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Showing posts from September, 2016

With Elon Musk to Mars

Yesterday’s much-anticipated announcement from Elon Musk of an outline plan to take humans to Mars deserves a good deal more attention that it has been getting. It comes at a time of deep crisis for American democracy, when the very best that our political parties have on offer, aside from standard-issue gridlock on The Hill, is a pair of Medicare-eligible candidates with agendas deeply locked into the past. Along comes a man with his eyes fixed firmly on the future. And yet he’s also a man developing innovative and successful businesses for today. And he’s also a man not unaware that there are negatives lurking in our passage up the Moore’s Law curve – he signed on to the infamous AI warning letter with Stephen Hawking et al. (a move that earned them a bizarre and frankly ridiculous rebuke from one of our fellow-DC think tanks with the award of Luddite of the Year – for daring to be candid about technology risk, something we need more not less of from our tech gurus). His v