| Big Prediction From Top U.S. Economist George Gilder Ignoring the Noise In the current phantasmagoria of life after capitalism, the entrepreneur is on his own. To function coherently, he has to generate a “system of the world.” He has to have a philosophy and mode of measurement backpropagates truth to his neurons — that can guide him in the face of constant political and financial distortion and noise. Elon Musk commands four major companies devoted to a fashionable philosophy of life and politics that shapes his ambitions, but also befogs his vision. To judge the future of Tesla and the rest, you have to calculate the real topologies of the world behind the spurious maps and power-walls of the world. In making our judgments, it is not enough merely to expound scientific truths or distill the true information quotients. Columbus’s maps were chimerical, but Columbus still discovered America. The four pillars of Musk’s entrepreneurial belief system are: - That the climate is threatened by accumulations of CO2 in the atmosphere caused by a human race that is ultimately an unsustainable burden on a frail planet with a scarce and diminishing resource base. This is the prevailing premise of his Tesla automobile and battery technologies, the SpaceX extra-planetary agenda, and all their political subsidies and supports. All these propositions are profoundly wrong, but the world worships at the altar of a “sustainability cult.” An entrepreneur will do best to grasp both truths — to understand both the opportunities opened by public and political manias and the long-term limitations and perils of using a flat map in a round world.
- That artificial intelligence and machine learning can usurp and obsolete human minds. Humans are ultimately meat machines. Minds are the random effects of evolutionary accidents. Machines, by contrast, are planned by rigorous engineering. Machines will prevail. This is the assumption of his OpenAI project with Ilya Sutskever and a philosophically more sophisticated old paypal Peter Thiel.
- That human brains can be enhanced with neuralinks to computers. These are being developed by his Neuralink corporation, a rather far-fetched direct neuron communicator. “In twenty years,” he says, “we’ll have a full brain interface to all our neurons.” The idea is that the symbols used by minds are readable in the electrical signals measurable at neuronal nodes. Good luck with that.
- That flight to Mars is a reasonable goal with a vital yield. That’s the goal of his breakthrough SpaceX venture.
I’m probably missing a few. Some of his ventures are even boring. He’s a supremely busy and visionary guy. But the essence of his system is Tesla as a Roadster on a SpaceX Rocket neuralinked to Musk’s dream of machine supremacy in the universe. Altogether these themes mount to the level of an entrepreneurial ideology. Although each of the assumptions is wrong, they all have huge momentum in the academy, the media, and in politics. They are maps only vaguely congruent with reality, but offering a set of guideposts that can summon real technology and accomplishment. That’s because what we call science is mostly speculation, as depicted by Thomas Kuhn, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions. It is secular religion, with a succession of faith-based systems following one another, from multiple parallel universes to gender studies, often without traction or truth. But engineering and technology are real and cumulative. Today’s Prophecy Investors should keep an eye of Musk’s projects and engineering insights and treat his philosophy as mostly noise and politics. He may ride the Zeitgeist and land on the moon and become the world’s richest and most powerful person without being any more right than Columbus was. Impelled by the grandeur of his vision and the practical bounties of his pursuit, he may well produce a series of new machines with huge utility without being right about anything but the engineering. There is magic in boldness and vision. Like the smart phone of the last era, Tesla has found the sweet spot where technologies converge in a new morphic resonance — a unity where time and space reinforce one another and yield new utility. If Musk can stay healthy and disciplined, he can become a giant. Don’t bet against him. Regards, 
George Gilder
Editor, Gilder's Daily Prophecy | 
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