Key ideas from Adam Becker

• "Elon Musk has said he wants to put a million people on Mars by 2050 to have a self-sustaining civilization" - Adam, but radiation exposure alone makes this timeline "definitely not happening"
• Moore's Law has ended - computers are no longer getting smaller and denser, they're just getting bigger by stacking more chips
• "If you did build [an AGI] that could solve global warming and you turn it on, I'm pretty sure the first thing it would do is say, well, you shouldn't have built me" - Adam
• The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) doesn't give employees 401ks because they believe The Singularity Is Near enough to make retirement planning irrelevant
• Ray Kurzweil's second book is titled The Singularity is Nearer after his first was The Singularity Is Near - he claims it will arrive precisely in 2045
• "Discovering new laws of physics does not always remove limitations. Sometimes new laws of physics create a limitation" - Adam, citing Einstein's speed of light limit
• Most of the cloud infrastructure that composes the World Wide Web belongs to Jeff Bezos through Amazon Web Services - Amazon.com is "window dressing" on the real operation
• Tech billionaires read science fiction like Blade runner and Neuromancer as instruction manuals rather than cautionary tales about wealth concentration and dystopia