Thoughtslime makes many good points here, even if Kurzweil and Andreesen and Musk are cheap, easy, stupid targets. How did they get so rich anyway?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Thoughtslime makes many good points here, even if Kurzweil and Andreesen and Musk are cheap, easy, stupid targets. How did they get so rich anyway?
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By profiting off of the work of more talented and intelligent people I would guess.
“Sarah Connor?”
Anyone who compares Kurzweil’s wealth with Musk’s is really rather clueless.
($30M vs $425,000M)
Do you have $30M? I don’t care, anything above $10M is unimaginable to me.
Average household net worth in the USA is about $1million but median is less than $200k. In other words, there is a large wealth disparity and for the numerate explains why Congress only passes legislation that the rich say is OK. It also supports the central thesis in the video: we will continue to hear hype about AI as long as the money class want us to.
Both Kurzweil and Musk are in the top 0.5% by household wealth in the USA (in 2023 needed > $20million). In other words, Kurzweil is wealthy. Musk’s wealth is simply obscene.
Kurzweil was useful to the world developing OCR technology to help disabled people.
And Musk never did this:
His daddy issues kinda made him lose the plot into transhumanism.
Musk didn’t “get rich”. His daddy had an emerald mine in South Africa. Musk poo-poos is as not a mine but just an “outcropping” (shot through with emeralds). Gee, I wish my daddy had just an outcropping.
He makes some good points, but I think that there is something of a false dichotomy with AI. It tends to be depicted as either a revolutionary technology that will change everything (for good or bad), or as a completely overhyped hoax. It seems to me that it is most likely a major technological leap, but one that is still in its infancy. It is definitely overhyped by people who have a financial motive for exaggerating its short term potential, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be a major technological leap in the longer term. I remember the dot-com boom and bust some 25 years ago. That was also a case of a new technology – the internet – being overhyped as far as short-term profitability was concerned, but the hype about how much the internet would change things turned out to be largely correct, just over a longer period and in different ways than anticipated.
moarscienceplz @7
He’s depending on people not knowing that many Emerald mines are essentially “outcrops”, i.e. they are surface mines. We have a major emerald mine like that not too far away from me in North Carolina. So he’s once again trying to fool people into believing his myth of being self-made rather than reality.
Of course, Musk got as rich as he is by the method that most really rich people do: start wealthy, leverage that wealth by exploiting the ideas and labor of others shamelessly, and use the generated wealth to secure you against anything that might reduce it or your ability to use the methods that got you there (taxes, regulations, lawsuits, etc. ad nauseum.) Like most of the uber-wealthy, he’s basically a high functioning sociopath who cares not one bit about anyone but himself and has no moral compunctions about doing anything that will act to his benefit.
springa73–
Yep. I see AI as a developing technology that is mostly being driven by short-sighted sociopaths. Like the railroads in the 19th century. The technology had extraordinary impact, it made life better for most people, but it was built by ruthless bastards who happily commited theft, fraud, and genocide for extra profit.
re #4: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheTriple
springa73 @ #8 & chrislawson @ #10 — “AI”…specifically generative AI or LLMs and so forth…are emerging technologies in the public realm. Of course, work on them has been going on for a while, but several technologies converged recently to open up new ways to use them so they are more functional and more widely available. From my experience, they are still something of a novelty but you can get your search engine to tell you the actual elevation of Mt. Everest rather than provide a list of websites where you can read the info (and get bombarded with ads) for yourself.
The huge data churning that LLM engines do uses a lot of energy.
I have it on good authority that $5-$8 million is more than enough to live on and die comfortably in California post-retirement. And, you can do very well on a lot less than that…even in California. No one needs billions of dollars.
robro @12:
Think relative wealth, not absolute wealth: they want to be richer than others. Some might think that they “need” billions if that’s their only source of self-esteem given that they don’t have anything else. (Inheritance brats like Trump and Musk come easily to mind.)
AI hype is recycled Big Data hype. Meaningless marketroid nonsense. Sorry if the video mentions this but I didn’t really need 45 minutes to figure that out.
@12– Agreed. I was trying to be brief and ended up oversimplifying. AI and LLM technology arose in academic computer science circles (the first neural network was described in 1943 and built in 1951) and that work continues. What I was referring to was the AI being pushed by the big tech firms, which has a lot more in common with cashing in on a gold rush than an attempt to build public utility.
Bah.
chrislawson, caveat emptor is a thing.
As the years go by, the claim that cluey big companies are investing in AI only because they are deluded by the hype becomes ever more silly.
Musk may not have been wealthy because of his father as stated above.
“ According to the 2015 biography of Elon Musk titled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, in 1995, Errol Musk gave $28,000 to Elon and Kimbal as they were starting up the software company Zip2.[30] Elon Musk has denied receiving the money from his father.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_family
I believe he got most of his early money from the sale of PayPal. Not saying all the bad things said about him here are not true, just that he may not have gotten a lot of money from his father like Trump did.
Despite what certain bubble-denialists around here will claim, it is clear that springa73 had it right with:
It is also delusional to claim that big companies must be “cluey” or they would long since have failed. The same “thinking”, if I may use that term loosely, would have predicted than Enron was going to be around well into the mid-century period, or that giant department stores would be an eternal feature of the retail landscape. Big company management ossifies and surrounds itself by sycophantic yes-men eventually, as all privileged twits are wont to do. Then one day reality hits them with something that for all their wealth they still don’t have enough money to buy their way out of. The notion that people with a lot of money should be assumed to be wise about it shouldn’t have survived Trump’s bankruptcies, let alone everything that’s happened since. And of course it has a distinct whiff of conservatism to it that ought to have made it suspect even without the mountains of empirical evidence for its falsity; it is that claim that is at the root of the “it’s a meritocracy; they earned their privileged position in society by being exceptionally good money managers!” strain of Reaganesque pro-rich thinking.