The best time to use fear is during the novelty phase of a transformation: people are very attentive but almost entirely ignorant, have no experiential knowledge, cannot consult family and friends because none of them are extremely early adopters. It is within this window of maximum vulnerability that apocalyptic narratives win.
Time decays the power of the false but terrifying narrative. it has happened many times before: population explosion, climate, virus, crypto, now AI
Knowledge and experience destroy the false narrative so the strategy of fear must work quickly before truth has time to manifest itself.
@pmarca First it was Y2K,then nuclear war; then some virus coupled with climate change; now AI........tomorrow it will be humanoid robots
Armageddon is a compelling narrative for people who substitute thought for fashion.
The popular narrative in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington DC is not remotely related to the popular conversation on Main Street. It rarely is but there are periods when the divergence becomes so large that society approaches a cusp : The "let them eat cake" elites either become massively entrenched or they encounter the guillotine.
There are some tech executives who believe the purpose of their company is to control not elevate others. They claim magical abilities and the witch doctor's authority because the purpose of magic is power not illumination.
75 to 100 years ago these people would have favored eugenics because that was the majority view of the social and scientific elites.
In his book "That Hideous Strength" CS Lewis anticipated the hubris and the stunted humanity of some of today's AI bosses.
Dorothy Sayers : ""For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly. First... the Creative Idea... Second... the Creative Energy... Third... the Creative Power... And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity."
A hundred such academies would greatly augment the human capital of America which would lead to step increases in productivity, income and investable savings for ordinary families. In turn this would strengthen democracy and capital markets and expose the negative value added of non- STEM college degrees.
Abandoned college campuses would be quite suited for domiciling workforce academies.
For young people AI anxiety would be replaced by AI hope because they would participate directly in the 4th industrial age.
@alive_ At present AI is an idiot savant pretending to be a polymath.
Value the idiot savant for its superhuman ability in a very narrow domain but confusing it with a polymath leads to emotional, cultural and financial pain.
Just because a good is a commodity does not mean producers have no pricing power. It depends entirely on how much spare capacity there is relative to demand.
Consider oil, helium, urea ,sulfur or copper markets today. In capacity constrained markets commodity producers earn extraordinary returns on investment.
If compute is constrained compared to demand, for whatever reason, then commodity models will have pricing power over tokens.
@JTLonsdale When a child cannot or wont do the homework she says the dog ate it. When this child becomes CEO and wont or cannot adapt to technological and economic change she says AI ate it.
SpaceX is building an intelligent physical swarm in space. Tesla is building two intelligent physical swarms(Robotaxi, Optimus) on Earth. The swarms converge; therefore, the companies converge.
The combination is propelled by engineering and physics.
The financial combination is a consequence not the primary motive.
The kulturkampf is between the idle, narcissistic, rich and the aspirational class. Inherited privilege always collides with merited success. Merit rebukes unearned privilege and exposes it's falsity, so privilege seeks to crush merit.
The war is as old as civilization; only the vocabulary and battlefield changes.
@KTmBoyle Dostoevsky: "โHe was so carried away by his simulated emotion, that he was for one moment almost believing it himself.โ
โNothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.โ
โ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
Socrates: "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."
C.S. Lewis: "The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life."
@elonmusk Knowing something and acting on it within a specific context are 2 entirely different things.
Only exceptional founder-builders can act on first principles. This is why very few start ups and growth businesses are based on genuine first principles.
All material progress turns high time price goods and services into low time price goods and services. Time cannot be debased by a government nor expanded or compressed by human action. Time ( at the speed of daily life on Earth) is the one absolute metric and constraint..
Declining time prices turn astonishing luxuries into basic utilities within 2 to 3 generations.
Good time management leads to upward mobility; bad time management leads to downward mobility.
There are people who understand what a singular person is and support that person despite current numbers, which are backward looking and reflect past actions. Then there are people too vain or too ignorant to accept the reality of a singular person and seek to both deny and destroy the reality.
How people think about SPCX-TSLA reveals a lot about how they think about themselves.
SPCX is ,by far, the most capital efficient builder of AI compute. It will , with the merger of TSLA, become the biggest when TSLA fixed and mobile compute is added to the company.
When a company is both the most capital efficient builder and has the most relevant capacity it becomes the preferred provider of compute to the digital intelligence eco system. Then it can be compared to neither a neo cloud nor a hyperscaler. It occupies its own category: Megascaler.
SPCX has clearly indicated that its AI compute revenue will follow the same inexorable trajectory as its launch and Starlink revenue: small beginnings, routinely dismissed, to gathering momentum to explosive growth : dominant in launch, then in internet/cell phone service, then in compute for rent.
What is the multiple on triple dominance?