Because I'm not- I think the Model 3 is an ugly designed car and Tesla gets far too much credit for the cars they build. If Ford or Kia made a car of Tesla Quality there would be a revolt. But you got to respect when respect is due.
The minute Ford/Chevy/Kia/Toyota drop a EV that can do 300 miles per charge, Tesla is done. They were first, but they will get lapped by the big boys (except on the batteries)
Personally I dislike the cult of personality. Plus some things like how Musk acts - sensationalist, antiunion, lies, dumb on twitter, interviews with a person like Joe Rogan. I dont like corporations build on speculation when it comes to taxpayers money.
> "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.
Here is my prediction: they will begin slowly, but eventually ISP's will be priortizing the traffic of their shitty versions of various internet services (youtube.com, DropCam, etc...)... This will impact small new businesses the worst because large entities will be able to afford to pay... So, we'll just have less new internet startups... Will be quite hard to quantify.
I haven't read the book he suggested, but the book's author created this podcast[1], which I'm told covers much of the same stuff. It's really fascinating and changes how you think about debt.
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.
As a concrete example, consider the government effort to shift ethanol-to-be-mixed-with-gasoline from food-based sources to non-food sources like switchgrass. No one figured out how to efficiently turn switchgrass into ethanol, so it failed. And that was despite a huge economic incentive.
In contrast, the government effort to promote electric cars, solar energy, and wind energy appear to be really paying off.
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.
While I agree wholeheartedly that peer review is fundamentally a risk-averse, conservative process, I bristled when I read the statement that LeCun as a "lesser mind." That's quite rude, and uncalled for.
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.
Out of curiosity, why do you think you included 'not the biggest fan'?