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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

ycombinator.com

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Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might have a valid point but the point is off-topic. Here the context is technology, not politics or economic policies.

Haha, yes, technology has nothing to do with politics or economics, of course.

Focus. Some people want to focus on the tech side. If you want to focus on politics side, go ahead and do it.

I understand the technology focus though, policy is probably the worst possible use of your time if you want to help, and it carries a great risk of turning you into an evil person.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#112
"But we're extremely bandwidth-constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself. And helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be, I think, very important in the future as well. Yeah."

After working and consulting with labs while building/hacking software/hardware for neural interfaces and seeing where the field is now, I have very little hope. Too much bureaucracy, and too much (darpa) money going after red queens races (lets not even get started at all the private/nih money flowing into some labs funding even more technologically incompetent PI's) at least in neuroimaging, and companies lining up to get MIT postdocs to peddle their latest and greatest toys.

I even had to find someone willing to write my grant and go through the submission process for an abstract (not even the full proposal) for DARPA-BAA-16-33, because despite calling for "BTO seeks unconventional approaches that are outside the mainstream, challenge assumptions, and have the potential to radically change established practice, lead to extraordinary outcomes, and create entirely new fields.", apparently an email submission is just not ok despite having co authored in this area and currently designing BCI related hardware and software in the open in my free time compared to a lot of newly minted assoc. profs struggling to get their matlab scripts (that someone else probably wrote years ago) to run on cluster their uni just spend 10's of millions on again this year expanding, forget understanding how any of the machines from which data is collected (and can barely analyze themselves) actually work…

Yeah… semonga berhasil ;)

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#113

>I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design. Uh... that's not really a CEO's job though.

A CEO's job is to delegate responsibilities, and an essential part of delegation is deciding what to delegate, and what to handle yourself. The latter depends on the CEO's passion and skillset, and since engineering and design is where Musk's lies, that is what he focuses on. Most CEOs have humanities or social sciences backgrounds, so they focus on the non-engineering aspects of the business.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#114
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly very interesting, in fact I wrote this down when I heard it. And if you look at the projects he's working on (Renewable energy, cars able to powered by renewable energy, and preserving life outside of Earth), they all affect a great portion of humanity, and have a very large affect.

Affect like how? As of today they're useless, except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.

Tesla's energy storage enables people to use solar energy at night, without the process being a big hassle. If it gets cheap enough, it will make solar power competitive with fossil power in most scenarios. Currently, the battery installations are a cost-competitive alternative to fossil ways of covering peak load. Calling it useless is probably a stretch.

Ditto with Tesla's cars; they aren't a drop-in replacement for gasoline cars in all scenarios but I've heard more than one Tesla owner say that they will never buy a gas-powered car again. So obviously that implies greater utility for the person in question than any current gas-powered car.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#117
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly very interesting, in fact I wrote this down when I heard it. And if you look at the projects he's working on (Renewable energy, cars able to powered by renewable energy, and preserving life outside of Earth), they all affect a great portion of humanity, and have a very large affect.

Affect like how? As of today they're useless, except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.

I suppose I should have wrote "will affect". If we end up colonizing Mars, or even getting one person to land on Mars, I think Space X will have been involved in creating competition in the aerospace industry at the least.

My point was that his ideas are ones that have potential for huge amounts of change. Whether or not we will see that change is another matter.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#119
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since when did entrepreneurs decided to speak in scifi-bullshit? "We have a digital tertiary self in the form of out email capabilities, our computers, phones, applications." It's not sci-fi, it's a legitimate view. It's basically the opposite of the common "omg children today are spending too much time with computers, this is unnatural, they should communicate more face to face instead of texting so much" bullshit…

The way you say it is a legitimate view. The way he says it is just pontifying. As for the idea that our tools and thoughts are a part of us, it goes way back. As for the PhD thing, I just wanted to mention how arrogant he is. He could at least have some respect for these poor losers.

I'll bet he has plenty of respect for the "poor losers" but little for those who took advantage of them (PhD programs).
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