightly celebrated. But if you don’t think he quietly enjoyed wearing an explosively beribboned uniform and a title like Supreme Allied Commander, you don’t know much about human nature. It is the same confidence—sometimes arrogance—that has allowed inventors and industrialists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk to press on in improbable ventures against extraordinary odds and create things that improve the world in big and meaningful ways, even if they make few friends doing it. Still, the heroic narcissist, the ingenious narcissist, the courageous narcissist are not the most common breeds. It’s the everyday, self-obsessed, pay-attention-to-me narcissist who is.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Likewise, after spending millions on developing its Android operating system, Google gave away the technology so it could be incorporated into the maximum number of devices, thus securing a vast market for its search engine and other digital services. Google’s open-source strategy paid off: Android is now available in over 1 billion devices, overtaking Apple’s iOS as the world-leading mobile operating system. In June 2014, Elon Musk, the iconoclastic founder of Tesla Motors, an electric car manufacturer, shocked the markets by announcing that he was giving away its core technology to all companies in the sector, including Tesla’s rivals. Musk’s decision is motivated by “enlightened self-interest”; by opening up Tesla’s patent portfolio he can more rapidly expand the global market for electric cars – which today account for only 1% of US auto sales – and make electric vehicles more affordable and cost-effective to maintain.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

., “Creating a Trusted Network for Homeland Security,” Markle Foundation, December 2, 2003, http://www.markle.org/down-loadable_assets/nstf_report2_overview.pdf. 2 See Saxby Chambliss, “Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9-11,” Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, A Report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Minority Leader, July 2002, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_rpt/hpsci_ths0702.html. 3 John Franke, “SAP CEO Heir-Apparent Resigns,” March 28, 2007, TechTarget.com, http://searchsap.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid21_gci1249379,00.html#. 4 This and other details are drawn from Daniel Roth, “Driven: Shai Agassi’s Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road,” Wired, August 18, 2008, http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all. 5 An article in The New Yorker indicated that Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk may be no fan of Better Place. “I think Shai is going to spend a lot of money and not have a lot to show for it,” Musk said of Agassi. Nonetheless, to hedge his bets, Musk was making Tesla’s Model S with an exchangeable battery. Tad Friend, “Plugged In,” The New Yorker, August 24, 2009. 6 See Roth, “Driven.” 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Clayton M.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The disrupters can win big. Christensen’s peers credited him with discovering a motive force in contemporary capitalism, a sunny successor to the “creative destruction” that Karl Marx, and then Joseph Schumpeter, observed in the industrial age. Thus we deify serial disrupters like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. But what about the disrupted—those who endure the effects? In centuries past, among St. Clare’s nuns and the Diggers, among the Rochdale Pioneers and the Knights of Labor, cooperative economies have tended to take hold on the receiving end of economic upheavals. What cooperators built then became infrastructure for the new order, more or less in tension with it, a lifeline that enabled people who would otherwise be left behind to survive and flourish.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

At Presby, the pharmacy robots are freeing the hospital from having to hire a blend of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians—in other words, they are enabling the hospital to not employ highly trained human beings who make somewhere between $80,000 and $110,000 a year, plus benefits. The pharmacy workers are not unionized, he added. Concern about the rise of the robots has become widespread, the stuff of trend pieces and hand-wringing remarks by famed techno-positiveists like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. (Gates, for instance, thought that governments could tax companies that use robots as a way to generate alternative funds for displaced human workers and pay for training in jobs that won’t be replaced.) However, I’ve been encountering robots less as a TED Talk abstraction than as the literal professional rivals to the middle-class people I have met for Squeezed, whose jobs may be, will be, or have been replaced by automation.


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

If a supermarket prefers to have humans at the check-out because of the social benefits they provide for both staff and customers, how long can they hold out against competitors who save money by replacing people with machines? Stephen Hawking described artificial intelligence as ‘either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity’4, whilst Elon Musk, one of the great entrepreneurs of the automated electric car, also looks on it as an it an existential threat. Whether or not the specific concern over AI is well founded, it is clear that technology as a whole has brought many good things over the millennia, but has now taken human-kind to a dangerous place and we need to handle it in a radically different way.


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

It’s true that logic is usually the best way to succeed in an argument, but if you want to succeed in life it is not necessarily all that useful; entrepreneurs are disproportionately valuable precisely because they are not confined to doing only those things that make sense to a committee. Interestingly, the likes of Steve Jobs, James Dyson, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel often seem certifiably bonkers; Henry Ford famously despised accountants – the Ford Motor Company was never audited while he had control of it. When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practise magic – or even to experiment with it.


pages: 257 words: 90,857

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson

23andMe, Airbnb, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, feminist movement, Firefox, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, retail therapy, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft

Only 18 PERCENT believed the heavier-set woman possessed leadership qualities. Worst of all, only 15.6 percent would even consider hiring the heaviest-looking woman. This was in 2017. Twenty seventeen! Not during the sixties. Not the fifties. But present day as hell. The same present day where Elon Musk watched the original Knight Rider and was like, “Car doors that open up to the sky like a yoga teacher going from a forward bend into mountain pose? #Goals,” and now we have Teslas. The same present day where you can use your bank’s mobile app to deposit a check while taking a dump. The same present day where everyone at Burger King collectively got on board with chicken being French fries?


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

For some outliers, a high plateau may well last through our eighties. For a select few, a high creative plateau can last longer than that, as the amazing story below illustrates. One indispensable component in both smartphones and the electric car is the lithium-ion battery that stores electricity. While you’ve heard of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, you probably have not heard of John Goodenough. At the relatively late age of fifty-seven, the University of Chicago–trained physicist co-invented the lithium-ion battery. Decades later, in 2017, Goodenough filed for a patent on a new battery that the New York Times reported was “so cheap, lightweight and safe, it would revolutionize electric cars and kill off petroleum-fueled vehicles.”


pages: 358 words: 93,969

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

The world’s top-selling plug-in hybrid is the General Motors Chevrolet Volt (and similar cars sold under a different brand). Total sales exceed 88,000. The Toyota Prius plug-in is the number two seller, with more than 65,000 sold. Another game changer in the recent history of electric vehicles has been the emergence of Tesla Motors. The company was founded in 2006 as a Silicon Valley startup by Elon Musk to build a high-end electric sports car with a single-charge range of over 200 miles. By 2014, Teslas had become California’s “largest auto industry employer,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Its market capitalization (the total value of all its stock) was more than half that of GM’s, despite having a small fraction of GM’s sales or revenues.


pages: 317 words: 89,825

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

In addition, Netflix garnered seventeen nominations at the Golden Globes, more than any other network or streaming service, and in 2019 earned the No. 1 spot as the most highly regarded company in America on the Reputation Institute’s annual national ranking. Employees love Netflix also. In a 2018 survey conducted by Hired (a dot-com marketplace for tech talent), tech workers rated Netflix as the No. 1 company they’d most like to work for, beating companies like Google (No. 2), Elon Musk’s Tesla (No. 3), and Apple (No. 6). In another 2018 “Happiest Employee” ranking, based on over five million anonymous reviews from workers at forty-five thousand large US companies compiled by the staff of Comparably, a compensation and careers site, Netflix was ranked as having the second-happiest employees of the many thousands ranked.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Futurists and “digital prophets,” like the elfin Australian David “Shingy” Shing, with his Vegas fountain of wild hair and Elton John glasses, were paid handsomely to interpret the transformative impact of the latest digital buzzword—big data, wearable, drone, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI)—and how it would change everything from the world’s economic order to pizza delivery. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were widely regarded as oracles of digitization, and we paid careful attention to their latest projections about the future it would form. The promise of the digital future constantly shaped our culture. From books and stories to TV shows and blockbuster movies, we sat and watched this future projected with awe: the holodeck, transporters, and touchscreen interface of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the hoverboards and giant TV screens of Back to the Future II, the dystopian predictions of Maximum Overdrive, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Lawnmower Man, and, my personal favorite, Demolition Man, where a cryogenically frozen supercop (played by Sylvester Stallone) is thawed out in the future to hunt down his thawed supervillain nemesis (played by Wesley Snipes) in a digital utopia where commercial jingles dominate popular music and toilets automatically clean your bum with three magical seashells.


pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The other jobs being offered are too exciting and lucrative to turn down.25 We need to bring prestige and romance to toiling with metals and to start companies that ask big questions, which only advances in material science can answer: for example, how to build a more fuel efficient car and commercialize space travel. Visionaries like Elon Musk, the cofounder of PayPal who was admitted into Stanford’s material scientist doctoral program, has started companies that ask just those questions, Tesla and Space-X. We need more of them. Simply, we need to create excitement around material science as we have for entrepreneurship. Now 70 percent of millennials want to work in more entrepreneurial endeavors outside a corporate structure.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

While old industry giants such as General Motors and General Electric were pandering for bailouts, companies such as Twitter, which counted their staff in the dozens, were being valued at many billions of dollars. Why invest in a blue-chip company struggling to adapt, when a small investment in a tech startup could make you rich overnight? Today, it is the titans of technology—Tesla’s Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick—who are the new gods of capitalism. Their stories of rapid success are the subjects of best-selling biographies and Hollywood movies. Silicon Valley has supplanted Wall Street as the destination for the best and brightest. The Economist reported that in 2014, one fifth of American business school graduates went to work in technology.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

The cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by more than 40 per cent in the past five years. This revolution has only just begun and has yet to play out. One of the leading innovators in energy storage is the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors. The company has adopted a radical approach to the problem of network lock-in.21 In June 2014, Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, announced that his company would effectively make their electric vehicle patents public. But this was not technological altruism. In order to be able to sell more of their electric vehicles Tesla simultaneously needs an entirely new vehicle-charging infrastructure. And for that to be built, the scale of the electric vehicle market needs to be greatly increased.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

It had nothing to do with their being more luckily born than you, unburdened by racial and gender discrimination and with greater access to seed capital from family and friends. It was that they were braver, bolder than you—some might say ruthless—willing to take on power, no matter the cost. Citing Travis Kalanick of Uber and Elon Musk of Tesla, he said, “They are most comfortable in the uncomfortable places. What that means is, they’re very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. And most of us want to just be kumbaya, everything’s great, I’m happy, you’re happy, we’re good, besties, BFFs—and it’s like, ‘No. Fuck that.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Even if we don’t sell you on all our ideas, we hope this book will open your mind to a new way of imagining the economy and politics. This challenging moment, when long-held assumptions are being overturned, is ripe for radical rethinking. 1 Property Is Monopoly CREATING A COMPETITIVE MARKET IN USES THROUGH PARTIAL COMMON OWNERSHIP As a child fascinated by Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, Alejandro Espinosa often pictured himself in the cab of the first supersonic train, sitting side by side with the conductor. It never occurred to him that these trains would have no conductors. Yet the topographic and economic maps displayed in the holographs he was peering at clashed even more powerfully with his childish dreams.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

As we increasingly find machines to do both blue- and white-collar jobs, that will spark discussion over the “purpose” of life. One potentially constructive way to think about it is that we must design a post-industrial existence that puts at its center the encouragement of human creativity, regardless of whether that creativity is monetarily rewarded. The idea is that everyone, not just big-dreaming entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or mass-marketed artists like Jeff Koons, Beyoncé, or J. K. Rowling, is defined by their capacity to create. This is not a new idea. Some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialists dreamed of a political economy in which communally owned technology freed human beings from the drudgery of work and allowed them to unleash their innate creative selves.


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

DeepMind was incorporated. The company needed money but initially Hassabis just couldn’t raise any capital. Pitching on a platform that they were going to play games and solve intelligence did not sound serious to most investors. A few, however, did see the vision. Among those who put money in right at the outset were Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Thiel had never invested outside Silicon Valley and tried to persuade Hassabis to relocate to the West Coast. A born-and-bred Londoner, Hassabis held his ground, insisting that there was more untapped talent in London that could be exploited. Hassabis remembers a crazy conversation he had with Thiel’s lawyer.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

We’re all suffering from a certain amount of malaise brought about by learned helplessness, new economic divides, and a sense that our real-world selves just can’t compete with the versions enhanced through AI. You seek solace in the form of brain-machine interfaces, which are high-throughput links that transfer data between your head and a computer. Although Facebook and Elon Musk announced a decade ago that they were working on special devices that would give us telepathy superpowers, Baidu was first with its “neuroenhancing headband.” Tucked away discretely inside a baseball cap or sun hat, the device can read and monitor your brainwave data and transmit feedback to enhance focus, create a sensation of feeling happy and content, or make you feel as if you have lots of energy.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

Companies will have to adapt to these new motivations that have employees using their day jobs to support causes, or risk losing top talent—and a huge customer base. CEOs today want to be seen as titans of business, but also as champions of social causes in their communities and among their peers. And increasingly, business people want to create companies that do good. Elon Musk could have sat on his PayPal fortune and never been heard from again. But he wanted to change the world for the better—and so we have Tesla and SolarCity and talks of colonizing Mars. Bill Gates could still be rolling out Windows updates, but instead we have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Our cultural heroes are increasingly scrappy disrupters, not corporate managers; the efficiencies of managerialism are seen as sand in the wheels of innovation; decades-loyal “company men” are being replaced by contingent and on-demand workers; and an amorphous “maker culture” is challenging long-standing norms about expertise. Old power managers are facing workplaces that can feel like they are full of wannabe Elon Musks, with vastly higher expectations and unending demands for feedback, with one eye on their next promotion and the other on their next job. Too often, this tension gets lampooned as Old Codger versus Young Turk. AARP versus ADD. But there is a deeper cultural shift playing out as old and new power values do battle at work.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

As Facebook’s stock slid, Zuckerberg remained out of sight. He finally emerged on March 21, with a Facebook post saying he was “working to understand exactly what happened” and saying there had been a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.” The hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter, with Elon Musk stoking the fire by tweeting that he’d deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla. As I prepared for my public testimonies, I listened to Cardi B, the American rapper who had released her debut album only a few weeks after the story broke. The record’s (purely coincidental) title, Invasion of Privacy, quickly prompted memes to circulate on social media with Mark Zuckerberg’s face appended to an edited version of the now-platinum album’s cover.


pages: 335 words: 98,847

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins

Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans

Lance, the outsized public schoolboy, also has several jobs, but never seems to do any of them. He mostly loafs about his cell, eating constantly and holding court. Today he recounts how he was given three and a half years over an unpaid bar tab at the Savoy. I’m shocked at the severity of the sentence, though I soon discover that he pretended to be Elon Musk and lived in a hotel suite for weeks. He was remanded in Wandsworth, and had to wait six months to get to court. Just before the sentencing, he gave all his possessions away on the wing, assuming that whatever sentence he received would be covered by the time already served. The hearing did not go well.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

“There’s all these fantastic things you can do at stage two, but it depends on a really good execution of stage one,” Collison recalled Thiel saying. Nonetheless, Thiel offered to invest. At the end of the summer, the Collisons completed a $2 million round raised from Thiel, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Elon Musk—another PayPal founder—and a few others. The Collisons did not return to school in the fall. Then, barely eighteen months after the two had begun working full-time on Stripe, the brothers—still only twenty-three and twenty-one—raised an $18 million round, led by Sequoia, at what was reported to be a $100 million valuation.30 • The only remaining member of Auctomatic’s original team of four who had not come back to YC or started another startup was Kulveer Taggar.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

As with Pursuit, the cost of a $10,000 training program will be funded by “career bonds,” in which investors pay up front for the program and the students turn over a percentage of their earnings for a fixed period to repay the investors if their salary exceeds a certain minimum. Even in an age of automation, there will be jobs available for those who have the training. As Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, said in explaining the limits of automation: “Humans are underrated.” Yamhill-area schools are trying to provide a ladder up for children, including vocational and technical apprenticeship options, but they’re finding it a challenge. The local economy is humming and the wine industry is helping to create jobs, but teachers are seeing more kids who have experienced trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (Random House, 2008). 5. https://businessmanagement.news/2017/05/05/warren-buffet-would-rather-invest-in-your-idiot-nephew-than-with-mark-zuckerberg-or-jeff-bezos/. 6. https://www.ft.com/content/fd27245a-9790-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. 7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-uncontested-3-pointers-1519595032. 8. http://gawker.com/322852/is-peter-thiel-silicon-valleys-godfather. 9. https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 10. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 2nd ed. (Dancing Unicorn Books, 2016). 11. http://consumerfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Overcharged-and-Underserved.pdf. 12. https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history. 13. https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-throttling-of-bittorrent-was-illegal/. 14.


pages: 372 words: 101,678

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

For example, manufacturing excellence didn’t matter in Apple’s early days when it was completely dominant, but with rising global smartphone competition, it sure does now. It doesn’t matter much when pharmaceuticals are under patent protection, but it sure matters when those patents expire and generics come into play. Elon Musk at Tesla knew early on that his vision would fall apart without exceptional manufacturing capabilities. When Tesla has struggled, problems with manufacturing were at the heart of the challenge. As simple as manufacturing excellence sounds, the reality is quite different—and that makes it all the more critical in differentiating a cost base.


pages: 400 words: 99,489

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

AN INDELIBLE RECORD Prabal Saxena, Rosemary M. Killen, Vladimir Airapetian, Noah E. Petro, Natalie M. Curran, and Avi M. Mandell, “Was the Sun a Slow Rotator? Sodium and Potassium Constraints from the Lunar Regolith,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 876, no. 1 (2019), p. L16. A MILLION PASSENGERS, SENT ON Sarah Knapton, “Elon Musk: We’ll Create a City on Mars with a Million Inhabitants,” The Telegraph (London: June 21, 2017). HOME TO A RELICT RIVER DELTA Timothy A. Goudge, Ralph E. Milliken, James W. Head, John F. Mustard, and Caleb I. Fassett, “Sedimentological Evidence for a Deltaic Origin of the Western Fan Deposit in Jezero Crater, Mars, and Implications for Future Exploration,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 458 (2017), pp. 357–365; Timothy A.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Bezos, who has libertarian leanings, hasn’t made up his mind yet on a UBI. In general, he is a social progressive who is not politically outspoken and has limited his public advocacy. That puts him at odds with his fellow tech titans, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his cofounder Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, all of whom support some form of a universal basic income. The UBI is simply a logical response to a socially and politically complex problem. It’s designed to make sure that those holding jobs that will be disrupted by technology will have enough money to retrain for a new job or, if untrainable, survive on minimum-wage jobs.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

In 2017, when Trump declared that he was going to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement51—joining Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries not committed to taking action against climate change—the CEOs of thirty US companies, including those from Apple, Gap, Google, HP, and Levi Strauss—published an open letter urging him to rethink the decision. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, resigned from the President’s Advisory Council in protest.52 An even more ambitious collaborative effort called “We Are Still In” now “includes 3,500 representatives from all 50 states, spanning large and small businesses, mayors and governors, university presidents, faith leaders, tribal leaders, and cultural institutions.”


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

Of course, the scenario of our creations turning on us is by no means a modern idea: it goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This narrative still dominates the debate about the future of AI, which is now routinely discussed in tones previously reserved for nuclear weapons. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal and Tesla, was sufficiently worried by this idea that he made a series of public statements expressing his concerns, and donated $10 million research funding to support responsible AI; in 2014, Stephen Hawking, then the world’s most famous scientist, publicly stated that he feared AI represented an existential threat to humanity.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

“So what would a 10-star check-in be? A 10-star check-in would be the Beatles check-in, in 1964. I’d get off the plane and there’d be five thousand high school kids cheering my name, with cards welcoming me to the country. “So what would an 11-star experience be? I would show up at the airport and you’d be there with Elon Musk and you’re saying, ‘You’re going to space.’ ” Obviously, those higher stars are imaginative and whimsical. But they serve a serious purpose. “The point of the process is that maybe 9, 10, 11 are not feasible,” Brian explains. “But if you go through the crazy exercise, there’s some sweet spot between ‘They showed up and they opened the door’ and ‘I went to space.’


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

The United Food and Commercial Workers union secured an increase in benefits and pay for workers in over a dozen food-processing plants, including $2-per-hour premium pay for Campbell’s Soup factory workers, a $1,500 bonus for workers at Smucker’s, and premium pay for thousands of grocery store workers. The United Auto Workers union pressured GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler to shut down plant operations for two weeks and provide all workers with PPE. Tesla, which does not have a union, was initially held open by CEO Elon Musk, but closed a few days later, facing intense public pressure. Perhaps no union better exemplified the power of organized labor than the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), which stood up for its rank and file while its industry struggled to stay afloat. Air travel plummeted by over 90 percent in the month from March to April 2020, and millions of workers were at risk of losing their jobs.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

But in the end, they are not equal; the handset is the ascendant vehicle, and the car is the architecture in slow disappearance.51 In conceptualizing how Stack transportation might evolve, it's tempting to suppose that the aggregation of systems into central platforms at the Cloud level would be replicated at the City layer such that atomized vehicles (such as cars) would be agglomerated into larger urban, regional, and continental megavehicles (such as high-speed rail). The economies of scale that are possible by regularizing and extending itineraries might parallel those of regularizing and monetizing other kinds of social interaction online. Elon Musk's perhaps real and perhaps speculative Hypertube project, which would send humans whooshing up and down California inside what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube, is exemplary, as is the tendency for cities to strategize economic growth through the enhancement of their airports (now “aerotropoli”) ensuring their inhabitants easy access to the rest of the global urban grid.52 Implementing such systems is obviously very expensive in both time and treasure.

Interview with Joan Didion in Shotgun Freeway: Drives through Lost L.A., directed by Morgan Neville and Harry Pallenberg (King Pictures, 1995). 50.  Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, directed by Reyner Banham (1972). 51.  Benjamin H. Bratton, “iPhone City (v.2008),” in Digital Cities AD: Architectural Design 79, no. 4 (2009): 90–97. 52.  Elon Musk and SpaceX, “Hyperloop Alpha,” August 12, 2013, http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf. 53.  Vicky Validakis, “Rio's Driverless Trucks Move 100 Million Tonnes,” Australian Mining, April 24, 2013, http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/news/rio-s-driverless-trucks-move-100-million-tonnes. 54. 


pages: 398 words: 105,032

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

As we were watching a launch, a reader of ours tweeted that although he had witnessed the moon landing as a young boy, he found the reusable rocket even more exciting. It sounds crazy, but he’s got a point—the moon landing was certainly the greater technical feat, but it was done at a cost that more or less guaranteed it couldn’t become commonplace. Exactly how much the cost can be dropped is a matter of debate. Elon Musk apparently claimed he could eventually get the cost down by a factor of 100. In the more near term, SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell said their current Falcon 9 should be able to offer a 30% discount. But even if reusable rockets only mean a small price drop now, they may yet represent a path to greater future savings.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Chesky had once again learned from his original mentor, Walt Disney, who created Disneyland at a separate company that was later bought back and reintegrated into the parent company. Though Project Snow White was always operating within Airbnb, the concept remained the same. “This product was designed around the principles of Disneyland,” Chesky told Leigh Gallagher. Then, referring to some words of wisdom given to him by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, who had described for Chesky the three “eras” of a startup—creation, building, and administration—Chesky added: “Airbnb will never be in the administration era. It will always be in a building era.”2 To that end, last year the company launched Samara, an in-house innovation and design studio made up of designers and engineers and headed by Gebbia.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Artificial intelligence is on a path toward transforming every part of our lives in a way not seen since the creation of the Internet, perhaps even since we harnessed electricity. There are potential dangers with any powerful new technology and I won’t shy away from discussing them. Eminent individuals from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have expressed their fear of AI as a potential existential threat to mankind. The experts are less prone to alarming statements, but they are quite worried too. If you program a machine, you know what it’s capable of. If the machine is programming itself, who knows what it might do? The airports with their self-check-in kiosks and restaurants full of iPads are staffed by thousands of human workers (most using machines) in the long security lines.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out: What is the effect on society? What’s the effect on people? Without having to deploy it into the normal world. And people who like those kinds of things can go there and experience that. It’s not only Page. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk dream of establishing Learyesque space colonies, celestial Burning Mans. Peter Thiel is slightly more down to earth. His Seasteading Institute hopes to set up floating technology incubation camps on the ocean, outside national boundaries. “If you can start a new business, why can you not start a new country?”


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

Kent had just obtained a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford. Before that, he’d spent two years working for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena where he’d helped build Curiosity, the Mars rover. Kent in turn recruited Greg Baney, a friend he’d met at NASA who’d gone on to work for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s Los Angeles–based rocket company. At six feet five and 260 pounds, Greg was built like an NFL lineman, but his physique belied a sharp intellect and a keen sense of observation. For a period of several months, Kent and Greg became Elizabeth’s favorite employees. She sat in on their brainstorming sessions and made suggestions about what robotics systems they should consider using.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Into the void stepped angel investors—individuals, mostly former entrepreneurs and executives—who guided startups during their earliest stages. Angel investors were perfectly matched to the lean startup model, gaining leverage from relatively small investments. One angel, Ron Conway, built a huge brand, but the team that had started PayPal proved to have much greater impact. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppleman, and their colleagues were collectively known as the PayPal Mafia, and their impact transformed Silicon Valley. Not only did they launch Tesla, Space-X, LinkedIn, and Yelp, they provided early funding to Facebook and many other successful players. More important than the money, though, were the vision, value system, and connections of the PayPal Mafia, which came to dominate the social media generation.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

.: Rossum’s Universal Robots—the 1920 play that introduced the word robot to the English language 17—to the film The Terminator and its sequels, stories of human creations turning against their creators have been a staple of science fiction. Even though these examples are pure fantasy, they have made it very easy for us to imagine this actually happening. But with recent progress in AI, some very smart people, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and my MIT colleague Max Tegmark, have begun to believe that the risks of this actually happening are large enough for us to take them seriously. In fact, Hawking, Tegmark, and others have formed the Future of Life Institute to study these and other existential risks to humanity.18 One of the most complete and carefully reasoned descriptions of the problem is in the book Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.19 Bostrom carefully analyzes various ways that artificially intelligent systems (AIs) could eventually reach human-level intelligence.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Their character will dictate their economic value and their roles in our culture. Outlining the possible ways that a machine might be smarter than us (even in theory) will assist us in both directing this advance and managing it. A few really smart people, like astronomer Stephen Hawking and genius inventor Elon Musk, worry that making supersmart AIs could be our last invention before they replace us (though I don’t believe this), so exploring possible types is prudent. Imagine we land on an alien planet. How would we measure the level of the intelligences we encounter there? This is an extremely difficult question because we have no real definition of our own intelligence, in part because until now we didn’t need one.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Species biodiversity will have declined by another 10 per cent.6 Stocks of all presently fished seafood will have collapsed by an average of more than 90 per cent from 1950 levels.7 Most major metal reserves will be exhausted, including gold, copper, silver and zinc, along with many of the key metals used in renewable energy technologies, like lead, indium and antimony.8 If Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are to be believed, we might be able to replace some of these metals by mining the moon and asteroids. But extraterrestrial extraction won’t help us much with the forests and the fish. Nor will it do much for our soil crisis: at present rates of depletion, the topsoils of the world’s farmlands will be more or less useless by 2050, and by 2075 they will be gone.9 Despite these obvious problems, for some reason we have come to believe that GDP growth is equivalent to human progress.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

Even broadly sympathetic people still find it necessary to frame the idea humorously like this as if to admit that it is essentially nuts or at least crazy, new-fangled, snowflake thinking. So when you hear that Bernie Sanders supports it, you think, ‘That figures.’ When you hear that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Richard Branson support it, you wonder what’s in it for those creepy rich hippies/high-minded technocrats. But when you find out that the idea begins with Thomas Paine and came very close to being implemented in 1969 as US government policy by one Richard Nixon (rich and creepy maybe, but certainly no hippie and certainly no Thomas Paine) you begin to think again.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

Really think this through: the best that can come from adopting a cheapskate persona is a low-level clerical job with no prospect of advancement because people want to elevate people who think big. Saving five bucks by ordering an inferior snack tray for the office Christmas party is something everybody notices—it’s a bad impression that, once made, is almost impossible to rectify. Would Richard Branson or Elon Musk order the cheaper snack tray? No. They’d hire Cirque du Soleil and dress them up in snack costumes and have them do trampoline acrobatics. People would probably die in the process, but everyone would treasure the memory, and they’d expect even crazier batshit the next time. When you meet self-made rich people who are cheap, possibly it’s cheapness that got them there—but maybe they could relax a bit and make it look like a blast, like Richard Branson does.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

That’s more than the annual revenues of brand-name corporations including Under Armour, Levi Strauss, Hasbro, and Hyatt Hotels. Here’s the absurd thing—while those other companies have tens of thousands of employees, there are just three hundred or so at Renaissance. I’ve determined that Simons is worth about $23 billion, making him wealthier than Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow. Others at the firm are also billionaires. The average Renaissance employee has nearly $50 million just in the firm’s own hedge funds. Simons and his team truly create wealth in the manner of fairy tales full of kings, straw, and lots and lots of gold.


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Immigrants have a long history of innovation. Alexander Graham Bell was born and raised in Edinburgh. James L. Kraft, who invented a pasteurization process for cheese, emigrated from Canada. Products that were invented by immigrants include the PET scanner, the paddle-controlled video game, and lithium ion batteries. Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) is an immigrant, and so is Sergey Brin (cofounder of Google).2 All six of America’s 2016 Nobel Prize winners are first-generation immigrants; in 2015, when one of us was fortunate enough to win, three out of four were, and the other was the son of an immigrant. It is hard to believe that it would be a good idea for America to restrict such immigration—though the transmitting countries might feel differently.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Sooner or later, a small box in the living room, or the shed, will have the power to allow an owner to select a design for almost anything and produce it for themselves. It’s hard to imagine this as a way to produce a chair or a laptop, but it is already the way in which America’s aircraft carriers replace spare parts while at sea. Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric sports car, is determined to manufacture cars in this way. When this does become the norm, design will undergo another change of direction, one that will have consequences even more far-reaching in their impact than the coming of the factories. Design has more often been defined by what it is not than by what it is.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

Think of the products you just purchased online that appeared constantly in ads on your Gmail screen. Why did it take Google until June 2017 to announce it would terminate these? Designing the Apple Store as a tourist attraction as well as a service center has been a brilliant marketing tool for Apple. Starbucks stores attracted more traffic by creating a community spirit with free Wi-Fi. Elon Musk’s Tesla does no advertising, yet news of this innovative and stylish electric car has propelled Tesla’s stock above that of most other auto companies. Advertisers have begun to recycle the “Brought to you by” approach once so popular that in 1950 three of the top-rated shows on television were NBC’s Texaco Star Theater, the Philco Television Playhouse, and The Colgate Comedy Hour.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

What was even more surprising, to me at least, was that I was at all interested. In high school and college, I used to think that “business” was a dirty word. To me, it was the realm of hucksters and pitchmen selling cheap consumer products on late-night infomercials. Even though my generation produced people like Elon Musk and Larry Page, most of my cohort subscribed to an anticorporate, anticommercial ethos, perhaps best illustrated in a famous 1992 cover of Rolling Stone featuring Kurt Cobain wearing a shirt that read CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK. Why would I care about the story of some business? It’s not like business was ever going to be my thing.


pages: 334 words: 109,882

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

Those failures weren’t some setback; they were rungs on a ladder—precious, painful, and defeating experiences I had to endure in order to learn the things I needed in order to succeed. If you are Steve Jobs and you get fired from Apple, your failure sets you up for your comeback; it’s part of your legend, or your canonization. If you’re Elon Musk and you blow up the first few rockets you launch and lose millions upon millions of dollars—and years—in the process, you’re just working out the kinks. If you’re Elizabeth Gilbert and you write the wildly unsuccessful Committed after publishing the epochal Eat, Pray, Love, nothing bad has happened—you’re just practicing for your TED Talk, your Oprah tour, your next New York Times best seller.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Not recognizing how much data are needed for a precise answer is an even more common problem outside science. For several years, Twitter estimated in its regulatory filings that 5 percent or fewer of its accounts were operated by bots. Less than a month after concluding his April 2022 agreement to buy the social media company for $44 billion, Elon Musk tweeted that the deal was “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” To know that percentage with absolute certainty, you’d need to accurately classify virtually all of the more than 214 million unique daily users as bots or nonbots.


pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

Chapter 16 THE NEW CAPTAINS OF CAPITAL TESLA’S STOCK WENT ON A wild ride in 2020, powered by the devotion of the electric car company’s army of ordinary investors, who were suddenly stuck at home and day-trading their stimulus checks to pass time while the coronavirus pandemic raged. But in November, the rally received another huge jolt that would help make Elon Musk’s company one of the most valuable in the world. Despite its dramatic stock market gains over the past decade, S&P Dow Jones Indices—one of the biggest providers of financial benchmarks—had long refrained from adding Tesla to its flagship index, the S&P 500, for one simple reason: To be included, a company has to be consistently profitable, a requirement that Tesla had struggled to meet.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

Next, Kennedy conflated disparate anxieties to suggest a broad conspiracy to control freethinking Americans. “We’re seeing an onslaught of authoritarian clampdown and a giant shift of wealth from the middle class, which is just being obliterated by the quarantine, to the wealthiest people, the people like [Bill] Gates and Elon Musk and [Mark] Zuckerberg and all of the people who kind of own Silicon Valley and own 5G, and many of them also own vaccines.” In one breath, Kennedy managed to evoke our deepest societal fears and resentments and associate them with outlandish fantasies such as that Microsoft founder Bill Gates had sneaked microchips into the vaccine or that COVID-19 was actually caused by the advent of 5G cellular infrastructure.


pages: 470 words: 107,074

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt

An Inconvenient Truth, benefit corporation, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, call centre, commoditize, confounding variable, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, forensic accounting, Google Earth, high-speed rail, junk bonds, lock screen, market clearing, market design, off-the-grid, price stability, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, vertical integration

Though he had never considered himself much of a progressive, he had been thinking seriously about what climate change meant for a company like PG&E. He decided to explore the question exhaustively. Part of the process involved a series of events in which Darbee invited academics and thought leaders to share their perspectives on climate change. Elon Musk, then new to Tesla, appeared at one to talk about electric vehicles. Peevey, sometimes a speaker, sometimes in the audience, developed a certain respect for Darbee. The two men began spending more time together—environmental events, a San Francisco Giants game. Climate was always on the agenda. In 2006, Darbee told shareholders that the company had an urgent responsibility to source more renewable energy, which at the time supplied just a fraction of its generation.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

“Real Time Billionaires,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires. These are updated every five minutes daily when the stock markets are open. When I first checked in November 2020, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates ranked number 1 and 2 respectively and Mark Zuckerberg ranked number 4. By March 2022, Mark Zuckerberg dropped down to the teens and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates were 1, 2, and 4 respectively.   2.  See for instance, American Heritage Medical Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/technophobe; Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/nstagr/technophobe; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technophobia.   3.  


pages: 312 words: 108,194

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

3D printing, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, coronavirus, country house hotel, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Indoor air pollution, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, mittelstand, remote working, rewilding, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, uranium enrichment, warehouse automation, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

You can’t make them for a reasonable price, although the reason existing car companies were willing to make them is that electric cars help to achieve specified exhaust emissions across their product range. So, if they take a loss on electric cars, they make a profit on polluting cars while appearing virtuous. Tesla, meanwhile, had been through $23 billion of shareholder money, grants, and the rest of it, grants of which we wouldn’t necessarily get even a small fraction. At the time of writing, Elon Musk is raising a further $6 billion. Because of this shifting commercial sand, we made the decision to pull out of production at the last minute. N526 was a brilliant car. Very efficient motors. Very aerodynamic. Wonderful to drive and be driven in. We just couldn’t ever have made money from it, and for all our enthusiasm for the project, we were not prepared to risk the rest of Dyson.


pages: 338 words: 112,127

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

I came here planning to dislike SpaceX, and while Gwynne Shotwell doesn’t exactly defy my every expectation, I still find myself liking her in spite of myself. In part, I know that I am a sucker for women involved in spaceflight, for women in jobs traditionally closed to them, and I can’t help but suspect that Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, had this appeal in mind when he chose her to run his space company. I’m at a postlaunch party, my second official EndlessBBQ (“It really is endless,” I joke on Twitter, before noticing how many other people have made the same joke), standing on the deck behind the Cocoa Beach Brewing Company with a few dozen space people.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Companies and entrepreneurs that are showing the way include: IBM, which in 2014 announced a five-year plan to bet 10 percent of its net income on post-silicon computer chips;30 Google (Alphabet), whose recent long-term bets include a new quantum artificial intelligence lab, self-driving cars and research into anti-aging drugs;31 and Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal whose moon shots include SpaceX (a space transport firm whose eventual goal is to colonize Mars) and Tesla (whose diverse aims include the mass-market adoption of electric cars, household battery packs to store renewable energy, and a 600-mile-per-hour hyperloop to transport people between Los Angeles and San Francisco).


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Take artificial intelligence (AI), something which most politicians barely mention. The overwhelming majority of transhumanists think that AI is a positive development: it will help humans become more intelligent, help us make better decisions and will open up amazing new avenues of knowledge and understanding. Perhaps it will. But perhaps it won’t. Elon Musk, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, declared AI to be comparable to summoning the Devil and donated $10 million to research to make sure the super-machines of the future will be kind to us. Stephen Hawking said ‘the development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Therefore we have to figure out a way to burn it cleanly, capturing the carbon dioxide and burying it, or bonding it into concrete, or whatever it takes. In that light, Al Gore’s expensive TV ads deriding clean coal are a public disservice. In another shift, my fond hopes for space-based solar (page 81) have been dashed by Elon Musk, CEO of rocket-launching SpaceX and chairman of SolarCity. He informed me vehemently that even if access to orbit were free, the inefficiencies of energy collection and transmission rule space solar out as a viable source of baseload power on the ground. In a final energy comeuppance, I came to regret leaving fusion out of my nuclear chapter.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Tesla, most famous for its electric vehicles, is currently building a so-called gigafactory in Nevada that is expected to manufacture a new generation of powerful batteries that are capable of supplying energy to a home for up to two days. Sister company SolarCity—run by a cousin of Tesla chairman Elon Musk—which already controls 39 percent of the residential solar market, has announced that, within a decade, all of its power units will come complete with battery storage. The disruptive potential of this technology for the traditional utility industry is enormous; in fact, a 2013 report by the Edison Electric Institute warned, “One can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent.”


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

Systrom and Krieger asked Rise a lot of questions about his beta-testing experience, and he started to sense that the founders didn’t know their potential. “This is going to be fucking huge,” Rise explained. In the tech industry, leaders rarely had any experience in the industry they were disrupting. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had never been in books and Tesla’s Elon Musk had never been in car manufacturing, but Instagram’s filters had clearly been made by a photographer. Earlybird was the best Rise had ever seen, he explained—far higher quality than anything on Hipstamatic. After a few drinks, the founders asked Rise if he would like to create some filters of his own, as a contract job.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

In this respect, machine language is ‘psychotic’ … [envisioning] the perfection of social life through its obliteration.” Andrejevic, Automated Media, 72. 30. Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (New York: Picador, 1995). 31. Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem, trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tor, 2006). A similarly immature account of transparency as a route to human perfectibility was articulated in a long tribute to Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Tim Urban, “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future,” Wait but Why, April 20, 2017, https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html. 32. Abeba Birhane and Jelle van Dijk, “Robot Rights? Let’s Talk about Human Welfare Instead,” arXiv, January 14, 2020, https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.05046. 33.


Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide by Martin S. Fridson, Fernando Alvarez

Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fixed income, information trail, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, offshore financial centre, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, speech recognition, statistical model, stock buybacks, the long tail, time value of money, transaction costs, Y2K, zero-coupon bond

Cash from operations became increasingly negative during the period as losses escalated up until 2009. Investing activities, primarily capital expenditures, did not put a lot of additional strain on cash flow, but Tesla had to issue substantial amounts of debt and preferred stock to continue in business. Funds were provided by Chairman Elon Musk, who took an active role in the company; other entrepreneurs such as Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page; venture capitalist firms; and German automaker Daimler AG. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (Exhibit 4.6) is a rapidly growing company that is well beyond the introductory phase. It was founded in 1981, went public in 1993, and generated revenues of $1.2 billion in fiscal 2010.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Left Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren go even further and demand “college for all.” Not everyone can be a winner, however you design the game. In some fields such as law, medicine, technology, and some corners of business, “winner-takes-all” markets have provided exceptional rewards to exceptional people—people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk—who have both high cognitive skills and practical knowledge of something that gives them a big first-mover advantage in new digital markets. Below them is a wider group of highly educated—and highly credentialized—people from top universities who have the intelligence and personality attributes to propel them into the top layer of jobs.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

While eco-fascist views are an extremist tendency, they are an outgrowth of the limitations of liberal movements struggling for the environment as a “white sanctuary.”40 The Sierra Club was embroiled in vicious debates about immigration and population control throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Like those on the left who inaccurately believe we can fight austerity through border controls, Sierra members advocated immigration restriction as a method of environmental protection. Environmental liberalism is steeped in such false solutions, evident in the rise of Elon Musk–style techno-solutionism. We are also presented with attempts to greenwash industrial extraction and corporate profiteering with propaganda for carbon markets, natural gas, and clean coal by corporations interested in sustaining their windfall profits, not the earth. The CEOs of these toxic corporations are boosted by G7 governments providing one hundred billion dollars in oil, gas, and coal subsidies.41 We are all assigned individual responsibility to recycle and change consumer habits, even though just one hundred corporations are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions and the poorest half of the world are responsible for only 10 percent.42 Many environmentalists applaud green militarism, such as the Zionist Jewish National Fund greening the occupation of Palestine through tree planting, or the US military, as the world’s largest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons,43 announcing it will green its killing machine.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

Strategically, Amazon was more focused on endeavors like selling advertising and, outside the realm of entertainment, providing same-day shipping. Nevertheless, the fact that Bezos set so many tongues wagging emphasized how thoroughly streaming had disrupted the media industry. History suggests that evolution will only accelerate. With wealth being created at a stunning pace (in 2021, Bezos himself was dislodged by Tesla founder Elon Musk as the world’s richest person) and recent favorable economic conditions, the next mega-merger could well involve participants previously unimagined. Just as it had been in 2013, when Netflix redefined the medium of television by dropping House of Cards, the challenge rivals faced was not merely a matter of talent relations or taste.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

By definition, this is inefficient and expensive. Countries can’t function safely and efficiently without buffer stocks of commodities. According to energy and tech expert Mark Mills, at any given time, country-level supply chains of critical commodities typically have three months’ worth of annual demand in storage. The annual output of Elon Musk’s planned $5 billion “gigafactory” in Nevada, slated to produce more than all the world’s existing lithium batteries combined, could store about five minutes of annual U.S. electricity demand. “Storing electricity in expensive short-lived batteries is not a little more expensive but tens of thousands of times more expensive than storing gas in tanks or coal in piles adjacent to idle but readily available long-lived power plants,” Mills explains.51 Lack of storability makes the operating and economic dynamics of electricity generation and distribution entirely different from other forms of energy such as oil and gas, and from all other commodities: Supply must respond almost instantaneously to changes in demand; not enough, and there is a danger of degraded quality and power cuts; too much, and the transmission system can be damaged, wires deformed or even melted.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

In addition to the interviewees who are quoted in this book, many others taught us a lot: Daron Acemoglu Susan Athey David Autor Jeff Bezos Nick Bloom Christian Catalini Michael Chui Paul Daugherty Tom Davenport Tom Friedman Demis Hassabis Reid Hoffman Jeremy Howard Dean Kamen Andy Karsner Christine Lagarde Yann LeCun Shane Legg John Leonard David Lipton Tom Malone James Manyika Kristina McElheren Tom Mitchell Elon Musk Ramez Naam Tim O’Reilly Gill Pratt Francesa Rossi Daniela Rus Stuart Russell Eric Schmidt Mustafa Suleyman Max Tegmark Sebastian Thrun But you can put off writing for only so long. After we had talked to a lot of people, and to each other a fair amount, it was time to put words on paper.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

For instance, markets are useful, but extreme libertarian beliefs along the lines that markets should be the only organizing principle in human affairs—or that an unregulated market will always tend toward perfection—have the effect of making markets less useful. Similarly, democracy is useful, but a determination that every little decision should be undertaken through a democratic process as frequently as possible makes democracy less useful. As for religion, don’t get me started. 10.   Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are the primary current public faces of this fear. 11.   Hopefully this doesn’t make my ideas marginal. 12.   The sexual singularity is the hypothetical future moment after which virtual reality sex would be more appealing than real sex, and, according to the typical framing, women would lose their power over men. 13.   


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

But by this time ‘the Valley’ had a life of its own, and it continued to be vibrant even after Wall Street interest shifted from high technology to mortgage-backed securities. Fresh venture capital firms took the place of the four horsemen. The new businesses that continued to emerge were mainly focused on information technology and biotechnology, but the model has spread to some other sectors. Tesla Motors, the innovative electric car manufacturer, was founded by Elon Musk, another co-founder of PayPal. But the popular obsession with Silicon Valley should not lead anyone to believe that all successful SMEs are made in California. The business writer Hermann Simon has identified around two thousand firms he calls ‘hidden champions’, distinguished by a combination of modest scale (revenues below $4 billion) and world-dominant positions in niche markets.13 Most of their products are sold to other industrial firms and are items that most readers have never imagined buying.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

coupled with a deliciously shudder-inducing punch line (“We’d be ruled by robots!”). Did you know that if you sneeze, belch, and fart all at the same time, you die? Wow! Following in the wake of decades of AI hype, you might think the Singularity would be regarded as a parody, a joke, but it has proved to be a remarkably persuasive escalation. Add a few illustrious converts—Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and David Chalmers, among others—and how can we not take it seriously? Whether this stupendous event occurs 10 or 100 or 1,000 years in the future, isn’t it prudent to start planning now, setting up the necessary barricades and keeping our eyes peeled for harbingers of catastrophe?


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

“It was the craziest, fastest wealth creation ever, and it was the fastest to disappear, but it’s also the fastest anyone ever zeroed their debts,” he said, smiling wide as he thrust his hands up and down to illustrate his points. Godoy suggested a parallel with Donald Trump—who went through four corporate bankruptcies. “Don’t compare me to him, please,” Eike replied. “All he does is buildings.” Eike preferred to think of himself as an innovator like Elon Musk, the founder of the electric car company Tesla. Eike was willing now to admit mistakes—“I expanded too fast”—but he complained bitterly about his treatment in the press. Asked if he felt like a victim of unfair criticism, he nodded gravely. Did it hurt his feelings when people called his companies “PowerPoints”?


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Indeed, America as a whole has a soft spot for risk takers willing to gamble almost everything in an effort to create new business opportunities. While in Europe schoolchildren are taught to revere poets and philosophers, in the United States schoolchildren are primed to lionize entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. The very term business hero has a distinctly American ring. And by hero, we generally mean “innovator,” regardless of what that innovation foretells for our futures, both individually and as a nation. For the question remains, innovation of what and for whom? Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase creative destruction to describe the process by which innovation creates new technologies, businesses, and jobs at the cost of the old.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

Volvo intends to provide 100 Swedish customers with a self-driving XC90 for testing in real traffic on a beltway outside Gothenburg, Sweden. In cooperation with Microsoft, this pilot programme is due to be extended to China and the United States. Tesla boasts of being a public champion of self-driving vehicle technology, with announcements from its CEO, Elon Musk that autonomous cars are only two to three years away. It is therefore unsurprising that Tesla launched its autopilot software update, enabling auto steering, lane changing and parking features to great fanfare from the media. However, shortly after the software was launched, various autopilot features were deactivated after some drivers used them irresponsibly and posted videos of what they had done on YouTube.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

The events listed above sound fantastic, incredible, unbelievable, even impossible, but they all happened. It’s the reason so many are angry, not just with political leaders but with all leaders. Partly, this is the fault of leadership models based on the myth of the infallible male leader, whether it’s Jesus Christ, Steve Jobs, Moses or Elon Musk. It is individual hero leadership, where the ‘leader’ is more important than the ‘ship’. It has become leadership of the short term, by the short term, for the short term. It is tactical. It is quantitative. It is also highly academically and professionally qualified. It is experienced and data-rich.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

H1-B workers are tethered to a particular job; if they quit or get fired, they have to leave the country, which makes them spectacularly compliant as well as cheaper to hire. 38 All of this means that tech workers might have more in common with the industrial workers of midcentury than they might think. Silicon Valley touts itself as the “New Economy,” but it still relies on products that have to be built somewhere, and the tactics of offering perks on the job don’t work quite as well on them. Elon Musk promised free frozen yogurt and a roller coaster to disgruntled employees at his Fremont, California, Tesla car factory—but the workers were complaining of injuries on the job because of the pace of production, and they didn’t want frozen yogurt to soothe their pains. They wanted a union. 39 Yet the hype for Silicon Valley continues, and ambitious programmers don’t want to just be labor, anyway—they want to be startup founders, the next Zuckerbergs themselves.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

One summer afternoon in 2020 during that North Korean hacker investigation—in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic—Twitter suddenly blew up with strange messages, seemingly posted by many of its most high-profile users. Hackers, it soon became clear, had simultaneously taken over the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Apple, and the then presidential candidate Joe Biden, all to deliver the same message: “I’m feeling generous because of COVID-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!” The scam netted nearly $120,000 in just minutes before the messages could be deleted.


pages: 309 words: 121,279

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

Plastic waste is turning up in the melting glaciers of Everest1 and in our deepest ocean trenches.2 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the gyre that collects much of the estimated 11 million tons3 of plastic dumped in the oceans every year, is now three times the size of France.4 The problem is no longer even limited to the surface of the Earth. There’s so much waste in orbit – detritus from old rocket launches, castoffs from the International Space Station, even one of Elon Musk’s Teslas – that the European Space Agency is working on plans for an orbital clean up mission, in case the cloud of trash hurtling around the planet puts an explosive end to future space missions. This hypothetical event, known as Kessler syndrome, predicts that unless we act soon, human spaceflight will be grounded by what is, in effect, space littering.5 At this point it will not surprise you to learn that when the last Apollo astronauts lifted off from the surface of the moon, they left their trash behind.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Among the EV activists was Al Cocconi, who had been part of GM’s illfated EV1 program. Cocconi took the idea of the EV1 and turned it into an electric supercar called the tzero. It could go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in a blazing 4.1 seconds. In 2003 Cocconi came into contact with two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs straight out of the dot-com boom. One of them, Elon Musk, was a cofounders of PayPal. After selling it to eBay, Musk launched SpaceX, a commercial space shuttle business, which Musk intended to be a way station to his larger ambition—enabling people to colonize Mars. The other entrepreneur, Martin Eberhard, offered Cocconi $150,000 in investment for him to experiment with a different kind of battery: a pack composed of lithium-ion batteries, lots and lots of lithium-ion batteries.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, June 22, 2010. 12 Seth Fletcher, Bottle Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy (New York: Hill and Wang , 2011), pp. 30–35; National Research Council, Transition to Alternative Transportation Technologies: Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010), p. 9. 13 Fortune, July 11, 2008. 14 Fortune, July 1, 2010 (lithium-ion batteries); New Yorker, August 24, 2009 (“hugely underestimated,” “logjam”); Elon Musk, “In the Beginning,” Tesla Blog, June 22, 2009 (“redesigned”); Wired, October 2010; Robert Lutz to author. 15 Scott Doggett, “32 Hours Needed to Charge at Tesla Roadster Using Common Electrical Outlet,” Edmonds.com, July 7, 2008, at http://blogs.edmunds.com/greencaradvisor/2008/07/32-hoursneeded-to-charge-a-tesla-roadster-using-common-electrical-outlet.html. 16 Interview with Carlos Ghosn; Fortune, February 19, 2010 (“mermaid,” “not a bet”). 17 Bloomberg, July 15, 2010. 18 Interview with Lee Schipper (“emissions elsewhere”). 19 IHS CERA, “Automotive Scenarios 2010”; Electrification Coalition, Electrification Roadmap: Revolutionizing Transportation and Achieving Energy Security (Washington, DC: Electrification Coalition, 2009). 20 Interview with Steve Koonin. 21 Calvin Timmerman, “Smart Grid’s Future: Evaluating Policy Opportunities and Challenges after the Recovery Act,” Brookings Institution, July 24, 2010. 22 Interview with Rick Wagoner. 23 Interview with Carlos Ghosn. 24 Zhang Guobao, speech, U.S.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It is staffed by over a thousand private investigators, who work closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operates.131 The company runs seminars and training sessions and offers travel junkets to cops around the world.132 eBay is proud of its relationship with law enforcement and boasts that its efforts have led to the arrests of three thousand people around the world—roughly three per day since the division started.133 Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for the CIA.134 The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a dozen other US intelligence agencies.135 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing.136 Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, a space company started by another Internet mogul: PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, spun off PayPal’s sophisticated fraud-detection algorithm into Palantir Technologies, a major military contractor that provides sophisticated data-mining services for the NSA and CIA.137 Facebook, too, is cozy with the military. It poached former DARPA head Regina Dugan to run its secretive “Building 8” research division, which is involved in everything from artificial intelligence to drone-based wireless Internet networks.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

What is remarkable about the book is that, while written fifteen years ago, it feels as if it is directed at today’s events. 31.Adam Bluestein, “The Most Entrepreneurial Group in America Wasn’t Born in America,” Inc., Feb. 2015. 32.Rose Leadem, “The Immigrant Entrepreneurs behind Major American Companies (Infographic),” Entrepreneur, Feb. 4, 2017. Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX) spent two years at Queen’s University in Canada and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received Bachelor of Science degrees in physics and economics. Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of Chobani, the yogurt company, immigrated to the United States to study English at Adelphi University. 33.Fortunately, Congress has not paid much attention: the 2018 budget actually provided for an increase in science spending of 12 percent, in contrast to the 17 percent reduction that he had asked for. 34.Our media is often rightly criticized for trying to have a false balance in coverage.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

Encouraged by these possibilities, I believe that strong AI with causal understanding and agency capabilities is a realizable promise, and this raises the question that science fiction writers have been asking since the 1950s: Should we be worried? Is strong AI a Pandora’s box that we should not open? Recently public figures like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have gone on record saying that we should be worried. On Twitter, Musk said that AIs were “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” In 2015, John Brockman’s website Edge.org posed as its annual question, that year asking, “What do you think about machines that think?” It drew 186 thoughtful and provocative answers (since collected into a book titled What to Think About Machines That Think).


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

It was abandoned after an underwhelming pilot on New York’s Upper West Side by both Chase Bank and Citibank. Credit-card companies also formed a consortium called Secure Electronic Transactions, or SET, to figure out how to make online credit-card purchases safe from hackers. And then, in 1998, PayPal was launched by Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur now best known for his Tesla electronic car. The service allowed people to open up online accounts with the digital equivalent of dollars and send them to other PayPal users, including the new breed of low-overhead vendors using e-marketplaces such as eBay. None of these could do what DigiCash could do, but they didn’t need to.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

Musk, “All Our Patent Are Belong to You,” Tesla Motors Blog, June 12, 2014, http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you. 95. W. Oremus, “Tesla Is Opening Its Patents to All. That’s Not as Crazy as It Sounds,” Slate, June 12, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/12/tesla_opens_patents_to_public_what_is_elon_musk_thinking.html. 96. C. L. Treasure, J. Avorn, and A. S. Kesselheim, “What Is the Public’s Right to Access Medical Discoveries Based on Federally Funded Research?,” Journal of the American Medical Association 311, no. 9 (2014): 907–908. 97. D. G. McNeil, “Car Mechanic Dreams Up a Tool to Ease Births,” New York Times, November 14, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/health/new-tool-to-ease-difficult-births-a-plastic-bag.html. 98.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Furthermore, other than the 1942 realization of nuclear power (long after the physics had been proven), since the late 1930s there has been no new great invention on the order of the computer, flight, or nylon clothing. A century ago there were many great inventions; there are very few now. In the United States people are offered innovations such as Mark Zuckerberg’s “Facebook credits,” invented in 2009 and defunct by 2013, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s promise of an inaugural private passenger trip around the moon and back on a “Big Falcon Rocket” in 2023. The responses of many are “Why?” and “Really?” In the United Kingdom, we are forced to celebrate Sir James Dyson’s hand dryer and Sir Richard Branson’s tilting trains, even though he and his Virgin company did not invent them: businesses invent brands now, not completely new machines.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Particularly notable was the 2011 book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which sold 379,000 copies in its first week on sale,24 became a number-one New York Times best seller, and has over 6,500 reviews on Amazon with an average ranking of 4.5 stars out of 5. Isaacson specializes in biographies of geniuses (including Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk), but his book about Jobs was by far his most successful. Why did his book about Jobs go viral? Part of the answer was the timing: the publisher wisely dropped it into the market just weeks after Jobs’s death, allowing the news media narrative of his death to interact with the talk about the book.


pages: 415 words: 136,343

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul

Anthropocene, assortative mating, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Earth, jitney, long peace, low earth orbit, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, off grid, phenotype, quantum entanglement, SpaceX Starlink, the scientific method

But the fact is that sometimes conservationists feel as though they’re playing whack-a-mole, as new challenges arise just as they begin to grapple with old ones. During the course of our conversation, Farnsworth mentioned the launch, a few weeks earlier, of the first of what is expected to be 12,000 small, internet-servicing satellites from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, a project called Starlink with the promise—or threat, depending on your perspective—of creating an artificial galaxy blanketing the sky. Astronomers went ballistic when the first of these small, brilliant objects were lofted into low-earth orbit in 2019, concerned that the eventual “mega-constellation” (as it’s been described) would interfere with their ability to study the stars, and alter the character of the natural sky to everyone, everywhere on the planet’s surface—and that was before Musk said he was seeking permission to add a further 30,000 satellites to the total.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

The corporatist controllers with the money and political aspirations that are running the United States are families and people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Koch, Bezos, Gates, Buffet, Du Pont, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Ford, Walton, Soros, Kissinger, Adelson, Sergey Brin & Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, and others. Families such as these have either been running the country for decades or are a new breed of wealthy technocrats that are stepping up to replace the older ruling families. Their money funds programs pushing to relax restrictions on things like oil drilling, the deregulation of industries they seek to expand into, the regulation of industries that they wish to lock others out of, and the ability to keep their operations as secret as possible.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

It is not tolerable that they see their everyday life protected and guaranteed by many rules, but once they have passed the factory gates they are in a no-man’s-land,” declared Francesca Re David of the metalworkers union, FIOM-CGIL.36 On the other side of the Atlantic, on March 18, under pressure from the United Auto Workers, the big three Detroit car producers—GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler—agreed a more or less complete nationwide shutdown. The one holdout, predictably enough, was Tesla. Whereas in China, Elon Musk had complied with official instructions, in California he decided to make a stand. He announced that concern about Covid was exaggerated. “My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” he told his staff.37 A day later, he too folded. It was typical of Musk’s belligerent egotism that he should have turned the question of the shutdown into a matter of his personal judgment.


pages: 373 words: 132,377

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, imposter syndrome, Mason jar, microdosing, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, rolodex, Saturday Night Live

I was very sceptical of this so-called “gift,” because I didn’t have any use for a coin that couldn’t be exchanged for chocolate and/or more chocolate. And given that the coin is now worth a whopping twenty dollars on eBay, I feel quite vindicated in my youthful cynicism. It’s not that I was a regular Elon Musk with a savvy (read: slavish) enthusiasm for made-up currencies that made me doubt the value of the bicentennial coin; my issue was that I’d already been burnt by another government-driven excitement ruse: Stamp Explorer. The 1980s was a decade defined by collectable fads. Perhaps that’s why the Australian postal service thought they could successfully invigorate a passion for stamps in children.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Thanks to many of those with whom conversation led in short order to many of the insights herein, and of whom the following is an incomplete list: Elliot Aguilar, Ben Backus, Liat Berdugo, Dave Blei, Ben Blum, Joe Damato, Eva de Valk, Emily Drury, Peter Eckersley, Jesse Farmer, Alan Fineberg, Chrix Finne, Lucas Foglia, John Gaunt, Lee Gilman, Martin Glazier, Adam Goldstein, Sarah Greenleaf, Graff Haley, Ben Hjertmann, Greg Jensen, Henry Kaplan, Sharmin Karim, Falk Lieder, Paul Linke, Rose Linke, Tania Lombrozo, Brandon Martin-Anderson, Sam McKenzie, Elon Musk, the Neuwrite group at Columbia University, Hannah Newman, Abe Othman, Sue Penney, Dillon Plunkett, Kristin Pollock, Diego Pontoriero, Avi Press, Matt Richards, Annie Roach, Felicity Rose, Anders Sandberg, Claire Schreiber, Gayle and Rick Shanley, Max Shron, Charly Simpson, Najeeb Tarazi, Josh Tenenbaum, Peter Todd, Peter van Wesep, Shawn Wen, Jered Wierzbicki, Maja Wilson, and Kristen Young.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

From San Francisco to San Jose, Silicon Valley has become one continuous low-rise stretch between I-280 and U.S.-101 that is home to over six thousand technology companies that generate more than $200 billion in GDP. (With a San Francisco–Los Angeles–San Diego high-speed rail, California’s Pacific Coast would truly become the western counterpart to the northeastern corridor. Elon Musk’s Tesla has proposed an ultra-high-speed “Hyperloop” tunnel system for this route.) And the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, the largest urban cluster in the American South, houses industry giants such as Exxon, AT&T, and American Airlines in an economy larger than South Africa’s and is actually building a high-speed rail (well, only 120 kilometers per hour) called the Trans-Texas Corridor that could eventually extend to the oil capital Houston based on plans rolled out in 2014 by Texas Central Railway and the bullet-train operator Central Japan Railway.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The accelerating growth of competence in AI, advancing under the banner of deep learning, has surprised even many professionals in the field, not just long-time commentators and critics such as myself. There is a long tradition of hype in AI, going back to the earliest days, and many of us have a well-developed habit of discounting the latest “revolutionary breakthrough” by, say, 70% or more, but when such high-tech mavens as Elon Musk and such world-class scientists as Sir Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking start ringing alarm bells about how AI could soon lead to a cataclysmic dissolution of human civilization in one way or another, it is time to rein in one’s habits and reexamine one’s suspicions. Having done so, my verdict is unchanged but more tentative than it used to be.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s contention that “in America nearly every man has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily” remains as true now as when they wrote it in the preface to The Gilded Age (1873). America’s current generation of entrepreneurs is refashioning civilization just as fundamentally as the robber barons did. They are gripped by the same “madness of great men” that gripped the robber barons. Sergey Brin wants to grow meat from stem cells. Elon Musk wants to “reinvent” railways by shooting passengers down hermetically sealed tubes. Peter Thiel of PayPal proclaims that “the great unfinished task of the modern world is to turn death from a fact of life to a problem to be solved.” These great revolutions may well lay the foundations of improved prosperity just as the steel and petroleum revolutions did in the nineteenth century.


pages: 609 words: 159,043

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas, Don Thomas

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

While it is entirely possible that the payload specialist concept could have carried over to the ISS, the loss of two orbiters, the reliance on Russia’s Soyuz three-seat crew vehicles, and the resultant limitation of a six-person onboard crew have sharply reduced the available manpower for research aboard the station. Developmental contracts for commercial crew transport were awarded to the Boeing Company and Elon Musk’s SpaceX for more capable vehicles, but neither would fly before 2018, after arduous funding issues and technical delays. However, there is great promise for scientists and engineers to be able to conduct space-based microgravity research in a coming age of suborbital—and even orbital—private spaceflight.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In the end, success would forgive any sins, as it did for Gates and Jobs, and continues to do for countless startup entrepreneurs. Do we begrudge David the use of his sling, after all, against the towering giant Goliath? The Dog Shit Sandwich* Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. —Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX OCTOBER 2010 Adchemy was holding a legal gun to our heads. Fenwick & West provided us with our own gun, but the reality was we couldn’t afford a long-drawn-out standoff, as much because of the time as the money. The only way to win was to subtly find Murthy’s balls, and hold a cold, sharp knife up against them until he saw the light of reason.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Unleashing Europeans’ entrepreneurial spirit could make a huge difference quickly. Existing companies, governments and society as a whole need to be more willing to embrace risk. Think big We live in an age of diminished expectations. Europeans in particular tend to be afraid to venture out and try new things, let alone reach for the stars. We need more people like Elon Musk, a South-African-born entrepreneur. After making billions in the US from PayPal, the online payments system, he didn’t rest on his laurels. He founded Tesla, which makes fantastic (and profitable) electric cars. He set up SpaceX, a space travel company. Now he wants to build a Hyperloop – basically a solar-powered maglev train in a vacuum tube that would whisk passengers along at 760 miles (1,220 kilometres) an hour, three times faster than a high-speed train, and cost ten times less to build.705 Gloomsters argue that technological progress is grinding to a halt.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

That was fortunate, since once I had tossed them the keys to my future, they had slipped behind the wheel of my psyche and taken it careering over bumpy back roads and slick mountain switchbacks. My ego struggled to keep a grip. They were twenty-six years old, but not the first successful young people to pass through my career. At the Merc I had met with Elon Musk of Zip2, who sold his startup for $300 million at age twenty-eight before helping to found a new venture called PayPal. Successful young technology executives were the crabgrass of the Valley, popping up everywhere and self-confidently calling attention to their greenness as they choked out the existing paradigm in one field after another.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

utm_content=buffer868a0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer. 11 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven-in-ten-americans-have-news-fatigue-more-among-republicans/. 12 That was actually the following year. I’m obviously not cured. https://www.vanity-fair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x. 13 ‘Engine Roll Call’ by Thomas and Friends, from Thomas the Tank Engine. 30. Politics Poisons Everything 1 Kirk, The Conservative Mind. 2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-018-9487-z. 3 Time (12 August 2013). 4 https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1002637331692703744. 5 https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/just-a-reminder/; https://jaymans.word-press.com/2012/08/23/another-tale-of-two-maps/; http://www.jcrt.org/archives/12.3/ramos.pdf. 6 Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

“Yes,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2016, “some people will idle away their lives under my UBI plan. The question isn’t whether a UBI will discourage work, but whether it will make the existing problem significantly worse.” The approval of people on the right, and of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, does not make universal basic income a better idea, just a somewhat more politically plausible one. *1 During the panel discussion, Norm Pearlstine of Time Inc.—who now runs the freshly unionized Los Angeles Times—said he wasn’t too worried by the Internet: “I don’t think long-form journalism is much threatened,” he said


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

What if some combination of AI, robots, and autonomous vehicles actually means not just job disruption, but less demand for human workers in the private economy? What would our economic model be in an economy where there is no need for millions to work at all? Some, from presidential candidate Andrew Yang to Silicon Valley icons like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to former head of the SEIU Andy Stern, think this is a primary virtue of a universal basic income (UBI). If unprecedented technological advances make us wealthier, more productive, and less in need of workers, we need a different model of income support. But hold it. Even if it did come to pass that the private sector demands less labor, does that lead to “end of work” scenarios with massive job shortages?


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

They did not consider the intelligence of women to be intelligence; they did not consider a female understanding of human behavior to be knowledge. They built a machine to control and predict what they could not. They are the long-dead, white-whiskered grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. The Simulmatics Corporation is a missing link in the history of technology, a clasp that fastens the first half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, a future in which humanity’s every move is predicted by algorithms that attempt to direct and influence our each and every decision through the simulation of our very selves, this particular hell.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

When the police finally arrested him, he was having a sleepover at a friend’s house, staying up late, eating junk food, and watching the movie Goodfellas.60 Twenty years later, when a hack took over dozens of high-profile Twitter accounts, including those of former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joseph Biden, and business leaders Elon Musk and Bill Gates, the culprit was a seventeen-year-old named Graham Ivan Clark who lived in Tampa and wanted to sell user names.61 Stories like Mafiaboy and Clark’s Twitter takeover generate headlines that often confuse as much as they clarify. The truth is, not every nefarious actor in cyberspace poses a national security threat.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

They wanted Apple to make a car. At the time, Tesla was in the process of doubling its staff and plowing money into the development of more sophisticated batteries for its electric vehicles. The electric vehicle company was recruiting dozens of Apple engineers, who told former colleagues that the company’s founder, Elon Musk, was going to be the next Jobs. In nearby Mountain View, Google had been working on its own self-driving car and trying to partner with established automakers to bring it to roads nationwide in a few years. The entire peninsula buzzed with the possibility of a transportation revolution. A group of engineers gathered in a conference room to discuss how to proceed.


pages: 1,331 words: 163,200

Hands-On Machine Learning With Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, backpropagation, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't repeat yourself, duck typing, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, machine translation, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, OpenAI, optical character recognition, P = NP, p-value, pattern recognition, pull request, recommendation engine, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, SpamAssassin, speech recognition, stochastic process

(e) was reproduced from Pixabay, released under Creative Commons CC0. 6 It is often better to give the poor performers a slight chance of survival, to preserve some diversity in the “gene pool.” 7 If there is a single parent, this is called asexual reproduction. With two (or more) parents, it is called sexual reproduction. An offspring’s genome (in this case a set of policy parameters) is randomly composed of parts of its parents’ genomes. 8 OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company, funded in part by Elon Musk. Its stated goal is to promote and develop friendly AIs that will benefit humanity (rather than exterminate it). 9 “Simple Statistical Gradient-Following Algorithms for Connectionist Reinforcement Learning,” R. Williams (1992). 10 We already did something similar in Chapter 11 when we discussed Gradient Clipping: we first computed the gradients, then we clipped them, and finally we applied the clipped gradients. 11 “A Markovian Decision Process,” R.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

For extensive discussions that have helped clarify my thinking I am grateful to a large set of people, including Ross Andersen, Stuart Armstrong, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Nick Beckstead, David Chalmers, Paul Christiano, Milan Ćirković, Daniel Dennett, David Deutsch, Daniel Dewey, Eric Drexler, Peter Eckersley, Amnon Eden, Owain Evans, Benja Fallenstein, Alex Flint, Carl Frey, Ian Goldin, Katja Grace, J. Storrs Hall, Robin Hanson, Demis Hassabis, James Hughes, Marcus Hutter, Garry Kasparov, Marcin Kulczycki, Shane Legg, Moshe Looks, Willam MacAskill, Eric Mandelbaum, James Martin, Lillian Martin, Roko Mijic, Vincent Mueller, Elon Musk, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Toby Ord, Dennis Pamlin, Derek Parfit, David Pearce, Huw Price, Martin Rees, Bill Roscoe, Stuart Russell, Anna Salamon, Lou Salkind, Anders Sandberg, Julian Savulescu, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Nicholas Shackel, Murray Shanahan, Noel Sharkey, Carl Shulman, Peter Singer, Dan Stoicescu, Jaan Tallinn, Alexander Tamas, Max Tegmark, Roman Yampolskiy, and Eliezer Yudkowsky.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

, have faded away, while those connected to hot new mobile Internet apps—including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Eric Lefkofsky of Groupon, and Jan Koum of WhatsApp—have risen up to the billionaire list in recent years. Though Silicon Valley has seen protests over the growing disparity between techies and low-paid service workers, on the national stage tech tycoons are treated as celebrities. The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose interests range from electric supercars to space tourism, is celebrated in scholarly reviews on how he is “changing the world.” There are many billionaire folk heroes from Silicon Valley, largely because consumers love the services they provide. WhatsApp gained seven hundred million followers in its first six years in business, which is more than Christianity gained in its first nineteen centuries, as Forbes magazine has pointed out.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The newspapers closely followed Thomas Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” and Americans prided themselves on his ingenuity. The Wright brothers, who invented the heavier-than-air plane, and Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, also became celebrities and heroes (in the case of Lindbergh, notwithstanding his repellent personal views). There was not one Elon Musk, there were dozens. The stature of science and technology peaked in the two decades following World War II. In the American mind, the victories of science were literal and existential, with triumph over the Axis due in no small part to the contributions of the scientific and technical establishment, especially the Manhattan Project.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

And those jobs, it expects, will require a very different set of skills.39 The main reason why warehouses still employ large swaths of the population is that order picking remains a largely manual process. Humans still hold the comparative advantage in complex perception and manipulation tasks. But here, too, AI has made many recent breakthroughs possible. At the OpenAI lab in San Francisco, California, set up by Elon Musk, a robotic five-fingered hand called Dactyl bears witness to impressive progress in recent years: “If you give Dactyl an alphabet block and ask it to show you particular letters—let’s say the red O, the orange P and the blue I—it will show them to you and spin, twist and flip the toy in nimble ways.”40 Though this is an easy task for any human, the achievement lies in the fact that AI allows Dactyl to learn new tasks, largely on its own through trial and error.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Doudna, who was sitting in the front row, later declared, “I literally had chills running down my spine” as she savored the latest power upgrade to the CRISPR toolbox. The media reaction to prime editing was extraordinary, even overshadowing Google’s claim of “quantum supremacy” published the same week. Commentators and journalists gushed about this gorgeous new “CRISPR 3.0” technology. The breakthrough even caught Elon Musk’s attention, who retweeted a New Scientist story. Urnov was much in demand, obligingly dashing off a different analogy for each reporter who called. For Scientific American, prime editing was like a new breed of dog. For STAT, it was a new superhero joining the Avengers. For Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, it was a college sports star preparing to join the professional leagues.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Exhibit C: The fact that xkcd, a web-based comic devoted to “romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” has any audience at all. Even more astonishing, at least to me, is that this new popular culture is a youth culture. The kids who are searching for an exciting life no longer want to be rock stars, or rap stars, but rather Silicon Valley–style tech stars. They want to be Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk. As readers will discover, technology entrepreneurs have never made particularly good role models. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell essentially invented the role of the twenty-something Silicon Valley CEO almost a half century ago—and he may have been the baddest bad boy that the Valley has ever seen.


Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, the medium is the message

As I have written in Mission to Mars and elsewhere, that planet, not the moon, has always been my favorite. I used to joke that I flew to the wrong place, and that NASA should be renamed NAMA, the National Aeronautics and Mars Administration. But NASA it is, and today, for the first time since the days of Wernher von Braun, two names are recognizable in the world of spaceflight: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They seem to be able to do things faster and cheaper than the government, and a generation that never knew Apollo is awakening to the prospect of further space exploration. Musk is a billionaire, and Bezos is the richest person on the planet. Musk is specializing in reusable rockets, but ultimately wants to colonize Mars, starting as early as 2020 with the unmanned Blue Dragon, and then with an expedition crew of one hundred.


pages: 1,331 words: 183,137

Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff

bioinformatics, bitcoin, Donald Knuth, duck typing, Elon Musk, Firefox, fizzbuzz, functional programming, mandelbrot fractal, Morris worm, MVC pattern, natural language processing, reproducible builds, side project, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Turing test, type inference, WebSocket

We’re used to types passing mut access along from the parent to the child, from the container to the contents. You only expect to be able to call mut methods on starships[id].engine if you have a mut reference to starships to begin with (or you own starships, in which case congratulations on being Elon Musk). That’s the default, because if you don’t have exclusive access to the parent, Rust generally has no way of ensuring that you have exclusive access to the child. But Mutex does have a way: the lock. In fact, a mutex is little more than a way to do exactly this, to provide exclusive (mut) access to the data inside, even though many threads may have shared (non-mut) access to the Mutex itself.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

An Enlightenment.18 * * * Prominent among the existential risks that supposedly threaten the future of humanity is a 21st-century version of the Y2K bug. This is the danger that we will be subjugated, intentionally or accidentally, by artificial intelligence (AI), a disaster sometimes called the Robopocalypse and commonly illustrated with stills from the Terminator movies. As with Y2K, some smart people take it seriously. Elon Musk, whose company makes artificially intelligent self-driving cars, called the technology “more dangerous than nukes.” Stephen Hawking, speaking through his artificially intelligent synthesizer, warned that it could “spell the end of the human race.”19 But among the smart people who aren’t losing sleep are most experts in artificial intelligence and most experts in human intelligence.20 The Robopocalypse is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a modern scientific understanding.21 In this conception, intelligence is an all-powerful, wish-granting potion that agents possess in different amounts.