This guy is just a pump and dump king. All his businesses are built on getting huge investments based on fantastical claims that earth-shattering advancements are just around the corner so everyone has to get in now. Then they don’t happen, but it doesn’t matter because by that point he’s already the world’s richest man and he’s basically too big to fail. Remember when SpaceX was sold as the Mars colonization company? Remember when Tesla “wasn’t really a car company”, but an autonomous AI company? Neuralink, the boring company, hyperloop, those stupid humanoid robots he appears to bring out once or twice a year?I am beyond frustrated at how few people call him out on this behaviour.
Elon Musk must create a new scandal every day; it’s the source of his power, or something. I mean, this is the only way I can possibly justify this man’s actions. It’s like he wakes up in the morning and thinks, “What course of action can optimize the chances that I will be the center of some drama and have everyone talk about me for another half week of news articles?”
God, I really want him crushed. It stopped being funny a long time ago. Thanks for your contributions to industry, Elon, but I don’t need a walking meme dominating a strangely large part of the news cycle every single day ..
He has a very large and loyal following. His following expects him to entertain them and be controversial.
There's a law somewhere. I forgot the name. It basically states that at first, you worked hard to get a following, then you're a slave to your following because you have to do what they want to keep them happy.
If he ever writes things that his following dislike, such as saying how he loves DEI, then his following will turn on him.
In South Scotland I found it was almost always just “div” and proceeded by a pointed swear such as “fucking div”.
Divvy meant dividend! The thing the co-op used to give you for shopping there and old ladies used to obsess over. Come to think it, they were a right bunch of fucking divs.
You’re getting a lot of scared artistic people right now lashing their jobs disappearing. I genuinely can’t blame them.. I’d probably do the same, and let’s keep in mind, A lot of these people weren’t doing particularly well up to this point. Imagine being a struggling actor and realizing acting roles were being given to a chatbot. That’s how this is seen by them.
There was a similar controversy recently in the UK where a radio show was produced with an AI host (with the AI’s voice based on a now-dead famous interviewer). It was a complete novelty. Regardless, there were outcries, but when you looked closer, they were outcries from people in the industry feeling insulted that they could have dome interviewed and made a name for themselves in the radio interview circuit. An AI, particularly of someone who is dead and already had their time in the sun, felt like quite the insult. The territory they were all fighting over was already pretty tiny, and then it shrinks into almost nothing with them left thinking, “Would it really hurt so , much if I could just manually do this thing you’ve automated away?”.
we’re going to see a lot more of this. I can almost guarantee there’s going to be a movie made at some point that just doesn’t have any actors or very limited input from actors. Perhaps an animation with the voices done by very amateur people put through some sort of “acting filter” that makes them sound just as good. Actors will definitely have a lot to say about that. Don’t even get started on AI-generated scripts: the screenwriter guild is already putting things in their contracts to try and limit this.
amazingly accurate. Hard to believe anyone could’ve gotten so much so right with only small details missing a little, not feasible or existing in some way, though just to humble him a bit please keep in mind he did predict we’d have gorilla butlers farmed and trained to replace domesticated labor in the home. So even the best of us don’t get it all right and in some cases very wrong.
I enjoyed this book about him and Stanley Kubrick.
Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson
"Glide Path" which is a somewhat fictionalised personal account of his wartime experiences working on ground controlled descent & landing is entertaining.
He did make several quite interesting predictions, but as you note some preposterous ones as well.
What’s the argument here exactly? Wealthy people’s misfortune isn’t worthy of our attention? Should the US cease reporting on itself as it is a wealth nation and a much better state than many others?
Who is this “we”? The rest of the world? I don’t think the rest of the world is being asked by America to care. It is Americans caring about Americans or Californians caring for Californians at the very least.
At the end of the day, having your house burned to the ground, having to escape a deadly fire, have you seen everyone go a bit mad and crazy, fearing for your life? These people can be the richest people in the world, and I’d think it’s inhuman not to sympathize with them somewhat. It is a situation every person could find potentially life-destroying and traumatic.
i’ll make that annoying comment: perhaps people who consume a lot of sweetened foods are also sort of people who have bad diets, regardless of whether artificial or real sweetness. Not a hard thing to believe. all the article says is artificial sweetener intake was compared to people who didn’t consume as much artificial sweetener and found a big difference in diet. That baseline captures a lot of people who don’t take sweeteners at all; artificial or natural. I supect these are likely the sort of people who have better diets. To me the effects need normalizes against an individual’s intake of sweetened foods generally.
I think it’s just a way to stop the reporting of an event turning the event into an opportunity for people to gain media coverage and propel their careers, or their interests that may not be related to the discussion at hand.
Public debates are swamped with characters who want to make a name for themselves by holding views, having a particular style, or catering to certain demographics. At this point, the debate ceases to ne a way of discussing ideas and opinions. It’s just a way to sell the participants. Likewise, there are many people who want the opposite. They hold opinions but really don’t want to be part of the wider social debate . They don’t want to be public figures defending a particular point. They just want to contribute in some way.
