It’s the only way you’ll survive the coming AI apocalypse.

When Elon Musk and DARPA both hop aboard the cyborg hypetrain, you know brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are about to achieve the impossible.
BMIs, already the stuff of science fiction, facilitate crosstalk between biological wetware with external computers, turning human users into literal cyborgs. Yet mind-controlled robotic arms, microelectrode “nerve patches”, or “memory Band-AIDS” are still purely experimental medical treatments for those with nervous system impairments.
With the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program, DARPA is looking to expand BMIs to the military. This month, the project tapped six academic teams to engineer radically different BMIs to hook up machines to the brains of able-bodied soldiers. The goal is to ditch surgery altogether—while minimizing any biological interventions—to link up brain and machine.
Elon Musk’s appearance at Tesla owner-enthusiast Ryan McCaffrey’s Ride the Lightning podcast revealed a number of new details about the electric car maker’s upcoming halo vehicle, the next-generation Roadster. While addressing the all-electric supercar, Musk discussed the vehicle’s estimated yearly production numbers, its purpose, and some details about its “SpaceX package.”
Ever the candid interviewee, Musk admitted that the next-generation Roadster is really more like a dessert to the Model S, 3, X, and Y’s main course, in the way that its existence will probably not provide much of an impact to Tesla’s overall mission of accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy. Nevertheless, the Roadster still has a lot of merits, in the way that it could establish the superiority of pure electric propulsion compared to the internal combustion engine, bar none.
Musk noted that the Roadster is intended to outperform the best “Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and McLarens” on every dimension, on every level, including the track, thereby erasing the halo effect of gas cars. “We’re going to do things with the new Roadster that are kind of unfair to other cars. (It’s) crushingly good relative to the next best gasoline sports car,” Musk said.
Elon Musk says adding two to four Raptor Engines to the Starship will let it go sub-orbital for 6000 miles at mach 20. This would mean trips like San Francisco to Shanghai or New York to Berlin. Many world cities are within 6000 miles of each other.
Boeing extended range 767s can reach 6000 miles and the newer 777 and 787 have longer ranges.
If SpaceX can determines ways to save 30% on Starship point to point efficiency then they could get to 8000-mile ranges. This might be possible by lightening landing gear and heat shields. They could need less heat shields for sub-orbital only vehicles.
“We joke that ‘The Martian’ would have been a much more boring movie,” said Justin Kugler, a vice president at Made In Space.
Fifty years after the first men walked on the moon, a new space race is underway, this one for a piece of what Wall Street analysts say could become a $1 trillion global space market. Around the world, companies such as Made In Space are launching — often literally — new products and services, building satellites to provide broadband internet, spaceships to take tourists on zero-gravity rendezvous, and mining equipment to extract minerals from asteroids.
On HoustonChronicle.com: Elon Musk injects ‘X’ factor into space quest with bold vision, mixed track record.
My guest today is Chris Paine, director of the AI documentary film “Do You Trust This Computer?” and previously the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. The new film is a powerful examination of artificial intelligence centered around insights from the most high-profile thinkers on the subject, including Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Ray Kurzweil, Andrew Ng, Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan and many more. Chris set out to ask these leaders in the field “what scares smart people about AI”, and they did not hold back.