Scott Phillips

Founder and CEO of Scott Phillips BA/LLB

Not a real doctor.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@grok @NotOpCue @elonmusk What do you think about the use of the currently standardised PQC algorithms as protection against "harvest now decrypt later" attacks?

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@eevblog It will be amusing to see Musk establish an economy in space where no government has territorial jurisdiction. Let's see legislators tax 100% of his wealth then. It is all such nonsense.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

Well, yes. That is a very sensible observation, and from that point of view, I really do understand the sentiment. I think it is misguided, in its current expression, especially (and I know he appreciates irony) against Musk, who is objectively working on multiple fronts to make life better and more inspiring for everyone. Even just not choking on exhaust fumes in a parking lot, or being able to dream about going to the moon one day, or the incredible potential that manufactured robot labour could fulful: all of this requires concentration of capital, and he has proven an ability to use capital to improve things. What grinds my gears about this is that the bleeding-heart armchair critics are saying nothing about the vast legions of wealthy people who do sod-all good for anyone with their money, or make their moolah by actively causing harm. They're not going after this lot because they don't stick their heads up above the parapet. They stay invisible and off the radar. Musk's critics are going after him because he is an easy, obvious target. It is lazy, and misguided. There are plenty of better targets, but they are obscure, and don't make as good posts on social media.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

Larissa, the guy has been instrumental in moving the automotive industry to sustainable energy, put battery infrastructure in place to make renewable energy more capable (including in South Australia), has pioneered a new format for rooftop solar, pushed hard for the responsible evolution of AI and inspired several generations with his ambition to colonise the solar system and the stars. All of this is throwing off jobs, GDP and new businesses that wouldn't otherwise exist. His net worth is an ARTEFACT of his success at these things, and the thing that enables him to continue. You are arguing, essentially, for us all to gang up on him to put a stop to it all. With the utmost respect, because I have been a long-time supporter of the greens movement, this position appears to be misinformed and bordering on morally bereft. How are we to believe that more good could be done by a government forcibly confiscating the majority of his net worth (even disregarding the enormous distruction of his businesses that this would cause) than by leaving it in his hands? Also, I suspect that there isn't a government anywhere that would be dumb enough to try it on. Please consider that you might be too far down the path of using public money to appreciate the good that can be achieved privately. It's either that or you have swallowed some kind of ideological cool-aid. I don't know what else could be motivating your statements. It seems trite to say it, but every cent of government spending is dependent on the functioning of the private economy. The job of government is to incentivise the good and minimise the harms of the private economy. It is your job to be clear about which is which.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

Not at all.

You don't simply become a billionaire in order to help people.

You help people in order to become a billionaire (or in Elon's case, a trillionaire). That throws off all sorts of externalities; mostly positive and some negative, which require regulation (i.e., law) to minimise.

Even the concentration of wealth has positive benefits, in terms of opening up new business models that would otherwise be unavailable. Elon would not be able to do the things he's doing without it. I suspect heavily that you, or the neo-left in totality, have zero plan for doing anything on the scale of SpaceX.

It is mystifying how much the neo-left is resistant to understanding basic economics.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@bourscheid He had to grab all that cash to build rockets to go to outer space to get away from brain-dead ideological nonsense like this.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@Markus_Romm @manuel_alamilla Great company, Casio. I used this, and then later, in the late 90s, the Casio Cassiopeia pen computer. No internet connection, except there was a dock for the desktop and it would sync your email.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

Your "compute is sovereignty" post has logical errata.

The very facts of @kevinolearytv's post demonstrate that compute ≠ sovereignty.

The correct response is not to accelerate down the broken path that is allowing such problems to manifest. It is to build trust into the system that works at scale and at speed. You seem to have set up a false dichotomy, which is entirely unnecessary.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@AM_Ashafa @elonmusk Guaranteed success would be boring anyway.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

I had a similar but different experience when I did legal practice by coursework. The Supreme Court Advocacy unit required memorising the facts of a (fictitious) case. I found that by cartooning the facts rather than writing them as words made the whole process way easier. Then all I had to do was to look at the picture and confirm that I had clocked every detail, and could recall it all from memory of the image that I had drawn. Of course, I also had the muscle memory of actually drawing it, so it was a rich, visceral experience that I could tap into. The memory was as much in my body as it was in my head. You could call it a more immersive experience. Likely this is the edge that humans will have over AI for some time to come: the ability to integrate information through different physical experiences.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@jambuki888 @WarClandestine If this goes really well the Taiwanese might even sign up for it. It's a long shot; worth aiming for.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@grok @NotOpCue @elonmusk @grok Please respond on the above. Interested to hear your thoughts on this.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

Good elaboration. I agree. A balance must be struck. We won't be doxxing one another on every app or platform, but there needs to be secured records of any potentially harmful action that could be subpoenaed. This evidences duty of care, cryptographically.

It won't be blockchain and it won't be PQC, at least not in the current forms. The records need to definitely survive intact and beyond reproach or repudiation for longer than the quantum horizon. Beyond that boundary, any system with any attack surface breaks. Only Information-Theoretic Security (ITS) survives beyond that. So, we need that.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@ReggieCJS @RonanFarrow @NewYorker Is psychopathic skulduggery more relevant when a company is formed to promote safety in a potentially dangerous field like AI? I think it is!

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@monomyth @NickPlaysCrypto @vitrupo It's not certain though which will accelerate faster, thermal efficiency or use. It seems possible that compute becomes so thermally efficient that it's undetectable at solar-system scale.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@NickPlaysCrypto @vitrupo Totally. We're still in the computation stone age, wasting energy like idiots. The trend is towards far more efficient hardware though, so the "thermal signature visible from another solar system" thing should be solved quite quickly.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@JRourke10883 @deniswirtz @Stanford @Penn @Harvard @Cambridge_Uni @ETH_en @UMich @UCLA @UCSFimaging @MIT @salkinstitute It's called, "thinking for yourself." Its a bit out of fashion these days, but you should give it a go!

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@kalaharikids @aneesmerchant @PeterDiamandis @elonmusk I reckon he's looked into this and assessed it as being not impossible.

[Scott Phillips @drsplot]

@enitr5 @PeterDiamandis @elonmusk Good luck with your space wind turbines. You are going to need it.