Category: economics – Page 78
[Exclusive] Elon Musk: A future worth getting excited about | TED | Tesla Gigafactory interview
Elon talks about x-risks and making us a multi-planetary species, amongst other things.
What’s on Elon Musk’s mind? In this exclusive conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Musk details how the radical new innovations he’s working on — Tesla’s intelligent humanoid robot Optimus, SpaceX’s otherworldly Starship and Neuralink’s brain-machine interfaces, among others — could help maximize the lifespan of humanity and create a world where goods and services are abundant and accessible for all. It’s a compelling vision of a future worth getting excited about. (Recorded at the Tesla Texas Gigafactory on April 6, 2022)
Just over a week after this interview was filmed, Elon Musk joined TED2022 for another (live) conversation, where he discussed his bid to purchase Twitter, the biggest regret of his career, how his brain works and more. Watch that conversation here: https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM
0:14 A future that’s worth getting excited about.
2:44 The sustainable energy economy, batteries and 300 terawatt hours of installed capacity.
7:06 “Humanity will solve sustainable energy.“
8:47 Artificial intelligence and Tesla’s progress on full self-driving cars.
19:46 Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot.
21:46 “People have no idea, this is going to be bigger than the car.“
23:14 Avoiding an AI dystopia.
26:39 The age of abundance.
28:20 Neuralink and brain-machine interfaces.
36:55 SpaceX’s Starship and the mission to build a city on Mars.
46:54 “It’s the people of Mars’ city.“
50:14 What else can Starship do and help explore?
53:18 Possible synergies between Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink.
54:44 Intercontinental travel via Starship.
58:41 Being a billionaire.
1:02:31 Philanthropy as love of humanity.
1:03:39 Population collapse and birth rates as a threat to future of human civilization.
1:04:13 Elon’s drive.
1:06:06 “I think if you want the future to be good, you must make it so.”
If you love watching TED Talks like this one, become a TED Member to support our mission of spreading ideas: http://ted.com/membership.
Elon Musk acquires Twitter for roughly $44 billion
The company’s board and the Tesla CEO hammered out the final details of his $54.20 a share bid.
The agreement marks the close of a dramatic courtship and a sharp change of heart at the social-media network.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion on Monday, the company announced, giving the world’s richest person command of one of its most influential social media sites — which serves as a platform for political leaders, a sounding board for experts across industries and an information hub for millions of everyday users.
The acquisition followed weeks of evangelizing on the necessity of “free speech,” as the Tesla CEO seized on Twitter’s role as the “de facto town square” and took umbrage with content moderation efforts he has seen as an escalation toward censorship. He said he sees Twitter as essential to the functioning of democracy and said the economics are not a concern.
Ownership of Twitter gives Musk power over hugely consequential societal and political issues, perhaps most significantly the ban on former president Donald Trump that the website enacted in response to the Jan. 6 riots.
Under the terms of the deal, Twitter will become a private company and shareholders will receive $54.20 per share, the company said in a news release. The deal is expected to close this year.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in the release. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
DeepMind, Mila & Google Brain Enable Generalization Capabilities for Causal Graph Structure Induction
Discovering a system’s causal relationships and structure is a crucial yet challenging problem in scientific disciplines ranging from medicine and biology to economics. While researchers typically adopt the graphical formalism of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs) to induce a graph structure that best describes these relationships, such unsupervised score-based approaches can quickly lead to prohibitively heavy computation burdens.
A research team from DeepMind, Mila – University of Montreal and Google Brain challenges the conventional causal induction approach in their new paper Learning to Induce Causal Structure, proposing a neural network architecture that learns the graph structure of observational and/or interventional data via supervised training on synthetic graphs. The team’s proposed Causal Structure Induction via Attention (CSIvA) method effectively makes causal induction a black-box problem and generalizes favourably to new synthetic and naturalistic graphs.
The team summarizes their main contributions as:
Sonia Arrison — Author, Analyst, Investor, Entrepreneur — Positively Impacting Human Longevity
Making positive impacts on human longevity — sonia arrison, author, analyst, investor, entrepreneur.
Sonia Arrison (https://soniaarrison.com/) is a best-selling author, analyst, entrepreneur, and investor.
Sonia is founder of 100 Plus Capital (https://100pluscap.com/ — Investing in companies positively impacting human longevity), Chair of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (https://a4li.org/ — The first and only 501©(4) nonprofit organization founded with the goal of creating social and political action around the issues of combating age-related chronic conditions and increasing our number of healthy, disease-free years), co-founder of Unsugarcoat Media (acquired by Medium), and was an associate founder of Singularity University.
Sonia’s research focuses on exponentially growing technologies and their impact on society. Her book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, addresses the social, economic, and cultural impacts of radical human longevity, and gained national best-seller status.
In addition to the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, Sonia is a Board Member at the Thiel Foundation, Foresight Institute, and Woodland School. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia, and author of two previous books (Western Visions and Digital Dialog).
Synthetic DNA Manufacturer has the “Write Stuff”
Circa 2021 Synthetic silicon dna storage.
In research, the demand for DNA strands often outpaces supply. To help supply keep up, researchers may set aside traditional molecular cloning techniques and embrace polymerase chain reaction select PCR)-based techniques. Alternatively, researchers may perform gene synthesis, or the de novo chemical synthesis of DNA. Besides accelerating the creation of genetic sequences, gene synthesis avoids the need for template strands and simplifies procedures such as codon optimization and the fabrication of mutant sequences.
Although gene synthesis can be performed in house, many laboratories prefer to focus on their core competencies and outsource their gene synthesis projects to service providers, especially if sequences of over 1,000 base pairs are desired. Outsourcing also allows laboratories to take advantage of service providers’ economies of scale and quick turnaround times. Finally, service providers offer ease of use. Clients can go online, upload the desired sequences, choose the vector, get the price, and place the order. The entire process takes only a few minutes, and the genes can be delivered a few days later.
Researchers needing a few genes have a choice of several providers. But what if researchers need 10,000 genes? “We’re probably the only game in town,” suggests Emily Leproust, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience.
A gigantic EU tunnel will connect Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. For $11 billion?
Have you ever heard of the Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor? As the fifth of the Trans-European Transport Network’s nine priority axes, it is a critical path for the European economy.
It spans from Finland and Sweden in the north to the island of Malta in the south, passing through Denmark, Northern, Central, and Southern Germany, Northern Italy’s industrial areas, and southern Italian ports.
The Alpine mountain range between Munich and Verona, however, represents a major bottleneck for the corridor. The Brenner Base Rail tunnel is intended to solve this problem. It is scheduled to open in 2028 and seeks to reduce traffic while meeting the EU’s environmental goals for preserving the future of the environmentally vulnerable alpine region. If you want to understand more about the history and recent advancements of this gigantic project, be sure to watch the video by the YouTube channel The B1M posted above, and as always, enjoy!
The Solar Energy Multiverse Keeps Expanding: Perovskites, Shape-Shifting Molecules, & More
Solar energy has barely scratched the surface of its potential to decarbonize the global economy in time to avert catastrophic warming.
For all the activity in the solar energy marketplace, PV technology has barely even begun to hit the global economy in full force. Huge solar arrays filled with rows of super-efficient silicon solar panels are just one piece of an expanding universe. With that in mind, here are 4 new developments that could kick the slow pace of change into high gear.
1. Distributed Solar Energy
Distributed renewables are a big deal for the US Department of Energy and other solar energy planners, but they generally don’t catch the media spotlight. That’s because they tend to be small. On an individual basis, distributed energy resources range down to the kilowatt scale. They are easily eclipsed by huge multi-million megawatt PV arrays.
The space economy is ready for lift-off: First into orbit, and then to the Moon
2022 is set to be a major year for the space economy. According to the Space Foundation, 15 new launch vehicles are set to debut this year, more than any other year in space history. Last year, US spaceports had more launches than any year since 1967, and the number is climbing. Meanwhile, employment in the core US space industry employment is at a 10-year high.
The momentum is there for a flourishing space economy that, according to NASA leaders, could in 20 years take public and private missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), with services and infrastructure on the lunar surface and in cislunar space. It’s a fast-growing economy, NASA leaders said at the 37th Space Symposium, that offers promising opportunities for young people who want to get their foot in the door.
The space economy is already a $400 billion industry “and on the way to $1 trillion, and I suspect it’ll get there faster than we think,” James Reuter, associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA, said during a panel this week at the 37th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.