Elon Musk

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.”

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“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.

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.

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.,” 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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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“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.

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?

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“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.”

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“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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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“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.

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!

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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.

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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.

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.

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“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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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(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.

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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.

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/?

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_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?

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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 .

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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“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.

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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?”

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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“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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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).

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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).

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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?

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.

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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.

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,’” 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?

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.

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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).

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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.

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.

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* * * 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.

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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

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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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. . . .

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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.

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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.

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.

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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).

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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“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.”

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.

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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.

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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).

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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“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.

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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.

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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“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?

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.

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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.”

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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.”

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