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See also: Elon Musk Says Robots Will Help Tesla Catch Up to Apple in Value

So why won’t other auto manufacturers follow suit and overtake Tesla? First, their products, as well as their factories, are bogged down by legacy. Tesla’s electric cars are significantly easier to manufacture than internal combustion (IC) vehicles. Tesla’s Model S has fewer than 20 moving parts, compared with almost 1,500 moving parts in an IC-engine car. This means that there are fewer steps in the assembly process, fewer suppliers to deal with, and lower inventory of components and parts. Further, Tesla doesn’t have to deal with a unionized workforce, a complex supply chain, or a legacy dealer network. Free from this legacy, Tesla can embrace disruptive innovation without worrying about the backlash from workers, suppliers, and dealers.

To become as big as Apple one day, Tesla will need more than the “Henry Ford” approach to manufacturing. It will also need the “Steve Jobs” approach to marketing by creating a vast global appetite for its products. The Apple iPhone is a global product that can be sold from New York to Mumbai to Beijing with very little incremental investment. However, Tesla’s cars require the creation of infrastructure for charging and a distribution network from scratch—a very expensive and time-consuming process. Tesla will need to build out its charging network and distribution reach, country by country. China is an important overseas market for Tesla, as is Scandinavia; it also has a rollout plan for India with its Model 3.

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I’m speaking at Moogfest at 4:30PM a week from today. Can’t Wait! KurzweilAI doing a write-up on the festival below (including a bit on my talk):

The Moogfest four-day festival in Durham, North Carolina next weekend (May 18 — 21) explores the future of technology, art, and music. Here are some of the sessions that may be especially interesting to KurzweilAI readers. Full #Moogfest2017 Program Lineup.

(credit: Google)

The Magenta by Google Brain team will bring its work to life through an interactive demo plus workshops on the creation of art and music through artificial intelligence.

Magenta is a Google Brain project to ask and answer the questions, “Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music? If so, how? If not, why not?” It’s first a research project to advance the state-of-the art and creativity in music, video, image and text generation and secondly, Magenta is building a community of artists, coders, and machine learning researchers.

Continue reading “Best of MOOGFEST 2017” | >

  • Corporations now rule the world, and one of them is Apple.
  • With the company’s record-breaking cash hoard swelling to almost $300 billion, there’s not a lot the Cupertino tech giant couldn’t do.

In the science fiction flick Incorporated, a post-apocalyptic future world is no longer run by nation-states but by corporation-states, each acting in the best interests of the company. Such a future doesn’t seem that far or farfetched now, especially if one considers just how big the world’s most powerful corporations are.

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Upcoming missions to Mars have grabbed plenty of headlines in recent years, but before we set off for the Red Planet, a lot more research is needed – and that’s why NASA has a new plan for sending astronauts into orbit around the Moon.

It’s been a while – we last set foot on the Moon in 1972. But NASA thinks the cislunar orbit (between the Moon and the Earth) is going to be an essential testing site and launching pad for reaching Mars in the 2030s.

As NASA’s Greg Williams explained this week at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington DC, the Moon mission is on the slate for 2027 and could see a crew spending a year sailing above the lunar surface.

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