> "If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment"
This one has been around FOREVER but he was surprised to hear it this year? doubtful. I think Sam actually picked safe examples for his contrarian essay. e.g Notably absent Damore.
Government policy would cave-in if the private companies lacked innovation and told them it was impossible. You need existence proofs like Tesla, who are highly leveraged to making EVs work and don't care a wit about preserving the old business.
I think if you have good natural instincts about artificial intelligence you realize that Hinton really is the god in this space. If you don't, you get distracted by LeCunn and Schmidhuber and whatever lesser minds. The capsule theory here is maybe not the best implementation, but the intuition behind it is still leading the way. The undifferentiated mass of neurons is not how evolution has solved our problems. 3d geometry is intrinsic to the low level design. It shouldn't be learned. It should be assumed.
I reject your generic devotion to process. The real leadership and the process are far different. The process of peer review might do a good job of rejecting bad ideas, but it does a lousy job of accepting revolutionary ideas. I bet you don't understand the difference.
I'm mostly only interested when they pass us on per capita income. It is notable though that some of their megacorps are achieving valuations akin to our largest. Maybe some day they will have a global brand.
Gah -- reminds me of the press at the time talking about detectable radiation on the West Coast of the US. Yeah -- you know what else is detectable radiation? Stars from light-years away. I was shocked to see Germany respond so strongly to Fukushima. I think fortunately for the world solar and wind have become so cheap we can give up on making the world more rational about nuclear power.
He wasn't saying that air resistance is currently a problem. The current problem is that the robots don't move fast enough for air resistance to be a problem. He's basically pushing the question 'Going faster is obviously good. What happens if we go really really fast?'
My memory of this was that Google PR thought that humanoid robots might end up leading to associations with automation and job destruction. Also, it was never clear to me how much influence the PR position had vs. other reasons.
People generally don't give money away for nothing, and spend it carefully, so when someone figures out how to get a lot of people to pay them for something, I figure that's pretty high evidence they've done something helpful. Certainly exceptions exist.
Think about it, if you have even the remotest capability in reading DL research and simultaneously a decently impressive ability to gab, you can sell a startup idea to GM/Ford/etc. for billions on no real insight. Of course some of these people are gonna stew angrily about whether their 500k compensation is the limit. I bet anyone making that 300k+ at Netflix thinks they could easily do some basic spinoff utilizing their main job objective and further they could use the Netflix background as a credential. It gets ludicrous, but you'll never have much better than what Netflix right now is achieving in employee satisfaction. In fact it's a wonder it's so good.
I agree that cobalt is a fairly small proportion of the total cost of the vehicle. Tesla should be able to weather many multiples in the increase in cobalt price. I'm more worried about the dreadful notion of a complete supply disruption (akin to 70s oil crisis). I don't think this is a common situation and is generally unlikely in most markets but with cobalt there is a confluence of factors that seems to make it more likely: the byproduct of nickel/copper effect, the political factor in DNC, the lead-time to new mines, the potential for alternative chemistries to pop up and obviate cobalt, the generally pessimistic view of EVs outside of the narrow pro-Tesla, California green circle, etc. I basically think it's possible that the EV growth curve (50+% Y/Y kind of stuff) is only believed by Tesla and a relatively few people, and that these people aren't particularly common in mining circles.
My general perspective is that Tesla should derisk the miners by putting some money upfront on a contractual basis. Maybe it's Panasonic that does this. I'm happy to see that the rumor is the price spike to 25$\lb was brought on by hedge fund speculators. I think that's a perfect example of how Wall Street greed is actually good. The high price signal helps motivate the entire supply chain.
Out of curiosity, why do you think you included 'not the biggest fan'?