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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

#451

Post by contingencies »

pms wrote: post #444
contingencies wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it PayPal essentially helped an established incumbent monopoly (US credit card companies) with issues at the time maintain and extend its global relevance, lock down domination of cross-border consumer payments, meaningfully extend US intelligence sector surveillance, and continue to fuck the little guy. Only Europe and China are building a resistance now, 15 years later. That you have 5 or 10 rich peop…

It sounds interesting. Could you give some pointers to read more about this?

There are numerous reports from NGOs about the social impact of the credit card system and some reports from European Parliament detailing the use of financial systems for US surveillance, most recently around the fiasco resulting in SWIFT2 (aka SWIFT1 with a different name and more servers). A key recent instance of the political use of financial systems is the blocking of Iran from SWIFT, well documented to have been campaigned by Israel via the US defence establishment. They eventually convinced Europe to sign off on it too... amusingly India just said "we'll stop using cash for oil and ship them gold instead". Also http://www.scribd.com/doc/215642587/Finance-and-the-Future-B... (my talk from HAR2009)

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#452

Post by ptero »

johnloeber wrote: post #351

I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. I don't have the time to listen to the interview, I just want to read the transcript. They could have just pasted it in a reader-friendly format, but instead it's in an annoying Scribd applet. I don't want to sign up for their service or download the app, not to mention that it's a terrible mobile reader anyway. This was very disappointing.

Yes. I looked at it on my phone, then thought screw it. I will read it when I'm behind a real monitor.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#453

Post by brain5ide »

odbol_ wrote: post #365
Paul_S wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument isn't about soul-sucking jobs, but about jobs that don't contribute to society. I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy cold-calling and scamming people. But to address your argument: you missed the "opportunity" bit. If you're a well-off, well educated person you can choose to do whatever you feel like and I'm sure some people do without worrying about money (perhaps they have lots already). Most…

HN's privilege is showing pretty badly here in these comments. Seem to be completely oblivious to the oppressive squalor that most the world lives in, only thinking about which high-paying cushy job they should take to "change the world."

Well you know, we were talking about Elon Musk after all. So that kinda assumes, that we're not talking about jobs for survival kind of situation. Even if it is the vast majority of population.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#454

Post by mcv »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #446
codecamper wrote: post #445

Elon says we must be careful to get AI right. However, the value of his company is already based on the premise of self driving cars. Self driving cars will cause a pretty massive shift in the world. I'm all for it & really think that most people suck at driving. However... I have a hard time following his advice of getting AI right while is plan is to profit immensely from AI. Maybe his moral compass is telling him…

The term AI has two somewhat separate meanings and you're equivocating. Which is unsurprising, given that Musk himself is not saying anything to separate them. Anyways. The AI we must be careful with is "strong AI", that is, human level in all or most intellectual endeavours. The AI he will profit with is "weak AI", or the current and foreseeable AI technology. We don't need to be careful with that one, but not as mu…

Strong AI is fantasy AI in my opinion. We're not interested in creating artificial well-rounded humans, we're interested in automating specific, complicated tasks. Like driving a car. And in some ways, AI is already better than us at driving cars; less accidents, always perfect attention, etc.

But AI without a real purpose but that can think and feel the way we do? I see no reason why anyone would put that in charge of ICBMs.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#455

Post by swiley »

enraged_camel wrote: post #385
johnloeber wrote: post #351

I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. I don't have the time to listen to the interview, I just want to read the transcript. They could have just pasted it in a reader-friendly format, but instead it's in an annoying Scribd applet. I don't want to sign up for their service or download the app, not to mention that it's a terrible mobile reader anyway. This was very disappointing.

>>I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. You are surprised? Are you forgetting that Hacker News itself was, as of a few months ago, a horrible experience on mobile?

It's always been well behaved and predictable though. And if you have a mobile browser that forces text to wrap when you zoom in (I don't know how you brows the web without this) then it really was fine.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#456

Post by keyle »

"Most of my time is spent designing things".

Woah that hit home. I wish I could run a business without businessy things. How do you find the right people?! I'm a really good tech guy and designer. I can whip up anything, I've just never found the right person to sell it and deal with other humans.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#457

Post by mcv »

Noos wrote: post #418
kstenerud wrote: post #105

It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd. "Yes, he ushered in the electric car revolution, but the production carbon footprint is still huge!" "Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!" "Yes, he's paving the way to Mars, but what has he done for world hunger?" And it not just with Musk, but really with anyone who has been successful. I would have t…

To be fair though, Tesla cars are an expensive luxury brand and have no real revolutionary potential at the moment. The revolution is to make affordable electric cars and the infrastructure to build them, and there are serious doubts about how much Tesla can scale to that. It's similar to electric bicycles, in that there are some masterfully engineered, high tech ones out there...at the cost of a decent used motorcyc…

But Tesla's goal is exactly that: to make electric cars affordable and create the necessary infrastructure for them. And he does that by starting with the market segment where it's easiest to get started: high margin sports cars and luxury cars, and working his way down from there.

It'll be a while before his electric cars can really compete with cheap cars, but I'm sure he'll get there. He's making good progress.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#458

Post by huuu »

Lately I'm very concerned about my posture. Now I'm watching two people who both have a bad posture like me (hunchback, forward head). And I'm sure this is becoming a problem in the 'read from a screen all day' age.

So the future of better interfaces (with your brain) Elon is talking about might be also much better for our health.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#459

Post by awesomerobot »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #349
Paul_S wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the people working in marketing, software patent lawyers, drug dealers? You want them to quit their jobs? --- Let me make my point in a less obtuse way. Most people make decisions about their careers based on opportunity and maximising profit. No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place. This would all be fine as long as the capitalist market rewarded choices that make the world a bett…

...make the world a better place. Just what the hell does anyone even mean by "make the world a better place"?! I am willing to bet that if we held a forum to settle what a "better world" means, we'd have to adjourn it with no resolution. The questions of better world for whom, and on what terms, by what definition, what expense and, oh yeah, who pays the bill and why would never find one conclusion. What you really…

Hitler thought he was making the world a better place.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#460

Post by tim333 »

rpedela wrote: post #378

I would be far more interested in how to build a successful business. Everyone asks Elon about his big ideas, but how do you turn those big ideas into reality, specifically? I have never seen anyone ask him those questions. I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Jessica Livingston because that was the primary topic. A missed opportunity in my opinion. I hope the rest of the interviews are more about the nuts and bol…

>What worked for PayPal but not the other companies and why?

Amusingly if you read chapter 1 of Founders at Work quite a big part of what worked at PayPal may have been firing Elon Musk. Max Levchin largely built PayPal tech wise using Unix and then it was merged with Musk's X.com and Musk became CEO and wanted to switch everything to Windows.

>Levchin: The three of us are pretty good friends now. At the time, already I had hated the guy's guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like,"You gotta go, man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.

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