The stock prices of Tesla jumped 45 per cent in as investors are taking a keen interest in electric cars. Elon Musk had co-founded the electric car company Tesla in He derives two-thirds of his net worth from Tesla Inc. His 21 per cent stake in Tesla discounted for loan obligations comprises the bulk of his fortune.
Take Weekly Tests on app for exam prep and compete with others. Today, there are still many flood geologists making their case. Contrary to what is widely believed, radioactive dating has not proven the rocks of the Grand Canyon to be millions of years old. The vast majority of the sedimentary layers in the Grand Canyon were deposited as the result of a global flood that occurred after and as a result of the initial sin that took place in the Garden of Eden.
It makes sense. Whether religious or not, most people who read this site are big on data, evidence, and accuracy. Whatever role faith plays in the spiritual realm, what most of us agree on is that when seeking answers to our questions about the age of the Earth, the history of our species, the causes of lightning, or any other physical phenomenon in the universe, data and logic are far more effective tools than faith and scripture.
But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength— to nanometers. I need to find a girlfriend. I think maybe even another five to 10 — how much time does a woman want a week?
Maybe 10 hours? MuskSpeak is a language that describes everyday parts of life as exactly what they actually, literally are. There are plenty of instances of technical situations when we all agree that MuskSpeak makes much more sense than normal human parlance—.
When you or I look at kids, we see small, dumb, cute people. When Musk looks at his five kids, he sees five of his favorite computers. When he looks at you, he sees a computer. And when he looks in the mirror, he sees a computer— his computer. At its simplest definition, a computer is an object that can store and process data—which the brain certainly is. And of course, not all clay is equal—each brain begins as a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses across a wide range of processes and capabilities.
As I wrote the other three posts in this series, I looked at everything I was learning about Musk—the things he says, the decisions he makes, the missions he takes on and how he approaches them—as clues to how his underlying software works.
Eventually, the clues piled up and the shape of the software began to reveal itself. This box contains anything in life where you want Situation A to turn into Situation B. Some examples:. It contains all things that are possible:. The overlap of the Want and Reality boxes is the Goal Pool, where your goal options live: 3.
And how do you cause something to change? You direct your power towards it. Once a goal has been selected, you know the direction in which to point your power. One reasonable hypothesis is that the Earth is flat, but until we have tools and techniques that can be used to prove or disprove that hypothesis, it is an open question.
A scientist gathers together only what he or she knows to be true—the first principles—and uses those as the puzzle pieces with which to construct a conclusion. Reasoning from first principles is a hard thing to do in life, and Musk is a master at it. Brain software has four major decision-making centers:.
Musk works through each of these boxes by reasoning from first principles. Filling in the Want box from first principles requires a deep, honest, and independent understanding of yourself. Filling in the Reality box requires the clearest possible picture of the actual facts of both the world and your own abilities. The Goal Pool should double as a Goal Selection Laboratory that contains tools for intelligently measuring and weighing options.
And strategies should be formed based on what you know, not on what is typically done. These ones:. Except then what happens when quantum mechanics comes around and shows that general relativity fails to apply on a tiny scale and that a new set of laws is needed to account for those cases.
There are no axioms or proofs in science because nothing is for sure and everything we feel sure about might be disproven. Usually, the best we can do is a strong hunch based on what data we have. And in science, a hunch is called a hypothesis. Which works like this:. Hypotheses are built to be tested. Testing a hypothesis can disprove it or strengthen it, and if it passes enough tests, it can be upgraded to a theory. So after Musk builds his conclusions from first principles, what does he do?
He tests the shit out of them, continually, and adjusts them regularly based on what he learns. You begin by reasoning from first principles to A fill in the Want box, B fill in the Reality box, C select a goal from the pool, and D build a strategy—and then you get to work. But the goal-achievement strategy you came up with was just your first crack. It was a hypothesis, ripe for testing. You test a strategy hypothesis one way: action.
You pour your power into the strategy and see what happens. As you do this, data starts flowing in—results, feedback, and new information from the outside world. Certain parts of your strategy hypothesis might be strengthened by this new data, others might be weakened, and new ideas may have sprung to life in your head through the experience—but either way, some adjustment is usually called for:.
As this strategy loop spins and your power becomes more and more effective at accomplishing your goal, other things are happening down below. For someone reasoning from first principles, the Want box at any given time is a snapshot of their innermost desires the last time they thought hard about it. So even if something in the Want box was correct at one point, as you change, it may lose its place in the box. The Want box should serve the current inner you as best possible, which requires you to update it, something you do through reflection:.
On the other side of the aisle, the Reality box is also going through a process. It takes into account both the state of the world and your own abilities. And as your own abilities change and grow, the world changes even faster.
Filling in your Reality box from first principles is a great challenge, and keeping the box current so that it matches actual reality takes continual work. For each of these areas, the box represents the current hypothesis and the circle represents the source of new information that can be used to adjust the hypothesis. What we see is a goal formation mechanism below and a goal attainment mechanism above. One thing goal attainment often requires is laser focus.
To get the results we want, we zoom in on the micro picture, sinking our teeth into our goal and honing in on it with our strategy loop. But as time passes, the Want box and Reality box adjust contents and morph shape, and eventually, something else can happen—the Goal Pool changes. The Goal Pool is just the overlap of the Want and Reality boxes, so its own shape and contents are totally dependent on the state of those boxes. Checking in with the large circle down below requires us to lift our heads up from the micro mission and do some macro reflection.
Step 1 for Elon was filling in the contents of the Want box. Doing this from first principles is a huge challenge—you have to dig deep into concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, important and trivial, valuable and frivolous.
You have to figure out what you respect, what you disdain, what fascinates you, what bores you, and what excites you deep in your inner child. I talked with him about his early thought process in figuring out what to do with his career.
He has said many times that he cares deeply about the future well-being of the human species—something that is clearly in the center of his Want box. I asked how he came to that, and he explained:. The thing that I care about is—when I look into the future, I see the future as a series of branching probability streams. Honing in on his specific path, I brought up the great modern physicists like Einstein and Hawking and Feynman, and I asked him whether he considered going into scientific discovery instead of engineering.
His response:. I certainly admire the discoveries of the great scientists. What matters is knowledge in a human context. I could try to be a flower in the garden, or I could try to make sure there is a garden. I was at one point thinking about doing physics as a career—I did undergrad in physics—but in order to really advance physics these days, you need the data.
Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of engineering. You just hit a limit. Like look at Galileo. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering. He has other reasons too. Next to wanting to help humanity in the Want box is this quote:.
How is that possible? So given all of the above, an ideal endeavor for Musk would be something involving engineering, something in an area that will be important for the future, and something to do with cutting-edge technology.
Those broad, basic Want box items alone narrow down the goal pool considerably. Meanwhile, he was a teenager with no money, reputation, or connections, and limited knowledge and skills. Musk had gone into the Goal Pool and picked the Stanford program, and he moved to California to get started. But there was one thing—it was The internet was in the early stages of taking off and moving much faster than people had anticipated. It was also a world Musk could dive into without money or a reputation.
So he added a bunch of internet-related possibilities into his Reality box. The early internet was also more exciting than he had anticipated—so getting involved in it quickly found its way into his Want box. Musk quit the program after two days. He started Zip2 with his brother, an early cross between the concepts of the Yellow Pages and Google Maps. Being leisurely on the sidelines was nowhere in his Want box and totally unnecessary according to his Reality box. So he used his newfound wealth to start X.
The internet was still young and the concept of storing your money in an online bank was totally inconceivable to most people, and Musk was advised by many that it was a crazy plan. But again, Musk trusted his software. What he knew about the internet told him that this was inside the Reality box—because his reasoning told him that when it came to the internet, the Reality box had grown much bigger than people appreciated—and that was all he needed to know to move forward.
In the top part of his software, as his strategy-action-results-adjustments loop spun, X. By the time eBay bought it in , the company was called PayPal and it was a money transfer service. Following his software to space. Now 31 years old and fabulously wealthy, Musk had to figure out what to do next with his life. But Musk went back to first principles.
What was in there was his still-burning desire to help the future of humanity. In particular, he felt that to have a long future, the species would have to become much better at space travel. So he started exploring the limits of the Reality box when it came to getting involved in the aerospace industry.
Conventional wisdom screamed at the top of its lungs for him to stop. Historically, all rockets have been expensive, so therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive.
If you say, what is a rocket made of? And you can break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these components? And if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be?
So I started SpaceX. He started SpaceX , again with his own money, and dove in head first. The mission: dramatically lower the cost of space travel to make it possible for humanity to become multi-planetary. Two years later, while running a growing SpaceX, a friend brought Elon to a company called AC Propulsion, which had created a prototype for a super-fast, long-range electric car.
It blew him away. He ran into the same conventional wisdom about battery costs as he had about rocket costs. Batteries had never been made cheaply enough to allow for a mass-market, long-range electric car because the cost of making a battery was simply too high.
He used the same first principles logic and a calculator to determine that most of the problem was the cost of middlemen, not raw materials, and decided that actually, conventional wisdom was wrong and batteries could be much cheaper in the future. So he co-founded Tesla with the mission of accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-vehicle world—first by pouring in resources power and funding the company, and later by contributing his time and energy resources as well and becoming CEO.
Two years after that, Musk co-founded SolarCity with his cousins, a company whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of homes.
His idea is that there should be an entirely new mode of transport that will whiz people hundreds of miles by zinging them through a tube. The cost of a tunnel is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the tunnel. The wider the tunnel you want, the more you have to pay for it. A one-lane road tunnel has to be 28 feet. The two-lane A West tunnel in Paris, completed in , is 38 feet wide.
The Boring Company intends to build tunnels of just 14 feet. This is half the diameter of the current required road tunnel, and leads to approximately one-fourth of the cross-sectional area. Reducing the diameter can save millions of dollars. The majority of space in traditional tunnels is for the ventilation of the fumes from combustion engines. Whether this vision will come to fruition is unclear: Musk tweeted in May that he had abandoned the electric skate idea. Instead, the electric vehicles would simply travel autonomously on their own through the tunnel, which some have said undermines the revolutionary public transport concept that was initially promoted.
The other problem is speed. Tunnel boring machines TBMs are slow — typically only digging 1 mile of tunnel in 8 to 12 weeks. Musk is also looking to offset the environmental impact of The Boring Company through one of its main assets: dirt. Boring Bricks will reuse the dirt from tunneling — each one will cost 10 cents or will be free for affordable housing projects. Currently, the Boring Company has 4 projects in varying degrees of completion. The Las Vegas Convention Center loop is a 0.
It would reportedly shorten a minute walk to a 1-minute ride. Excavation of the second of 2 tunnels was completed in May and the completed loop was scheduled to debut in January at the Consumer Electronics Show CES.
However, because of the Covid pandemic, the event was moved online. Initial designs mapped out a vision of platooned passenger trams that would travel at speeds up to mph. Recent renderings from July show Tesla Model 3 sedans, which can fit roughly 5 people.
A project called the Dugout Loop, announced in , aims to ferry passengers from East Hollywood to Dodger Stadium in less than 4 minutes. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has yet to advance that bid and appears unlikely to.
An environmental report revealed the project to be similar to the Vegas contract — i. Furthermore, some transportation solution advocates warn that providing more space for cars may not actually fix traffic congestion, as the approach may simply incentivize more people to drive while diverting resources from mass transit approaches like subways.
The first is Tesla. The cost projections for the inner city tunnels are lower because they will be exclusively for electric vehicles, reducing the need for ventilation and boosting speed. Proponents say that this could alleviate traffic congestion on the surface streets by transferring traffic underground.
When the first tunnels hit capacity, the company plans to add more, creating a network of tunnels under each city. The second is Hyperloop. These tunnels will have to be larger, but with the advancements learned through the smaller tunneling projects, the Boring Company may be able to increase the efficiency of digging these as well.
Musk aims to put 1M people on Mars, and tunnels are central to this vision. With inhospitable conditions, humans may need to live underground. If Musk is going to build a colony on Mars, building a network of tunnels could be essential.
Trained on B parameters — its predecessor, GPT-2, was trained with just 1. Current AI research is largely concentrated within big tech companies that have a commercial imperative to keep developments secret. AI research is progressing at a significant rate, and Musk sees this as an existential threat to humanity. Google , Facebook , Amazon, Apple, and an ocean of startups are contributing to the upside of AI : higher efficiency, higher productivity, less work for humans, and, ideally, a higher quality of life for humans.
But the race for these upsides is also a race towards a massive potential downside — a super-intelligent general artificial intelligence that is vastly smarter than humans and sees no use in keeping them around. Say we build an AI cleaning bot. All this bot wants to do is make sure the world is as clean as can be.
If the bot just wants to make sure everything is clean, it has a few options. One option is to just clean up all the mess. This is the outcome we want and that the AI developer is expecting. Another possibility is that it will try and stop the mess occurring in the first place.
Humans cause mess. The paper identified 5 areas of research that AI researchers need to strongly consider as they push forward with any type of AI:. There are already ways to test the limits of AI. Robustness is a particular concern for narrow AI. How well do they work when you test them outside of their comfort zone. As of today, not well. This is a benign example. One of the core concerns is the learning rate for AI.
OpenAI Five — an AI that learned to play a multiplayer video game called Dota 2 — played the equivalent of 45, years of Dota 2 against itself over a time span of 10 months.
Source: OpenAI. It went on to win OpenAI Five demonstrates the potential for deep reinforcement learning, as the model learned by playing games against itself at an astonishing speed. It also served as a reminder of the law of accelerating returns: AI that learns quicker is being developed quicker. An artificial general intelligence AGI could test millions of iterations of itself , picking the best parameters from each, combining them and immediately becoming smarter.
That smarter AGI could then start the process anew. OpenAI researchers reported another breakthrough in March They had found a way to peek into neural networks and gain insights into how the software operates. Musk understands that the key for implementing his plans is drastically cost reduction.
Thus in SpaceX in order to reduce space transportation costs he espouses successfully in house production of most components and using off-the-shelf products proving no less reliable than aviation or space grade components. Book Rating: 4. Related Papers Current challenges at local and global level on entrepreneurship By otilia manta. Rethinking industrial research, development and innovation in the 21st century By Patrick Marschollek.
Shammas, V. L and Holen, T. Palgrave Communications
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