But if Trump outdoes Obama in his mastery of social media to control the public agenda, he lacks his predecessor’s sense of an important fact about the new media. To borrow terms from the pioneering theorist Marshall McLuhan, communication tools in the smartphone age are “cool” rather than “hot.” New media aren’t intended to grab and hold our entire attention, as the ratings-obsessed Trump wishes to do. Winning candidates of the future are unlikely to be so needy, so obvious, so nakedly relentless in their efforts to command our national bandwidth. They will be, in a word, cooler.
Few public figures have mastered cool like Musk, who describes himself as “half Democrat, half Republican” — exactly what a future president should say. “I’m somewhere in the middle,” he explains.
With more than 21 million Twitter followers, Musk has sufficient reach to shape and control his public image much as Trump shapes his own. But Musk’s message, his brand, is all about hope and the future, while Trump appeals to fear and the past. Trump wants walls and tariffs — policy detritus of previous ages. Musk promotes sleek electric cars, solar-powered cities, superfast mass transit and grand fantasies of human settlements on Mars.
.. Optimism has always been the better long-range bet in America, a fact measurable in the relative fortunes of Musk and Trump, perhaps.
.. Both men are ballyhoo artists of the highest degree. They understand that if you want to move a huge crowd, you need to paint a big picture. Anyone who has followed Trump over the past 40 years knows that his projects, from luxury condos to bottled water, are never less than the Biggest, Best and Beautiful-est.
Why billionaires keep pouring money into the space industry
“It’s becoming more of a mainstream place for more financially focused” venture capitalists, said Carissa Christensen, Bryce’s founder and chief executive. “They are in it not because space is cool, but because they think this a place to generate serious return.”
.. For years, the industry was fueled by the vast fortunes of a few billionaires. Musk invested $100 million of his own money into SpaceX before capturing several billions of dollars in government contracts.
.. Last year, Jeffrey P. Bezos described the investment model for his space company, Blue Origin, this way: “I sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.”
.. Richard Branson has backed Virgin Galactic and a satellite company called OneWeb, while Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, is building what would be the world’s largest airplane by wingspan to “air-launch” rockets.
.. More recently, Mark Cuban invested $500,000 into a company called Relativity Space, which plans to 3-D print an entire rocket. Astranis, which intends to use small satellites to beam Internet to places off Earth’s power grid, recently announced that it was being backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
.. The growing market has also captured the interest of the Trump administration, which has vowed to expand the partnerships with the private sector that began under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During Thursday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump lauded SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and took a shot at NASA, saying that if the government built a similar rocket, it “would have cost probably 40 or 50 times” what SpaceX charges.
Elon Musk Lays Out Worst-Case Scenario for AI Threat
Powerful technology will threaten all human jobs, could even spark a war, Tesla CEO says
.. laid out several worst-case scenarios for AI, saying that the technology will threaten all human jobs and that an AI could even spark a war. “It is the biggest risk that we face as a civilization,” he said... Proponents of AI say such concerns are premature, given the current state of the technology. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who said that he has spent his own career trying to reduce government regulations, questioned Mr. Musk over the suggestion of creating new rules, saying that he was unsure what policy makers could do beyond pushing for a slowdown in development.
The tech behind Google-Uber legal beef could be ready to boom
The tech behind Google-Uber legal beef could be ready to boom
.. Waymo alleges that six weeks before resigning, Levandowski copied 14,000 confidential files and trade secrets from his company-issued laptop. Among those files were designs for Google’s custom-designed Lidar system, the technology that gives autonomous vehicles their vision... Waymo learned of the alleged theft when a Lidar component supplier inadvertently attached machine drawings of what was said to be Uber’s Lidar circuit board in an email, a design it said is strikingly similar to Waymo’s own unique design... Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk is not a fan, and his aversion to Lidar brings up some questions about how widespread its use will be. He believes radar-based visual systems are better, and is focusing on those for Tesla’s self-driving automobiles. Unlike radar, Lidar cannot penetrate fog, heavy rain, or snow, but radar has its own issues, including difficulty detecting non-moving objects and certain materials such as metallic objects... Rasgon believes that radar in conjunction with cameras may become more widely used than Lidar.“Radar is easier, cheaper, more ubiquitous,” he said in an interview. “Ideally, you would want to use the cheapest solution that you can…The performance is very good in Lidar, but if you can get by with cameras and radar, that is probably the best way to go.”.. Google’s Waymo said in the lawsuit that by designing its Lidar systems itself, it has already driven down the costs; its Lidar systems are now less than 10% of the cost of Lidar systems just a few years ago.