Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk might think it’s a good idea to warm up Mars with thermonuclear weapons so humans can live on it, but scientists are raising red flags about the idea.

The CEO of Hawthorne-based SpaceX talked Mars colonization, among other topics, on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Wednesday.

When Colbert asked how he would eventually transform the Red Planet into a livable place, Musk said it would need to be warmed up.

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For most of us, figuring out the value of something that we want, comes from research. If you want a new set of wine glasses, you check the price online. Perhaps you consult a catalog. If the set of 8 stemware goblets that you like are a current model from a major company, there are probably many places to buy them. If there are multiple Ebay sellers and many recently completed sales, then you can establish the value with precision.

I’ve written a lot of Bitcoin articles on this Lifeboat Blog and elsewhere, so, let’s dig a bit deeper this time. Let’s talk about from where value really comes.

Supply and Demand

In the end, an item’s value is a direct result of supply and demand. It’s no different with a currency. And let’s be clear: Despite a raging debate, Bitcoin is a currency and not just a payment instrument. How can I be certain? Try this mental exercise—

Continue reading “What gives Bitcoin Value?” »

As far as the Model 3 goes, Musk relayed that Tesla’s electric car for the masses will be formally unveiled in March of 2016, whereupon the company will begin taking pre-orders. And if pre-orders for the Model S and Model X are any indication, it’s a safe bet that the Tesla Model 3 — sized at about 80% of the Model S — is poised to be a runaway hit. The only looming question is whether or not Tesla’s Model 3 design resonates with consumers.

Price-wise, Musk reiterated a price point he’s trotted out before, namely that the base price on the Model 3 will check in at $35,000. As far as a release date is concerned, Musk said that production will begin in two years time. Musk explained that Tesla first has to wait until the Gigafactory is fully operational before kicking off Model 3 production. Read more

The comment seems to have been made at least partly in jest, but Elon Musk has been very clear in the past that the dangers posed by artificial intelligence are no laughing matter.

So why not killer robots?

“And people wonder why I’m worried about the robocalypse…” Musk wrote in this Instagram post over the weekend. As you can see by the caption, he’s talking about a Tesla TSLA, +0.23% production line comprised of 542 robots, with 15 operating at the same time. Read more

The Hyperloop sounds like science fiction, Elon Musk’s pipe dream: leapfrog high speed rail and go right to packing us into capsules that fling us across the country in hours using what are, essentially, pneumatic tubes. It sounds crazy, when you think about it.

It’s starting to look a little less crazy. Read more

Recently, Elon Musk, Canadian-American business magnate, tried to make us think about the causes of things. He is explaining his theory by giving two examples: weights on a scale and causal chains. Read More

In 1989, an 18-year-old South African named Elon Musk approached a girl at a party in Canada, where he was attending college, and said, “I think a lot about electric cars. Do you think about electric cars?”

That anecdote, one of scores that make up Ashlee Vance’s biography of the 44-year-old entrepreneur, is telling. Long before Musk parlayed the $US165 million he made for his part in developing the internet-banking giant PayPal into the more than $US11 billion that underwrite Musk Industries today, he was thinking ahead, envisioning a world that merged science with science fiction, a real world that he, the hero of this story, would bring to fruition.

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Technology » Forum Email Print Ban Killer Robots before They Become Weapons of Mass Destruction By Peter Asaro | August 7, 2015 Vladislav Ociacia/Thinkstock SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Last week the Future of Life Institute released a letter signed by some 1,500 artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and technology researchers. Among them were celebrities of science and the technology industry—Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—along with public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett. The letter called for an international ban on offensive autonomous weapons, which could target and fire weapons without meaningful human control.

This week is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together killing over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It took 10 years before the physicist Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with nine other prominent scientists and intellectuals, issued a letter calling for global action to address the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. They were motivated by the atomic devastation in Japan but also by the escalating arms race of the Cold War that was rapidly and vastly increasing the number, destructive capability, and efficient delivery of nuclear arms, draining vast resources and putting humanity at risk of total destruction. They also note in their letter that those who knew the most about the effects of such weapons were the most concerned and pessimistic about their continued development and use.

The Future of Life Institute letter is significant for the same reason: It is signed by a large group of those who know the most about AI and robotics, with some 1,500 signatures at its release on July 28 and more than 17,000 today. Signatories include many current and former presidents, fellows and members of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society; editors of leading AI and robotics journals; and key players in leading artificial-intelligence companies such as Google DeepMind and IBM’s Watson team. As Max Tegmark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and a founder of the Future of Life Institute, told Motherboard, “This is the AI experts who are building the technology who are speaking up and saying they don’t want anything to do with this.”

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Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk said Friday the company is “almost ready” to make its cars go driverless on highways and parallel-park themselves

The much-awaited software update that would make Tesla TSLA, -0.24% vehicles able to steer themselves safely down the road has one more thing to sort out, Musk said in a tweet. Read more