#pandodaily

[lindortech]

A brief history of Uber’s bumpy road to an IPO

A brief history of Uber’s bumpy road to an IPO

It’s been nine years since UberCab made its first impression on the WordPress pages of this website. In the ensuing years, the startup has grown from an upstart looking to upend the taxi cab cartels, to a juggernaut that has its hands in every form of transportation and logistics service it can think of.

In the process, Uber has done some things that might give (and in fact has given) some…

[cnnnewsnetwork-blog]

Ex-Uber Boss Was Paid $4m By Investor That Acquired 17.5% Stake

Ex-Uber Boss Was Paid $4m By Investor That Acquired 17.5% Stake

CNN Paper: A controversial former Uber boss, who was one of the ride-hailing service’s most senior executives when it was engulfed in crisis last year, was paid $4m (£2.8m) in consultancy fees by the venture capital firm brought in to revive the company’s fortunes.

Emil Michael received the payment for advice given to the technology investor SoftBank as it acquired a 17.5% stake in Uber at the…

[davidraudalesuk]

24 Must-Read Blogs For Entrepreneurs

Blog: QuoraBlogger: Any entrepreneur you want to follow, from Fred Wilson to Marc CubanWhy it's so great: Quora is a Q&A site where experts actually take the time to seriously answer your questions. You can follow topics like "startups" and "entrepreneurship" and people like Fred Wilson or Mark Zuckerberg.  Answers get voted up by by the community so that only the best ones shine. You can find answers to questions like "What is the best way to prepare yourself for entrepreneurship?" or "What are some tips on connecting with high-profile people that can help your startup?"Sample: "What are some tips on connecting with high-profile people that can help your startup?"Top answer by Robert Scoble:I hang around high-profile people often. Here's some things that can help you connect:Listen. If they say your idea sucks, listen to the feedback, take notes, and ask for contact info. Then go fix the problems, or come up with another idea and demonstrate you listened. Get to the point. People like Ron Conway are busy. They are wildly rich, so the only thing that is limited in their life is time. You are taking away some of their most precious resource, so get to the freaking point. Don't try to chit chat or ask about their kids or make small talk. Go right for the big ask. They are used to it.

PandoDaily 📷 Blog: PandoDailyBlogger: Sarah LacyWhy it's so great: Sarah Lacy and her band of bloggers at Pando are making an effort to become the "site of record for Silicon Valley." Much of the staff came from TechCrunch, so they're well sourced. Lacy conducts exclusive interviews with high profile people in tech and curates the top tech/entrepreneurship stories from other startups in the site's right rail.Sample: AngelList has Transformed Seed Investing -- Are Recruiters and Job Boards Next?Last week Naval Ravikant went to an industry dinner. He asked a friend in the venture business how things were going. The friend slumped over in his chair, shrugged sadly and said, “The business is becoming commoditized.”It’s an extreme interpretation, and not everyone shares it. Times have never been better for a handful of firms who are rolling in the returns, raising as much from LPs as they want and still doing business the way they always have.But matters have also never been more polarized for the VC-haves and have-nots, and this sad-sack VC has a few people to blame. Chief among them is his friend Ravikant, whose site AngelList has dragged the stealthy, back-room world of venture capital kicking and screaming into the light — something many industry watchers never thought could be done.And now, AngelList is doing the same thing it did to VCs to recruiters.

LinkedIn Today 📷 ScreenshotBlog: LinkedIn TodayBlogger: LinkedIn curates articles based on your professional profile and your social connections.Why it's so great: LinkedIn Today curates articles that are fitting for your industry and that people in that industry are sharing. As such, it's a good source of entrepreneurship and business news all in one place.Sample: Articles on LinkedIn Today:Hiring Your First Set Of Employees - Greylock CapitalFacebook Testing a New 'Want' Button - Inside Facebook

Both Sides of the Table 📷 Blog: Both Sides of the TableBlogger: Mark Suster, VC at GRP Partners and former entrepreneurWhy it's so great: Suster founded two companies and worked in consulting, and has now gone over to "the Dark Side of VC," as he puts it. He's seen every business situation imaginable, from startups to large corporations, and from success to failure. Plus, he has a knack for breaking down complicated ideas and making them much easier to understand. He knows what it takes to win, and you should listen.Sample:I have always believed in the saying, “It’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”  It’s a way of life.  It’s not about abusing situations but about knowing when to push the boundaries.  It’s about knowing that the overwhelming number of people in life are naysayers and “no sayers” and sometimes you gotta just roll the dice and say WTF.

[thedetechtor]

On November 8, 2020, Virgin Hyperloop completed the first-ever human passenger Hyperloop test. This is a huge step for the company trying to bring to life Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's vision of a futuristic, ultra-fast and environmentally friendly 5th mode of transportation. How are the results from this first passenger the test and what's next for the Hyperloop?

A Bit about the Hyperloop

As mentioned in a previous article about the Hyperloop, it was originally conceived by Elon Musk in 2013 and has been touted as the fastest way to cross the surface of the Earth. Possibly one of the greatest leaps in transportation for generations, the concept promises to slash journey times between cities from several hours to a matter of minutes. Musk first mentioned that he was thinking about a concept for a "fifth mode of transport", calling it the Hyperloop, in July 2012 at a PandoDaily event in Santa Monica, California. He envisions the more advanced versions will be able to go at hypersonic speed.

It's cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table - Elon Musk - CEO of Tesla and SpaceX

Since 2015, the yearly Hyperloop Pod Competition sponsored by SpaceX allowed student and non-student teams to participate, design and for some, build a subscale prototype transport vehicle in order to demonstrate the technical feasibility of various aspects of the Hyperloop concept.

An Important Milestone

The test took place on November 8, 2020, at the Virgin Hyperloop's DevLoop test track in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The first two passengers were Virgin Hyperloop’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Josh Giegel, and head of passenger experience, Sara Luchian.

The test was completed with the newly-unveiled XP-2 vehicle, which was custom-built with occupant safety and comfort in mind. While the production vehicle will be larger and seat up to 28 passengers, this 2-seater XP-2 vehicle was built to demonstrate that passengers can in fact safely travel in a hyperloop vehicle.

The pod accelerated up to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) down the length of the 500 meters long track, before slowing down to a stop.

This is an incredible milestone for Virgin Hyperloop, one of the leaders in the race to build the first fully functional Hyperloop system, as it proves the safety of this futuristic mode of transport.

"I can’t tell you how often I get asked ‘is hyperloop safe?’, with today’s passenger testing, we have successfully answered this question" - Jay Walder, CEO of Virgin Hyperloop

What's Next?

This is not only a big step for Virgin Hyperloop, but it will also motivate other companies working on this technology, like Hyperloop Transportation Technology (HTT), Transpod Inc, or even TUM Hyperloop, a student team from the Technical University of Munich, to perform similar tests bring us closer to a faster, safer and greener future.

All of these companies are working closely with governments and partners to help advance their technology and construction in countries like India, the United States, Belgium, France and the United Arab Emirates.

For more about the Hyperloop, check out our article covering everything you need to know about this futuristic technology, from how it works, to who's building it, to what the potential cost could be! You can also listen to Episode 2 of The Detechtor Podcast where we discuss the hyperbole, and whether it's the future of travel?

More from The Detechtor:

Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage: The Solution to the Climate Crisis?

⌚️ Fitness Trackers: Helping us Get Fit or Just Another Gadget?

Smartphones: The True Cost of Upgrades ♻️

Stay updated:

Want the latest on the impact of tech? Subscribe to our newsletter!

NEW! The Detechtor Podcast is now available on all podcast players! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Tunein

Let's connect! Follow us on Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Youtube

via The Detechtor

[un-enfant-immature]

L.A.-based Upfront Ventures has two new general partners, bringing its GP count to eight

Upfront Ventures, the 23-year-old, L.A.-based venture capital firm, is gearing up for far more deal-making.

In addition to filing paperwork with the SEC this summer to raise its third growth-stage investment fund (it is also investing a $400 million early-stage fund and probably announcing another soon), the firm just added two new general partners to its line-up of investors.

One of them, Michael Carney, joined Upfront as a principal in 2015, after working as an editor at the news site Pandodaily, and, before that, working as an investor and analyst at a boutique merchant bank called Worldvest.

The firm’s second new general partner is Aditi Maliwal, who has also circled in and out of investing before, including stints as an associate with Crosslink Capital and, more recently, spending several years with Google, where Maliwal worked in corporate development before becoming a project manager.

We talked with both this week to congratulate them, as well as to learn more about where they’ll be shopping — and from where.

For her part, Maliwal, who begins work at Upfront next month, says the idea is for her to eventually open a San Francisco office, though for now, she’ll be operating from the Bay Area out of a space that’s yet to be determined and spending every Monday or every other Monday down in L.A. with the rest of the team.

She got to know Upfront through another general partner, Kara Nortman, who joined Upfront in 2014 and “we’d continue to see each other at events. I also have family ties in L.A. so would see her there.” Maliwal says she also says she would observe on her trips that the “ecosystem in L.A. has really grown from 2014 to where it is today. I think the Bay Area continues to see how important it is, too.”

As for becoming an investor again, Maliwal says she was always interested in becoming a VC, thanks in part to a class taught at Stanford by renowned venture capitalist Heidi Roizen VC that inspired her. She says spending time with founders in her husband’s business school class at Stanford this past year whet her appetite anew. “There are four or five companies I’m close to and they’re good friends and when I was up at 11 pm working on a company idea with one of them earlier this year, I just realized that this is what gives me a lot of energy and this is a space I want to [get involved in again].”

What she’ll be focusing on, she says it will mostly likely be business to business to consumer models, as well as SaaS applications, fintech, and, when the opportunity arises, consumer products. More broadly speaking, says Maliwal, she hopes to serve as a bridge for Bay Area startups looking for a foothold in the L.A. market and vice versa.

Meanwhile, Carney is, and will remain, more focused on later-stage bets that Upfront funded early on and whose success the firm wants to ensure (to the extent that any firm can). Understandably, he sounds excited — still — about the work.

“In 2012, [when I was at Pandodaily] L.A. was crossing and inflection point, with a number of second- and third-time founders coming out of later-stage marquee companies. When I joined Upfront, it felt similar. It was an incredible platform, it was a year or two after the firm was rebranded [from GRP Ventures] and Kara had been there less than a year and [fellow general partner] Greg [Bettinelli] had been there maybe two years. The team was kind of maturing and I feel lucky to join when I did.”

Carney suggests the opportunities have only grown stronger, in his view of the later-stage world. “We’re definitely seeing [greater bifurcation] between the haves and have nots, with company that can break out as clear leaders tending to have access to larger amounts of capital than in past years. For the best of the best, the conditions remain as favorable as possible, while it’s gotten harder for companies to raise capital that fail to hit those growth rates, even in good times.”

Being able to recruit employees from roles at top companies in the Bay Area is just one reason solid L.A. companies have attained more momentum. “I think that owes to the maturation of the L.A. ecosystem. I think people are drawn to L.A. because Silicon Valley, for all its incredible success in the tech sector, is an industry town and L.A. has a more diverse economy and ecosystem. But also, five years ago, people would ask themselves, ‘If this new role [in L.A.] doesn’t work out, what do I do next?’ And I think the answer to that question is much clearer and more positive today.”

According to Upfront, 40 percent of its initial checks are written to companies based in L.A., though it has bets in other parts of the U.S. and world. Some of the best-known deals in its current portfolio include the scooter company Bird, the sneaker marketplace GOAT, and the online resale store ThredUp. Upfront was also an investor in Ring, the smart doorbell company acquired early last year by Amazon for $1 billion.

In addition to Maliwal, Carney, Nortman and Bettinelli, the firm is managed by general partners Kobie Fuller, Kevin Zhang, Mark Suster and founder Yves Sisteron.

[tajagnayouthclub-blog]

Hyper loop - Advanced mode of Transportation

Hyperloop brings airplane speeds to ground level, safely. Passengers and cargo capsules will hover through a network of low-pressure tubes between cities and transforming travel time from hours to minutes. What is Hyper loop? The Hyperloop concept as it is widely known was proposed by billionaire industrialist Elon Musk, CEO of the aerospace firm SpaceX and the guy behind Tesla (as well as, in the last year, a number of public gaffes). It’s a reaction to the California High-Speed Rail System currently under development, a bullet train Musk feels is lackluster (and which, it is alleged, will be one of the most expensive and slow-moving in the world). A one way trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the Hyperloop could take about 35 minutes. Musk’s Hyperloop consists of two massive tubes extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Pods carrying passengers would travel through the tubes at speeds topping out over 700 mph. Imagine the pneumatic tubes people in The Jetsons use to move around buildings, but on a much bigger scale. For propulsion, magnetic accelerators will be planted along the length of the tube, propelling the pods forward.  The tubes would house a low pressure environment, surrounding the pod with a cushion of air that permits the pod to move safely at such high speeds, like a puck gliding over an air hockey table. Given the tight quarters in the tube, pressure buildup in front of the pod could be a problem. The tube needs a system to keep air from building up in this way. Musk’s design recommends an air compressor on the front of the pod that will move air from the front to the tail, keeping it aloft and preventing pressure building up due to air displacement. A one way trip on the Hyperloop is projected to take about 35 minutes (for comparison, traveling the same distance by car takes roughly six hours). The Hyperloop concept operates by sending specially designed "capsules" or "pods" through a steel tube maintained at a partial vacuum. In Musk's original concept, each capsule floats on a 0.02–0.05 in (0.5–1.3 mm) layer of air provided under pressure to air-caster "skis", similar to how pucks are levitated above an air hockey table, while still allowing faster speeds than wheels can sustain. Hyperloop One's technology uses passive maglev for the same purpose. Linear induction motors located along the tube would accelerate and decelerate the capsule to the appropriate speed for each section of the tube route. With rolling resistance eliminated and air resistance greatly reduced, the capsules can glide for the bulk of the journey. In Musk's original Hyperloop concept, an electrically driven inlet fan and axial compressor would be placed at the nose of the capsule to "actively transfer high-pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel", resolving the problem of air pressure building in front of the vehicle, slowing it down. A fraction of the air is shunted to the skis for additional pressure, augmenting that gain passively from lift due to their shape. Hyperloop One's system does away with the compressor. In the alpha-level concept, passenger-only pods are to be 7 ft 4 in (2.23 m) in diameter and projected to reach a top speed of 760 mph (1,220 km/h) to maintain aerodynamic efficiency.  The design proposes passengers experience a maximum inertial acceleration of 0.5 g, about 2 or 3 times that of a commercial airliner on takeoff and landing.

History The general idea of trains or other transportation traveling through evacuated tubes dates back more than a century, although the atmospheric railway was never a commercial success. Musk first mentioned that he was thinking about a concept for a "fifth mode of transport", calling it the Hyperloop, in July 2012 at a PandoDaily event in Santa Monica, California. This hypothetical high-speed mode of transportation would have the following characteristics: immunity to weather, collision free, twice the speed of a plane, low power consumption, and energy storage for 24-hour operations. The name Hyperloop was chosen because it would go in a loop. Musk envisions the more advanced versions will be able to go at hypersonic speed. In May 2013, Musk likened the Hyperloop to a "cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table". From late 2012 until August 2013, a group of engineers from both Tesla and SpaceX worked on the conceptual modeling of Hyperloop. An early system design was published in the Tesla and SpaceX blogs which describes one potential design, function, pathway, and cost of a hyperloop system. According to the alpha design, pods would accelerate to cruising speed gradually using a linear electric motor and glide above their track on air bearings through tubes above ground on columns or below ground in tunnels to avoid the dangers of grade crossings. An ideal hyperloop system will be more energy-efficient, quiet, and autonomous than existing modes of mass transit. Musk has also invited feedback to "see if the people can find ways to improve it". The Hyperloop Alpha was released as an open source design. The word mark "HYPERLOOP", applicable to "high-speed transportation of goods in tubes" was issued to SpaceX on April 4, 2017. In June 2015, SpaceX announced that it would build a 1-mile-long (1.6 km) test track to be located next to SpaceX's Hawthorne facility. The track would be used to test pod designs supplied by third parties in the competition. By November 2015, with several commercial companies and dozens of student teams pursuing the development of Hyperloop technologies, the Wall Street Journal asserted that "The Hyperloop Movement", as some of its unaffiliated members refer to themselves, is officially bigger than the man who started it." The MIT Hyperloop team developed the first Hyperloop pod prototype, which they unveiled at the MIT Museum on May 13, 2016. Their design uses electrodynamic suspension for levitating and eddy current braking. On January 29, 2017, approximately one year after phase one of the Hyperloop pod competition, the MIT Hyperloop pod demonstrated the first ever low-pressure Hyperloop run in the world. Within this first competition the Delft University team from the Netherlands achieved the highest overall competition score. The awards for the "fastest pod" and the "best performance in flight" were won by the team TUM Hyperloop (formerly known as WARR Hyperloop) from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) placed third overall in the competition, judged by SpaceX engineers. The second Hyperloop pod competition took place from August 25–27, 2017. The only judging criteria being top speed provided it is followed by successful deceleration. TUM Hyperloop from the Technical University of Munich won the competition by reaching a top speed of 324 km/h (201 mph) and therefore breaking the previous record of 310 km/h for hyperloop prototypes set by Hyperloop One.   Hyper loop and India The Indian State of Maharashtra announced their intent to build a hyperloop route between Mumbai and Pune, beginning with an operational demonstration track. THE MUMBAI-PUNE PROJECT MOVES FORWARD Working with our public and private partners, Virgin Hyperloop One is on track to complete the feasibility study for the Phase I demonstration track of the Mumbai-Pune project. The full project is proposing to link Central Pune, the Navi Mumbai International Airport and Central Mumbai – with a potential commute time of 25 minutes. Based on our ongoing analysis, the Mumbai-Pune route is proving to be the strongest economic case that we have seen to-date.

Building upon this progress, VHO welcomed the Chief Minister of Maharashtra Fadnavis, and representatives from the State Government including key members of the Chief Minister’s Office and Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority (PMRDA) chief Kiran Gitte, project lead on the Mumbai-Pune hyperloop project, at our DevLoop test site to inspect our technology. The Chief Minister and other esteemed guests were able to witness a full-scale hyperloop in action for a live demonstration test. It was an honor to host the Chief Minister, demonstrating a vote of confidence as we advance into the second half of our ongoing feasibility study and progress in accordance with the Framework Agreement signed in February. Speaking with our Chairman Richard Branson, the Chief Minister confirmed, “This was a very fruitful discussion and we should be able to start moving on this project very fast.”

( Image source : Virgin hyper loop one ) HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGY WITHIN INDIA’S TRANSPORT ECOSYSTEM Progress on the Mumbai-Pune hyperloop project is indicative of a larger trend – a wave of visionary policy leadership when it comes to supporting new technologies and innovation in India’s transport ecosystem. NITI Aayog’s Tech Vision 2022 document, the work of the government technology think tank Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), and the Centres of Excellence at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have been very supportive of new technologies. In addition, the Railways Ministry ‘Mission 350 Plus’ plan as well as work on maglev technologies and the HSR Diamond Quadrilateral project are indicative of how the central government is embracing new rail technologies. At a state level, Maharashtra’s push for a Mumbai-Pune hyperloop system is a clear endorsement for innovation at a regional level, with accompanying interest from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as well. India has multiple factors that make it an ideal country for a hyperloop system: infrastructure needs due to rising demand, superior engineering talent, low-cost manufacturing base, and strong political support and favourable regulatory environment. These factors ensure that the hyperloop, when built and tested commercially, will be affordable (for riders), scalable and low-cost (to build and operate). The hyperloop system’s appeal for India comes from its complementarity with existing transport technologies. Hyperloop systems, with its point-to-point transport proposition, can be built to inter-connect with existing High-Speed Rail (HSR) or Metro projects. There is a conscious effort to build such adjacencies into the design of the first inter-city hyperloop system in India, and this is reflected in the location of the proposed stations and the track alignment. Come 2025, a student from Ahmedabad should be able to reach Pune, by taking the Ahmedabad-Mumbai Bullet Train and then switch over to the 25-minute hyperloop ride to Pune, just as present metro commuters switch from one metro line to another in a city. Such a multi-modal transport system between India’s bustling cities will have significant productivity implications for the country. This system becomes yet more powerful when replicated across different regional clusters in other parts of India, or linked seamlessly with the Modi Government’s HSR Diamond Quadrilateral Project – and one can see the emergence of Indian mega-economic regions in a manner that rivals China’s super-city clusters plan. Once proven for commercial viability, the hyperloop system can be scaled to different city-pairs in India. Earlier estimates of five viable routes between different Indian cities had evaluated a 55 minutes commute for a Delhi-Jaipur-Indore-Mumbai system, 50 minutes for a Mumbai-Bangalore-Chennai commute, 41 minutes for a Bangalore-Thiruvananthapuram commute and 20 minutes for a Bangalore-Chennai commute on the hyperloop system. View this from a multi-modal transport perspective and the real benefits of a system like this come through – hyperloop technology adoption is a real enabler for India to leap-frog to a higher trajectory of growth, akin to the role that mobile phones have played earlier in terms of technology adoption as well as economic growth. Hyper loop explained   How Virgin hyper loop one's system becomes reality ?   Read the full article

[digiheart-blog]

Blog 8

Global social media: Case study China

A life without Facebook…Twitter…Instagram? But how will I know if people like me? For people living in China, a life without social media is a reality…kind of. The Great Firewall of China regulates and censors the use of these popular social media platforms (Open Democracy 2013), so it is easy to see why many in the western world may believe that the people of China do not use social media at all.

The Great Firewall of China

(Association for Progressive Communication 2014)

This however is a misconception. Although the Chinese government blocks the use of these social media platforms in the interest of national safety, there are a number of other platforms that can be used. 

‘Rather than eliminate social media, restrictions on foreign websites and social media have resulted in a flourishing home-grown, state-approved ecosystem in which Chinese-owned properties thrive’ (Crampton 2011).

Youku and Tudou is similar to Youtube however up to 70% of the content is professionally produced (Crampton 2011). Haidu is the Chinese equivalent to Google in that it allows users to search for information, however the content is highly edited by the PRC government. Renren is similar to Facebook and WeChat is the Facebook messenger equivelant. Sina Weibo is the Chinese answer to Twitter, and Douban is a mesh of IMDB, Spotify and Myspace (Fang 2016).

The Great Firewall of China Song

(PandoDaily 2012)

[businesscreditrocks]

How to Build Your Business Around What’s Most Important to You

Clay Clark is the former “U.S. SBA Entrepreneur of the Year,” a member of the Forbes Business Coach Council, an Amazon best-selling author and the host of the Thrivetime Show podcast which has hit #1 on the iTunes charts in the category of business 6 times. Throughout his career he’s founded several multi-million-dollar businesses including: DJConnection.com, EpicPhotos.com, EITRLounge.com, MakeYourLifeEpic.com, etc. (alphabetically speaking). Throughout his career he has been featured in Fast Company, Bloomberg, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, PandoDaily, and numerous other publications. He’s been the speaker and consultant of choice for top brands throughout the country including: Hewlett Packard, Maytag University, Valspar Paint, and O’Reilly’s Auto Parts. Clay is also the co-founder of 5 children, and is the proud owner of thousands of trees, dozens of chickens and 13 cats.

During this show we discuss…

Reducing you working hours, decrease costs and increase profit

The six F’s you need to know about

How to build multiple businesses at the same time

How to spend time with what matters most

How to be present when you’re with your family

How to interview 30 people at the same time

Time-saving hacks that are crucial to your success

How to overcome interruptions to get better results

How to break your dependence from your smart phone

How to not let your smart phone control you

How to deal with complaints and bad news

How to get good saying “no”

How to focus your time on what really matters most

5 steps to reaching all your goals

Check out this episode!

[abetheone]

Pando Editor Sells Site, Quits Journalism, Citing Sexual Harassment and Threats in Silicon Valley

Pando Editor Sells Site, Quits Journalism, Citing Sexual Harassment and Threats in Silicon Valley

[ad_1]

Former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy started PandoDaily in 2012. But now she’s “selling the company, quitting journalism, and ditching Silicon Valley after 20 years,” reports Business Insider, citing Lacy’s blog.

She says her decision comes from years of sexual harassment and threats in her two decades covering Silicon Valley. “I have absorbed so many more stories than I have…

[quanrel]

Curious - the game of learning

https://www.quanrel.com/curious-the-game-of-learning/ Curious - the game of learning - https://www.quanrel.com/curious-the-game-of-learning/ Are you Curious? Get a daily workout of lessons, puzzles(including Crossword), and Curios and grow your Curious Quotient (CQ)! Who knew exercising your brain could be this much fun? “Curious has mastered making learning addictive.” — PandoDaily “A Netflix For Learning” — Forbes “Curious stands out from sites like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, and Lynda.com by focusing on learning ‘for learning’s sake.’” — VentureBeat “Curious Helps Hobbyists Share Their Skills” — Mashable Curious helps people reclaim between 5 to 30 minutes a day to learn something new! Ready to learn? Here’s how the game of lifelong learning works: – First, we start with a brief interview. – You tell us how much time you want to spend learning a day: 5, 15, or 30 minutes – We customize your learning experience and build you a beautiful CQ wheel. Every wheel is unique! – You receive a daily, personalized learning workout via email and on your Curious dashboard. – You complete your workout by reading Curios (our well-loved daily fun fact), solving puzzles, and watching lessons. – Add lessons and topics to a focus area for longer term learning goals. – Track your progress every time you learn. You’ll be so much more interesting! Learn from over 25,000 video lessons on virtually any topic. Whether you want to learn how to crochet a scarf, plant an organic garden or play guitar, Curious helps you stay happy and healthy with a daily learning workout across eight key knowledge areas: Aesthetic (crafts, photography, sewing, drawing, interior design, crochet, graphic design) Humanities (public speaking, languages, storytelling, political science, history) Mind / Body (cooking, fitness, nutrition, confidence, meditation, yoga, mindfulness) Music (music theory, piano, guitar, singing, drums, ukulele, harmonica, violin, DJ skills) Play (home DIY, sports, travel, games, gardening, camping, puzzles, biking, running) Relationships (psychology, parenting, communication, marriage, dating, pets, leadership) S.T.E.M. (science, web development, math, biology, hardware, computing, engineering) Work (Microsoft Office, entrepreneurship, budgeting, marketing, finance, blogging, analytics) And you get recommendations from your (and our) favorite NPR shows: Science Friday, PRI’s The World, BBC World Service, Marketplace, and more! You also get 5 new puzzles every day: classic crossword puzzle, math mayhem with KenKen, and more. Download the Curious app and start for FREE! Daily Curios and intro lessons available to all users; subscribe for full access to the entire lesson library. FREE trial included with each subscription. What have you got to learn? Get addicted to the game of lifelong learning & stay Curious! — Curious offers the following all-access subscriptions: 1 year: $29.99 These prices are for United States customers. Pricing in other countries may vary and actual charges may be converted to your local currency depending on your country of residence. Your Curious subscription automatically renews at the end of the subscription term unless auto-renewal is turned off. Subscription renewals cost the same amount as the original subscription, and your credit card will be charged through your iTunes account at confirmation of purchase. You may turn off auto-renewal at any time after purchase by going to your iTunes Account Settings. Privacy policy: https://curious.com/legal_app#privacy Terms of use: https://curious.com/legal_app#terms By Curious.com Find out more

[writingguide003-blog]

Substack helps writers turn blogs and newsletters into subscription businesses

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/substack-helps-writers-turn-blogs-and-newsletters-into-subscription-businesses/

Substack helps writers turn blogs and newsletters into subscription businesses

Substack is looking to help writers make money in a way that CEO Chris Best described as “diametrically opposed to the broader Internet news model.”

In other words, while large digital media companies are chasing “a lot of engagement, a lot of clicks and eyeballs,” Best (who was previously co-founder and CTO at Kik) said Substack has built subscription tools for “these niche publications — they’re about doing something really good and really meaningful for a small number of people.”

Substack is actually going live with its first publication today — Sinocism, a China-focused newsletter written by MarketWatch co-founder Bill Bishop, who’s using the platform to launch his first paid version, which will cost $11 a month or $118 a year.

Bishop has 30,000 subscribers, and he told me he’s experimented in the past with asking readers for donations.

“It didn’t work as a business,” he said. “It got too messy and I got sick of begging for money.”

In Bishop’s words, Sinocism’s new business model is “shamelessly copied” from Ben Thompson of Stratechery, where members can read free posts on Thompson’s website but need to pay to get his daily email.  Similarly, Sinocism readers will need to pay for access to the daily newsletter, but Bishop will also be writing a free weekly email.

“I liked having a bigger audience and so it’s important to me to be able to keep that avenue alive,” Bishop said. “Over time I’m hopeful that people who stick with the free one will start missing the paid one.”

There are other companies offering different types of subscription and paywall support, but Best said his goal at Substack is to make the process of selling subscriptions as simple as possible. Part of that approach means Substack hasn’t just built payment and paywall products, but also a full content management system for publishing to both the web and email.

“We’re not trying to say: Use us as one of a constellation of services,” Best said. Instead, the goal is to “offer a unified solution.”

Best founded Substack with journalist Hamish McKenzie, who’s written for Tesla, Kik and PandoDaily. McKenzie argued the startup provides an antidote to some of the doom and gloom in the media industry.

“We’re very optimistic about the future of media,” McKenzie said. “People are struggling to figure it out, they’re chasing the next shiny objects. With subscription publishing, the likes of Bill and Ben Thompson have shown that there’s a huge, underexploited market that we believe can be bigger than the existing publishing industry.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com

[readingtext]

RT @sarahcuda: Sheryl Sandberg is practicing what she preached http://bit.ly/2P8pZ67 via @pandodaily

Sheryl Sandberg is practicing what she preached https://t.co/SznrCPFpB6 via @pandodaily

— Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) November 28, 2018

from Twitter https://twitter.com/bjohnson November 29, 2018 at 01:40AM via IFTTT

[how2to18]

WE FACE a crisis of computing. The very devices that were supposed to augment our minds now harvest them for profit. How did we get here?

Most of us only know the oft-told mythology featuring industrious nerds who sparked a revolution in the garages of California. The heroes of the epic: Jobs, Gates, Musk, and the rest of the cast. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, hawker of neo-Esperantist bromides about “connectivity as panacea” and leader of one of the largest media distribution channels on the planet, excused himself by recounting to senators an “aw shucks” tale of building Facebook in his dorm room. Silicon Valley myths aren’t just used to rationalize bad behavior. These business school tales end up restricting how we imagine our future, limiting it to the caprices of eccentric billionaires and market forces.

What we need instead of myths are engaging, popular histories of computing and the internet, lest we remain blind to the long view.

At first blush Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018) seems to fit the bill. A former editor of The eXile, a Moscow-based tabloid newspaper, and investigative reporter for PandoDaily, Levine has made a career out of writing about the dark side of tech. In this book, he traces the intellectual and institutional origins of the internet. He then focuses on the privatization of the network, the creation of Google, and revelations of NSA surveillance. And, in the final part of his book, he turns his attention to Tor and the crypto community.

He remains unremittingly dark, however, claiming that these technologies were developed from the beginning with surveillance in mind, and that their origins are tangled up with counterinsurgency research in the Third World. This leads him to a damning conclusion: “The Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today.”

To be sure, these constitute provocative theses, ones that attempt to confront not only the standard Silicon Valley story, but also established lore among the small group of scholars who study the history of computing. He falls short, however, of backing up his claims with sufficient evidence. Indeed, he flirts with creating a mythology of his own — one that I believe risks marginalizing the most relevant lessons from the history of computing.

¤

The scholarly history is not widely known and worth relaying here in brief. The internet and what today we consider personal computing came out of a unique, government-funded research community that took off in the early 1960s. Keep in mind that, in the preceding decade, “computers” were radically different from what we know today. Hulking machines, they existed to crunch numbers for scientists, researchers, and civil servants. “Programs” consisted of punched cards fed into room-sized devices that would process them one at a time. Computer time was tedious and riddled with frustration. A researcher working with census data might have to queue up behind dozens of other users, book time to run her cards through, and would only know about a mistake when the whole process was over.

Users, along with IBM, remained steadfast in believing that these so-called “batch processing” systems were really what computers were for. Any progress, they believed, would entail building bigger, faster, better versions of the same thing.

But that’s obviously not what we have today. From a small research community emerged an entirely different set of goals, loosely described as “interactive computing.” As the term suggests, using computers would no longer be restricted to a static one-way process but would be dynamically interactive. According to the standard histories, the man most responsible for defining these new goals was J. C. R. Licklider. A psychologist specializing in psychoacoustics, he had worked on early computing research, becoming a vocal proponent for interactive computing. His 1960 essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis” outlined how computers might even go so far as to augment the human mind.

It just so happened that funding was available. Three years earlier in 1957, the Soviet launch of Sputnik had sent the US military into a panic. Partially in response, the Department of Defense (DoD) created a new agency for basic and applied technological research called the Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA, today known as DARPA). The agency threw large sums of money at all sorts of possible — and dubious — research avenues, from psychological operations to weather control. Licklider was appointed to head the Command and Control and Behavioral Sciences divisions, presumably because of his background in both psychology and computing.

At ARPA, he enjoyed relative freedom in addition to plenty of cash, which enabled him to fund projects in computing whose military relevance was decidedly tenuous. He established a nationwide, multi-generational network of researchers who shared his vision. As a result, almost every significant advance in the field from the 1960s through the early 1970s was, in some form or another, funded or influenced by the community he helped establish.

Its members realized that the big computers scattered around university campuses needed to communicate with one another, much as Licklider had discussed in his 1960 paper. In 1967, one of his successors at ARPA, Robert Taylor, formally funded the development of a research network called the ARPANET. At first the network spanned only a handful of universities across the country. By the early 1980s, it had grown to include hundreds of nodes. Finally, through a rather convoluted trajectory involving international organizations, standards committees, national politics, and technological adoption, the ARPANET evolved in the early 1990s into the internet as we know it.

Levine believes that he has unearthed several new pieces of evidence that undercut parts of this early history, leading him to conclude that the internet has been a surveillance platform from its inception.

¤

The first piece of evidence he cites comes by way of ARPA’s Project Agile. A counterinsurgency research effort in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, it was notorious for its defoliation program that developed chemicals like Agent Orange. It also involved social science research and data collection under the guidance of an intelligence operative named William Godel, head of ARPA’s classified efforts under the Office of Foreign Developments. On more than one occasion, Levine asserts or at least suggests that Licklider and Godel’s efforts were somehow insidiously intertwined, and that Licklider’s computing research in his division of ARPA had something to do with Project Agile. Despite arguing that this is clear from “pages and pages of released and declassified government files,” Levine cites only one such document as supporting evidence for this claim. It shows how Godel, who at one point had surplus funds, transferred money from his group to Licklider’s department when the latter was over budget.

This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Given the freewheeling nature of ARPA’s funding and management in the early days, such a transfer should come as no surprise. On its own, it doesn’t suggest a direct link in terms of research efforts. Years later, Taylor asked his boss at ARPA to fund the ARPANET — and, after a 20-minute conversation, he received $1 million in funds transferred from ballistic missile research. No one would seriously suggest that ARPANET and ballistic missile research were somehow closely “intertwined” because of this.

Sharon Weinberger’s recent history of ARPA, The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, The Pentagon Agency that Changed the World (2017), which Levine cites, makes clear what is already known from the established history. “Newcomers like Licklider were essentially making up the rules as they went along,” and were “given broad berth to establish research programs that might be tied only tangentially to a larger Pentagon goal.” Licklider took nearly every chance he could to transform his ostensible behavioral science group into an interactive computing research group. Most people in wider ARPA, let alone the DoD, had no idea what Licklider’s researchers were up to. His Command and Control division was even renamed the more descriptive Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).

Licklider was certainly involved in several aspects of counterinsurgency research. Annie Jacobsen, in her book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency (2015), describes how he attended meetings discussing strategic hamlets in Southeast Asia and collaborated on proposals with others who conducted Cold War social science research. And Levine mentions Licklider’s involvement with a symposium that addressed how computers might be useful in conducting counterinsurgency work.

But Levine only points to one specific ARPA-funded computing research project that might have had something to do with counterinsurgency. In 1969, Licklider — no longer at ARPA — championed a proposal for a constellation of research efforts to develop statistical analysis and database software for social scientists. The Cambridge Project, as it was called, was a joint effort between Harvard and MIT. Formed at the height of the antiwar movement, when all DoD funding was viewed as suspicious, it was greeted with outrage by student demonstrators. As Levine mentions, students on campuses across the country viewed computers as large, bureaucratic, war-making machines that supported the military industrial complex.

Levine makes a big deal of the Cambridge Project, but is there really a concrete connection between surveillance, counterinsurgency, computer networking, and this research effort? If there is, he doesn’t present it in the book. Instead he relies heavily on an article in the Harvard Crimson by a student activist. He doesn’t even directly quote from the project proposal itself, which should contain at least one or two damning lines. Instead he lists types of “data banks” the project would build, including ones on youth movements, minority integration in multicultural societies, and public opinion polls, among others. The project ran for five years but Levine never tells us what it was actually used for.

It’s worth pointing out that the DoD was the only organization that was funding computing research in a manner that could lead to real breakthroughs. Licklider and others needed to present military justification for their work, no matter how thin. In addition, as the 1960s came to a close, Congress was tightening its purse strings, which was another reason to trump up their relevance. It’s odd that an investigative reporter like Levine, ever suspicious of the standard line, should take the claims of these proposals at face value.

I spoke with John Klensin, a member of the Cambridge Project steering committee who was involved from the beginning. He has no memory of such data banks. “There was never any central archive or effort to build one,” he told me. He worked closely with Licklider and other key members of the project, and he distinctly recalls the tense atmosphere on campuses at the time, even down to the smell of tear gas. Oddly enough, he says some people worked for him by day and protested the project by night, believing that others elsewhere must be doing unethical work. According to Klensin, the Cambridge Project conducted “zero classified research.” It produced general purpose software and published its reports publicly. Some of them are available online, but Levine doesn’t cite them at all. An ARPA commissioned study of its own funding history even concluded that, while the project had been a “technical success” whose systems were “applicable to a wide variety of disciplines,” behavioral scientists hadn’t benefited much from it. Until Levine or someone else can produce documents demonstrating that the project was designed for, or even used in, counterinsurgency or surveillance efforts, we’ll have to take Klensin at his word.

As for the ARPANET, Levine only provides one source of evidence for his claim that, from its earliest days, the experimental computer network was involved in some kind of surveillance activity. He has dug up an NBC News report from the 1970s that describes how intelligence gathered in previous years (as part of an effort to create dossiers of domestic protestors) had been transferred across a new network of computer systems within the Department of Defense.

This report was read into the Congressional record during joint hearings on Surveillance Technology in 1975. But what’s clear from the subsequent testimony of Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense David Cooke, the NBC reporter had likely confused several computer systems and networks across various government agencies. The story’s lone named source claims to have seen the data structure used for the files when they arrived at MIT. It is indeed an interesting account, but it remains unclear what was transferred, across which system, and what he saw. This incident hardly shows “how military and intelligence agencies used the network technology to spy on Americans in the first version of the Internet,” as Levine claims.

The ARPANET was not a classified system — anyone with an appropriately funded research project could use it. “ARPANET was a general purpose communication network. It is a distortion to conflate this communication system’s development with the various projects that made use of its facilities,” Vint Cerf, creator of the internet protocol, told me. Cerf concedes, however, that a “secured capability” was created early on, “presumably used to communicate classified information across the network.” That should not be surprising, as the government ran the project. But Levine’s evidence merely shows that surveillance information gathered elsewhere might have been transferred across the network. Does that count as having surveillance “baked in,” as he says, to the early internet?

Levine’s early history suffers most from viewing ARPA or even the military as a single monolithic entity. In the absence of hard evidence, he employs a jackhammer of willful insinuations as described above, pounding toward a questionable conclusion. Others have noted this tendency. He disingenuously writes that, four years ago, a review of Julian Assange’s book in this very publication accused him of being funded by the CIA, when in fact its author had merely suggested that Levine was prone to conspiracy theories. It’s a shame, because today’s internet is undoubtedly a surveillance platform, both for governments and the companies whose cash crop is our collective mind. To suggest this was always the case means ignoring the effects of the hysterical national response to 9/11, which granted unprecedented funding and power to private intelligence contractors. Such dependence on private companies was itself part of a broader free market turn in national politics from the 1970s onward, which tightened funds for basic research in computing and other technical fields — and cemented the idea that private companies, rather than government-funded research, would take charge of inventing the future. Today’s comparatively incremental technical progress is the result. In The Utopia of Rules (2015), anthropologist David Graeber describes this phenomenon as a turn away from investment in technologies promoting “the possibility of alternative futures” to investment in those that “furthered labor discipline and social control.” As a result, instead of mind-enhancing devices that might have the same sort of effect as, say, mass literacy, we have a precarious gig economy and a convenience-addled relationship with reality.

Levine recognizes a tinge of this in his account of the rise of Google, the first large tech company to build a business model for profiting from user data. “Something in technology pushed other companies in the same direction. It happened just about everywhere,” he writes, though he doesn’t say what the “something” is. But the lesson to remember from history is that companies on their own are incapable of big inventions like personal computing or the internet. The quarterly pressure for earnings and “innovations” leads them toward unimaginative profit-driven developments, some of them harmful.

This is why Levine’s unsupported suspicion of government-funded computing research, regardless of the context, is counterproductive. The lessons of ARPA prove inconvenient for mythologizing Silicon Valley. They show a simple truth: in order to achieve serious invention and progress — in computers or any other advanced technology — you have to pay intelligent people to screw around with minimal interference, accept that most ideas won’t pan out, and extend this play period to longer stretches of time than the pressures of corporate finance allow. As science historian Mitchell Waldrop once wrote, the polio vaccine might never have existed otherwise; it was “discovered only after years of failure, frustration, and blind alleys, none of which could have been justified by cost/benefit analysis.” Left to corporate interests, the world would instead “have gotten the best iron lungs you ever saw.”

Computing for the benefit of the public is a more important concept now than ever. In fact, Levine agrees, writing, “The more we understand and democratize the Internet, the more we can deploy its power in the service of democratic and humanistic values.” Power in the computing world is wildly unbalanced — each of us mediated by and dependent on, indeed addicted to, invasive systems whose functionality we barely understand. Silicon Valley only exacerbates this imbalance, in the same manner that oil companies exacerbate climate change or financialization of the economy exacerbates inequality. Today’s technology is flashy, sexy, and downright irresistible. But, while we need a cure for the ills of late-stage capitalism, our gadgets are merely “the best iron lungs you ever saw.”

¤

Eric Gade is a freelance writer and programmer, previously the project manager of the Declassification Engine project of Columbia University’s History Lab. He is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions.

The post The Long View: Surveillance, the Internet, and Government Research appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[ramialkarmi]

A new social network for working moms is skewering ad-based revenue models, the Silicon Valley status quo, and online trolling

Chairman Mom is a new site for working moms created by PandoDaily founder Sarah Lacy. It aims to provide mothers with a network of support on a  judgment-free platform.

The site offers an ad-free platform that costs users $5 a month to join.

Chairman Mom's revenue model is intended to shut down trolling and promote positive online behavior. 

  In the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, there's been a growing debate surrounding the role of social media giants. How do social networks ensure user privacy? How do they promote good behavior online? How do they keep problematic ads from surfacing on their sites? 

One brand-new site might have the answer, and it's offering a solution to an often overlooked segment of the population: working moms.

The site is Chairman Mom, the brainchild of  journalist and PandoDaily founder Sarah Lacy, who is creating an online community focused on connecting moms with a network of support where they can chat about their daily challenges on a pointedly judgment-free platform.  

"What we're launching is a subscription-based platform to rebrand working motherhood," Lacy said in an interview with Business Insider. "Before I became a mom, I always heard about the guilt that working moms felt and the stigmas they faced. I had friends who would say things to me like, 'Get ready to feel like a failure all of the time.'”

Lacy says the extreme pressure mothers face within the workforce is manifested not only in the office place, but in online interactions as well. "There's so many mother-focused Facebook groups where it turns into tribalism and mommy wars and horrible threads that end with someone calling someone else a bad mother," said Lacy.

At Chairman Mom, Lacy aims to check these tribalistic, antagonistic behaviors at the door. "There's no such thing as being a s----y mother," said Lacy. "We're changing the stigma of women feeling like shit for doing something great for their families."

Trolling and bullying are problems that have long troubled the online landscape, but Lacy says the key to maintaining good behavior online resides in how a site is built, rather than the people that populate it. 

For Lacy, creating a judgment-free platform meant rethinking the site's revenue model from the ground up.

To join Chairman Mom, users are charged a flat fee of $5 a month, and the site is a deliberately ad-free zone. That's because Lacy's fundamental agreement with the people who use her platform differs radically from that of most other mainstream social media sites. "Our users are the customer and not the product," said Lacy. "We won't obsessively track you, and we aren't trying to repackage you to sell to Procter and Gamble."

"There's so many little things that are done within social media sites that promote fighting and drama because fighting and drama make you come back to the site again and again," said Lacy.

With a subscription-based platform devoid of ads, there's no residual lure in attracting visitors to the site to gain revenue. A flat monthly fee not only incentivizes good behavior online, but it ensures that the people participating have some financial stake in the site itself. "You need a sense of barrier to create a trusted community online," said Lacy. "Five dollars a month isn't very much, but it's enough of a barrier to promote good behavior."

And while a subscription-based platform might promote good behavior online, Lacy says Chairman Mom is firm on moderating users as well. Users can flag content for removal, and if an item is flagged three times, it's automatically pulled from the site. 

Lacy's values for Chairman Mom reflect the unflinching critical insight she's levied on tech giants like Uber and Facebook during the years she spent working as a tech reporter in Silicon Valley. Lacy has long believed that social networks like Twitter and Facebook don't do enough to shut down trolling and abuse on their platforms. "These are wide open unenforced social networks that don't take these problems seriously," she said. "I’ve always had the point of view that if a tech company tells you that something like moderating commenters is hard, what they mean is that they don’t care about it."

While Lacy believes that Chairman Mom is targeting a large segment of the population, she's realistic about the platform's limitations. For instance, she doesn't expect Chairman Mom to entirely negate the use of Facebook in the coming years for working moms.

"I don't for a second think that there will be billions of people uninstalling Facebook," said Lacy. "What you're going to see is a shift in how people spend their time on Facebook. People are going to be using Facebook less, and we are carving a way out of Facebook in terms of what is a part of life."

While Chairman Mom's exclusive focus on working mothers might at first seem a niche market, the platform has caught the eye of several prominent investors. Its $1.4 million in seed funding was led by Floodgate Ventures and included prominent firms like Greylock Discovery and Precursor Ventures.

Lacy describes Chairman Mom's market as a massive opportunity. "This is not a small or niche product," she said. "It’s going to grow in a sustainable way. If this is our number one focus, it's not that hard to pull off. There are a bunch of tech companies that pull off way harder things than not having a troll-based environment."

Join the conversation about this story »

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[inmatts-blog-blog]

深度剖析：从能源到交通再到医疗保健，马斯克将如何颠覆这 8 个行业？

编者按：Cbinsights发表了一篇研究报告，详细描述了埃隆·马斯克和他的公司正在做的事情——颠覆8个行业。从这篇报告中，你能看到马斯克的伟大愿景，以及他将如何慢慢地把这些愿景变成现实。文章由36氪编译。 埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）是特斯拉和SpaceX的首席执行官，他计划在火星上开拓殖民地，并认为人工智能可能会把人类变成宠物。但除了这些之外，马斯克的公司还将颠覆......几乎每个行业。 埃隆·马斯克的愿景比其他的企业家的要更大、更广阔。 在人们眼里，埃隆·马斯克已经成为了未来的代名词。 无论在电动汽车行业的工作（特斯拉）还是向太空发射火箭（SpaceX），他那超乎寻常的名声吸引了很多英雄崇拜者。马斯克可以让100名气喘吁吁的记者用一张概念图和一条推文当作素材，来报道他和他的公司。 如下图所示，他的项目几乎涵盖了每一个重大的行业和全球性问题。 他能否兑现他的巨大承诺往往是无关紧要的。而且马斯克自己也非常乐意为炒作机器提供食物。 我们决定采取不同的方式对马斯克的生态系统进行研究。 我们并不是要根据承诺和炒作来评估马斯克和他的公司，而是想用数据和确凿的证据来看看他的公司是否正在改变其所在的行业。 为此，我们深入研究了马斯克及其公司所处的8个不同行业，以了解它们是如何开始改变的： * 1、能源：下面我们来了解一下，根据公用事业游说组织的说法，马斯克与特斯拉和SolarCity的合作可能会“消耗美国的电力事业，撕裂公用事业的商业模式。” * 2、汽车：马斯克希望特斯拉不仅能够便宜——他还希望它们能做一些奇特的事情：为它们的主人赚钱。他们会通过下一代人工智能和自动驾驶技术来做到这一点。我们将研究他将如何实现这一目标。 * 3、电信：虽然很少有人意识到这一点，但马斯克在太空领域的工作可能会彻底改变我们上网的方式，并为40多亿人提供快速、经济实惠的互联网服务。 * 4、交通：我们深入研究了马斯克提出的“第五种交通模式”——Hyperloop计划是如何将从华盛顿到纽约的6小时行程缩短到30分钟的。 * 5、基础设施/隧道工程：我们研究马斯克的无聊公司是如何削减成本昂贵的隧道行业成本的， 一英里的隧道挖掘费用为10亿美元，直径每增加一英寸就要花费数百万美元。 * 6、航空航天：研究SpaceX如何通过将航天飞机的飞行成本降至今天的一小部分来建造火星“高速公路”的，还有利用火箭技术来进行地球旅行，从伦敦到香港的“太空飞行”旅程与从伦敦到香港的定期航班价格差不多。 * 7、人工智能：我们调查了为什么马斯克确信人工智能主导权的竞争是第三次世界大战的“最可能的原因”，他正在投入大量时间来建立更好的人工智能。 * 8、医疗保健： 我们深入挖掘Neuralink正在开发的用于创建未来人类的高带宽、微创的脑机接口。 下面，我们将详细分析埃隆·马斯克及其公司的资金、发明和独创性是如何改变这些重要产业的。 1、能源行业 一开始是SolarCity，现在是特斯拉，消除了我们对化石燃料的依赖，取而代之的是从“天空中的巨大聚变反应堆”——也就是太阳中获取能量，是马斯克十多年来的首要任务之一。 SolarCity是他第一次尝试使太阳能成为主流并且无处不在。在21世纪初的“太阳能淘金热”中处于前列。从某些方面来说，这是一次失败，但了解其发展轨迹对于理解马斯克和特斯拉计划如何解决可再生能源问题仍然很重要。 SolarCity逐渐成为美国最大的住宅太阳能供应商，然后因为遭遇了一些公共财政问题，被马斯克的另一家公司特斯拉以20亿美元收购。 2016年的收购引发了争议，许多观察人士称其为“不加掩饰的救助”。然而，特斯拉延续SolarCity的工作，为太阳能创造了一个比SolarCity有史以来更强大的案例。 为什么是太阳能？ 埃隆·马斯克最早在2004年向他的堂兄彼得（Peter）和林登·里沃（Lyndon Rive）提出了成立SolarCity公司的想法。 SolarCity的概念源自于一个简单的认识：化石燃料能坚持的时间已经不多了。对替代品的需求正在迅速出现。“如果他们现在开始，” 据《Men’s Journal》报道，马斯克在2004年告诉林登，“他们可能会在市场中占据主导地位。” 2004年，有大量的证据表明，其他形式的能源生产是非常脆弱的。 自20世纪90年代后期以来，煤炭产量一直处于平��状态——这是自那以来���续下降的早期迹象。20世纪90年代后期，核能发电也达到了高峰。虽然有人预测在21世纪初会出现“核复兴”，但到2004年并没有到来。 自2000年以来，核能发电量一直相当稳定——增长几乎停止了。 截至2004年，美国大多数核电和煤电发电机也开始达到报废的状态。它们将需要昂贵的升级或维护，或者改装成用于替代能源的发电机。 核电站或煤电厂的平均持续时间约40年。今天，我们总能耗中约有250千兆瓦来自急需升级、维护或更换的发电机。 与此同时，从2004年开始，太阳能作为一种替代能源看起来相当有吸引力。通过太阳能产生的能源价格几十年来一直在下降——从1977年的每瓦76.67美元降至2004年的每瓦几美元。 据Swanson Effect，每当太阳能电池板的产量翻倍时，用于太阳能发电的光伏电池的价格往往会下降20% 左右。 在屋顶安装太阳能电池板的价格也在下降，并在随后的几年里一直保持这个趋势。 股价的转变 马斯克和SolarCity承担了让太阳能真正可用并成为主流的最后一英里挑战。 到2013年，它是美国住宅建筑中太阳能系统的主要安装商。 不过，它在关键创新方面的创新还比不上在会计方面的创新。SolarCity诞生的时候，安装一个太阳能屋顶的成本在3万美元至5万美元之间。SolarCity开创了“太阳能租赁”策略，允许房主免费安装太阳能屋顶，并分析偿还安装费用。GTM Research报告称，截至2014年，采用“太阳能租赁”方式安装的太阳能屋顶占新太阳能屋顶安装量的72％。 2014年2月，SolarCity的股价达到了高峰。根据Fast Company的数据，SolarCity合约的取消率很快就飙升到了45％甚至更高。 一些评论家指出，SolarCity积极的销售策略是罪魁祸首。SolarCity的销售人员使用省钱的承诺来让客户预订装置，批评人士称这些承诺“歪曲了事实”。客户一旦意识到不会像他们承诺的那样节省成本，就会大量取消安装。 一直以来，SolarCity的销售团队每周都会增加数百人。他们激励用户去预订装置。然而，收入却没有以相同的速度增长。 到2015年底，他们向投资者承诺，他们将会通过降低增长率来拨乱反正。华尔街疲惫不堪。在SolarCity于2016年2月发布了一个特别糟糕的财报之后，其股价下跌了三分之一。 特斯拉收购了SOLARCITY 2016年2月，马斯克就提议特斯拉购买SolarCity。特斯拉当时正在开发这项技术，以帮助人们在家中和路上给他们的特斯拉充电。这些所谓的Powerwall电池正在安装在家中并由第三方连接到太阳能发电机上。在交易获得批准后，SolarCity的业务在特斯拉的“太阳能屋顶”产品下得到了发展——允许特斯拉提供端到端住宅太阳能，而不仅仅是电池。 据估计，在加利福尼亚州一座一层的牧场房屋上安装太阳能设备，30十年内可节省4.18万美元。这并不包括州和地方税收抵免以及其他类型的补贴和激励措施，也不包括安装太阳能屋顶可能带来的房产价值增长。 在很多情况下，太阳能屋顶可以为消费者节省一笔净资金，并能够得到更多的回报。 换句话说，如果人们可以安装一套系统，使他们在能源方面几乎可以自力更生，公用事业还有什么用处呢？ 在2017年罗德岛州，州长协会( National chavers Association )的一次会议上，埃隆·马斯克宣布，一块使用特斯拉子公司SolarCity的太阳能技术和特斯拉Powerwall的电池技术的100平方英里的土地（可能在内华达州或德克萨斯州）可以提供足够整个美国使用电力能源。 2017年5月，第一批新型的太阳能屋顶（Solar Roof）开始接受预购，很快就被抢售一空，甚至2018年的产品都已经卖出去了。特斯拉宣布将在夏季开始安装。到了8月份，第一次安装的确开始了——但是在几个特斯拉员工的家中。 特斯拉位于布法罗的工厂“Gigafactory 2”在将太阳能屋顶交付给预定客户方面出现了多次生产延迟。特斯拉引进松下公司帮助弥补了一些不足，到了12月，它宣布准备开始生产太阳能屋顶所需的电池。 预计首批非员工的安装工作将于2018年开始，远远落后于计划。 在特斯拉在纽约米特帕金区的最新展厅里，没有太阳能屋顶，也没有特斯拉 Model 3s。因为除了太阳能屋顶以外。因为除了太阳能屋顶之外，没有任何一个特斯拉项目会遇到像Model 3那样的延时和生产问题。我们将在下面对其进行介绍。 特斯拉在纽约市的新展厅里宣传特斯拉太阳能——但没有展出太阳能屋顶。 2、汽车行业 Model 3所遇到的麻烦只是特斯拉过山车之旅的最新篇章。 特斯拉项目最初是在2003年开始的，它是马斯克继PayPal后的第二个项目，也是他最期待的项目之一。 特斯拉是一家致力于使“汽车公司”成为历史的汽车公司。特斯拉预想的未来，不仅仅是一个汽油燃料或非电动汽车看起来不合时宜的未来，还是一个让人类驾驶汽车不合时宜的未来。在这个未来，大多数人能够乘坐特斯拉出租车进行旅行的时候睡觉、聊天，汽车会自动驾驶将他们带到他们想要去的地方。在这种情况下，拥有汽车的人在不使用汽车的时候，可以毫不费力地将车出租出去，然后在需要的时候用一个按钮将其召唤回来。 然而，生产问题导致交货延迟，一直困扰着这家总部位于加州的公司，并令许多特斯拉的股东感到担忧。围绕特斯拉的大肆宣传使特斯拉成为卖空者的一个诱人目标。不过2017年，特斯拉的卖空者在押注该公司时损失了37亿美元，受到的惩罚比任何其他公司都要多。 特斯拉股票价格的弹性增长建立在投资者乐观的基础上。尽管Model 3最近经历了“生产地狱”，但还是会有许多人相信马斯克可以实现他的愿景或者至少是其中的一大部分。2016年，马斯克在特斯拉博客的“总体规划”文章中阐述了自己的愿景： 1、打造高端的、昂贵的低容量汽车，来获取资金； 2、用高端车带来的收入作为启动资金，打造价格相对较低一些的中等容量汽车； 3、利用获得的收入，打造一个价格较低、容量较大的汽车。 4、使用无缝集成电池存储创建令人惊叹的太阳能屋顶 5、扩大电动汽车产品线，以涵盖所有主要的领域 6、通过大规模车队学习，开发比人类驾驶安全10倍的自动驾驶能力 7、当你不使用汽车时，让你的汽车能够为你赚钱 马斯克的确是按照这个计划开始的，并打造了一款高端的、昂贵的低容量跑车：最初的特斯拉Roadster。 马斯克用他从 PayPal 赚的一部分资金资助了 Roadster 的打造。第一辆车是“总体规划”中的第一块多米诺骨牌, 是“电动汽车时代的加速催化剂”。 然后是特斯拉Model S。它在2013年获得了《汽车趋势》和《汽车杂志》的"年度最佳汽车"奖。2015年，它赢得了来自 Car & Driver 的“世纪汽车”奖。它在2015年和2016年都成为了全球最畅销的电动汽车(包括插电式车型)。但在大约7万美元的成本上，它仍然不是马斯克想要建造的价格合理的“大众市场”汽车。 瞄准大众市场是有道理的。英国和法国投票决定从2040年起禁止柴油和汽油汽车销售。中国已经规定，到2025年，每5辆汽车中就有1辆应该使用替代燃料。通用汽车计划，到2023年，有20款电动汽车上路。沃尔沃决定在2019年之前完全摆脱传统的燃油汽车。 彭博对未来几十年电动汽车的增长预测。 在这个趋势下，汽车制造商拥抱电动汽车，看起来就像拥抱未来的汽车行业一样。 此外，购买电动汽车的经济动机也已经很明显了。根据美国劳工部的数据，美国人每年仅仅在“汽油费”和“机油费”上就要花2000美元。货运公司每年要支付高达20万美元来为其耗油的半卡车提供燃料。 据报道，特斯拉Semi每年将为驾驶员节省高达20万美元的燃油成本。 还有人工智能组件。2016年，特斯拉宣布，将为每一台特斯拉汽车上配备用来训练自动驾驶汽车程序的组件： * 八个摄像头 * 十二个超声波传感器 * 一个前置雷达 * 一台计算机 当人们驾驶着自己的特斯拉时，这些传感器将一起工作，来创建一个逼真的周边环境模型。这些模型被上传到特斯拉总部，在那里被研究，并与从其他特斯拉车辆获取的数百万小时的视频进行比较。 由此产生的“Autopilot”技术已经推广到了特斯拉汽车上，不过，在特斯拉自己驾驶的时候，驾驶员还是无法安然入睡。马斯克预计，该功能将在2019年左右准备就绪。 这种自动驾驶功能还包括通过智能手机控制汽车的能力，如下面的示例所示。在迈阿密的一场暴风雨中，一位用户通过iPhone“召唤”他的特斯拉来接他。 不过，就目前而言，Autopilot和召唤的动能仅适用于特斯拉Model S和Model X。它也被预装在每个Model 3中——这是特斯拉试图破坏汽车工业的切入点，也是它最大的障碍。 在2016年3月发布后的48小时内，Model 3——特斯拉第一款真正的面向大众市场电动汽车——已经有将近25万的预订单。潜在销售额超过100亿美元。但生产问题一直困扰着这个“杀手级”产品的推出。 马斯克承诺，在2017年第三季度将会生产1500辆Model 3，到12月份每月将能生产2万辆。 实际上，第三季度只生产了260台。 2017年11月，每周生产5000台Model 3的实现日期从12月推迟到2018年3月。 与此同时，马斯克在Twitter上宣布，特斯拉不久将开发“智能挡风玻璃刮水器”，内部灯光的“迪斯科模式”以及一辆皮卡。 一些分析师建议马斯克“停止过度承诺和交付不足”。但是，虽然特斯拉的股价受到了Model 3的生产问题影响，但去年整体上仍旧上涨了50％左右。 这是因为特斯拉的投资者基本上信任马斯克，尽管该公司面临着挑战。即使抛开Model 3的问题，特斯拉的机器学习计划也有可能不会成功。汽车经销商游说团体有可能通过立法让特斯拉关门大吉(特斯拉绕过了传统的经销商网络, 这些网络在某些领域得到了立法的支持)，或者特斯拉的工厂永远也不可能达到生产标准。 还有一个基本上没有人谈到，但同样重要的威胁，马斯克现在就需要全面处理这些已经存在的数据。 行驶在道路上的每一辆特斯拉汽车都会通过AT＆T LTE网络，来接收软件更新并发送有关其环境的数据。每个人每个月要发送和接收的数据达到几千兆字节。正如加文·谢里丹（Gavin Sheridan）指出的那样，这必然会形成对另一家公司非常依赖的情况。这对于马斯克来说是不可接受的，只有“全栈”的方法对他来说才有意义。 这是马斯克现在称之为“Starlink”的设想背后的一个重要部分——他计划利用自己在SpaceX上取得的成功为地球上的每个人(包括特斯拉)提供廉价、快速的互联网。 3、电信行业 在关于马斯克和他的公司如何创新的讨论中，每个项目似乎都围绕着一个公式：找到一个因为技术问题而失败的旧想法，然后找一些世界上最好的工程师来攻克它。 这正是马斯克和 SpaceX 来攻克卫星互联网产业所采用的逻辑。将互联网从卫星上传送下来的想法是一个旧想法。Teledesic成立于20世纪90年代初，目的是建立一个能够提供宽带互联网的卫星群。但是，要把这么多卫星送入太空并保持低延迟连接是一个巨大的挑战。Teledesic和其他有同样目标的公司都失败了，然后破产了。 埃隆·马斯克首次公开谈论“卫星互联网覆盖全球”的想法是在2015年初。2016年11月，SpaceX向FCC（联邦通信委员会）提交了一份申请，请求在六年内发射1.1万颗宽带卫星，在全球范围内持续提供强大的宽带服务。 到2020年中期，这种卫星驱动的新型互联网服务——“Starlink”——有可能成为全球最大的电信服务供应商。这可能是一个价值1万亿美元的市场。但对于旨在殖民火星的SpaceX来说，这不过是一个项目。 SpaceX计划从轨道上提供宽带互联网服务，创建一个覆盖全球的网状网络。 在向FCC提交申请几个月后，SpaceX首次将一个已经使用过的火箭送入太空。这是SpaceX“总体规划”中的一个重要步骤，其中一部分就是完善火箭可重复使用的技术，使航天器可以在释放有效载荷数小时内降落并送回太空。 在向FCC提交申请几个月后，SpaceX首次将一枚用过的火箭送入太空。这是SpaceX“总体规划”中的一个重要步骤，其中一部分是完善火箭可重复使用技术，使航天器可以在释放有效载荷的数小时内降落并返至太空。 这项技术与SpaceX的宽带愿景相结合，就有可能颠覆当前电信公司的经营模式。 目前 SpaceX 公司正致力于攻克火箭完全可重复使用的各种难题，这个项目将于2018年底完成。到最后，发射的一次火箭，仅有燃料是不能重复使用的，每个发射任务花费大约25万美元。 如果每个发射任务的单位成本低于100万美元，发射4000多颗互联网卫星是轻而易举的事情。这些卫星一旦进入太空，就会覆盖全球——包括目前没有互联网的地区——提供持续的千兆、低延迟的宽带服务。 世界上大多数国家甚至还无法连接到内陆的千兆互联网连接。 在过去的几十年里，一些著名的卫星互联网公司纷纷走向倒闭。但Starlink项目在一些重要方面有所不同： 成本：如上所述，SpaceX将卫星发射成本降低到了原来的一小部分 速度：传统的卫星网路速度大约是25Mbps，而SpaceX的网速将达到1Gbps 延迟： 数据包在地球和卫星之间传输所需的时间——当前供应商的时钟延迟为600毫秒，而SpaceX的目标是减到30毫秒 今年2月22日，SpaceX利用猎鹰9号火箭发射两颗通信卫星，Starlink项目正式拉开序幕。随着公司降低发射成本以及发射更多卫星进入太空，用加文·谢里丹的话来说，SpaceX将会“导致陆基网络的死亡。” 对于卫星互联网的概念来说，这将是一次巨大的转变，因为卫星互联网已经停滞了几十年了。除此之外，马斯克和他的公司还在努力颠覆其他的“旧想法”。 例如，交通运输中最古老的想法之一是通过真空管来运输。1812年，一位名叫乔治·梅德赫斯特（George Medhurst）的英国人率先提出在地下建造隧道，并通过气动方式来推动吊舱，运送乘客。 2012年，埃隆·马斯克是第一个说服人们，他可以将这个愿景变成现实的人之一。 4、交通行业 2012年，马斯克在圣塔莫尼卡举行的 PandoDaily 活动上第一次公开讨论了Hyperloop。 马斯克称其为“第五种运输方式”（在汽车、飞机、火车和船之后）。将人或货物装进一个吊舱里，通过管道进行长距离运输。磁悬浮和大型真空泵将消除烦人的摩擦和空气阻力，让这些公交车大小的吊舱能以接近1马赫（1225.08千米/小时）的速度前进。 马斯克在2013年的白皮书中提出的Hyperloop Pod原型。 2013年8月，他发表了一份57页的白皮书，概述了他的想法。在白皮书中，他与SpaceX和特斯拉团队合作，测试了这个想法的可行性及其经济效益。他们发现“吊舱”能够在2.5分钟内行驶30英里，例如，将洛杉矶和旧金山之间的6小时旅程缩短到半小时。而且只需要花费20美元左右。 这比加利福尼亚当时计划要实施的高铁便宜。 将加压舱与减压隧道结合在一起，你就可以得到一种比以往任何模式都快得多的运输方式。 就速度而言，Hyperloop将以大约600英里/小时的速度行驶，大约是日本新干线（子弹列车）列车的3倍。比当前商业航空公司的平均时速575英里还要快。 Hyperloop可能会对几个不同的行业产生重大影响。首当其冲的就是6600亿美元的航空业。除了要跨洋过海之外，Hyperloop将能比飞机更快、更便宜地运送乘客。 这也会改变人们的生活方式和居住地，从而改变住宅和商业地产。人们可以住在佛蒙特州的伯灵顿，在曼哈顿上班，通勤时间也不过是大半个小时而已。 这也有可能改变政治，因为在华盛顿服务的政客们可以每周或每天到他们的选民所在的州访问一次。 这可以彻底改变货运。所有美国进口货物中几乎一半流经洛杉矶和长滩的港口。根据SCPR的数据，1.4万名卡车司机将这些货物运往南加州各地的“仓库和铁路货场”。根据普华永道的数据，他们每天运送约1.1万个集装箱，每年消耗6800万加仑的燃料。 尽管在最后一英里的交货过程中，你仍然需要卡车和人力驾驶员。但类似Hyperloop的系统可以以低得多的费用（污染程度大大降低）和更快的速度运输货物。 当然，也有人反对Hyperloop。尤其是那些有明显抗议的人——我们要把它们放在哪里？建造高于地面的火车所必需的道路权和建设费用，使得高速铁路项目几十年来一蹶不振。更何况隧道技术还没有完善。 有一天，当马斯克堵在洛杉矶郊外的车流中时，他发了一条推文，表示这将成为公司正面解决这个问题的动力。 堵车让我抓狂。我打算建立一个隧道挖掘机，现在就开始挖过去...... ——埃隆·马斯克（@elonmusk）2016年12月17日 5、基础设施/隧道工程 于是就有了无聊公司（The Boring Company）。 与火箭飞船和自动驾驶汽车相比，Boring——这个公司的名字非常贴切（在英文里有挖掘的意思）。打造基础设施并不是一个好生意，但这是一个至关重要的领域，也是美国比较落后的领域。2012年，美国建设项目的开支占GDP的比重仅为13%，刚刚超过希腊，是全球最低的国家之一。目前正在进行的最大的基础项目主要集中在亚洲和欧洲。 美国建筑业的发展已经趋于停滞。马斯克不仅仅只是希望通过无聊公司来挖掘大量的隧道，还要更好地挖掘隧道，将建设基础设施的能力带回美国。 无聊公司有三个活跃的项目。第一个是位于加州霍索恩的SpaceX测试隧道。这只是作为一个研发基地而建立的隧道。 挖隧道的问题在于成本。伦敦目前的Crossrail项目——从伦敦东西部直接向伦敦市中心隧道掘进，旨在为伦敦地铁增加26英里——预计耗资230亿美元。在美国，纽约第二大道地铁有两条8.5英里长的轨道组成，耗资170亿美元。洛杉矶地铁延伸2.5英里的费用接近20亿美元。 就目前的情况来看，挖隧道费用大约为每英里10亿美元。马斯克认为，想要从中获取经济效益，成本必须得下降一个数量级——到每英里1亿美元。 因此，降低成本归结为两件事：尺寸和速度。 挖掘隧道的成本与隧道孔的横截面面积成正比。你想要的隧道直径（宽度）越长，成本就越高。第二大道地铁隧道直径为23.5英尺。单线道路隧道直径必须得有28英尺。巴黎双线A-86西隧道于2011年竣工，直径为38英尺。 无聊公司打算建造的隧道的直径仅14英尺。这是当前所需的道路隧道直径的一半，从而使得横截面面积减少到了四分之一左右。 如果横截面面积增加4倍的话，成本就会增加4倍，减少直径可以节省数百万美元。 考虑到后续的计划——在洛杉矶挖一个隧道来缓解严重的堵车，无聊公司将会钻探横截面面积较小的隧道。 隧道是汽车专用的，但不是让人们开车通过，而是由电动滑板来运输汽车，以125英里每小时的速度穿过隧道。马斯克认为，现在从洛杉矶北部的韦斯特伍德到洛杉矶国际机场可能需要30-45分钟，将来能缩短到6分钟。 隧道可以很小，按照马斯克的设想，这不过是将电动车放到“电动溜冰鞋”上面。看一下A - 86西隧道的横截面，你就会明白这有什么不同了。 汽油车驱动引擎的时候，会产生大量的烟雾，所以当前隧道的大部分空间都是用来进行通风的。而且还需要为体型较大的车辆增加额外的空间，然后还需要确保有足够的空间进行应急操作。但如果隧道里只允许通过特定的电动汽车，这一切问题都将会迎刃而解。 另一个影响隧道挖掘的因素是速度。当前用于隧道转孔的隧道掘进机的挖掘速度“贼”慢。与无聊公司的“宠物蜗牛”——Gary，还要慢14倍。“击败蜗牛就能够赢得胜利，”马斯克说。 胜利是可以实现的。首先，隧道掘进机目前只有50％的时间用来挖掘。另外50％的时间是用来加固隧道，在隧道墙上增加混凝土增强材料。同时从这两个方面对机器进行优化，可以立即将挖掘速度提高2倍。无聊公司认为，可在不损坏设备的情况下，可以通过正确的电源和热量管理将隧道掘进机的功率输出提高三倍。加上自动化，超过蜗牛看起来很有可能。 第三个项目更为激进——挖掘一条从华盛顿到纽约的隧道。这是一段目前需要开车行驶四个多小时的旅程，而“高速”Acela Express列车几乎需要三个小时。Acela应该是高速的，但在高密度区域，高速旅行是受到限制的。只有在一定程度上，Acela才能拥有较快的速度。 通过隧道，你可以一路全速前进。马斯克认为，这项旅程可以在29分钟内完成。这一举动，将使整个大西洋中部地区变成一个大都市。 对于马斯克来说，无聊公司只不过是一种爱好而已，只占到他的时间“2-3％”。他以二手的价格购买了隧道掘进机，并为公司配备了实习生。但这并不能淡化无聊公司对其他项目的重要性。无聊公司正在默默地为马斯克的其他三项努力奠定了一个好的基础。 首先是特斯拉。因为只是专门用于电动汽车，预计在城市内部挖掘隧道的成本很低。这将缓解地面街道上的交通堵塞，将交通转移到地下。当第一条隧道达到容量时，该公司将挖掘更多的隧道，在每个城市下创建一个三维的隧道网络，以满足交通需求。马斯克预计，由于成本分摊，驾驶成本直线下降，从而使得自动驾驶的电动汽车的运输量增加。 第二个也很明显：Hyperloop。这些隧道必须得变得更大，但随着通过较小的隧道项目获得的进展，无聊公司也可以提高挖掘隧道的效率。 第三个就不太明显了：SpaceX。 马斯克的计划是在不久的将来把100万人送上火星，而隧道是这一愿景的核心。火星上的大气是粗糙的。毕竟，人们需要一些地方来生活。此外，每日运行两次的“地对火”航天飞机航线，所需要的燃料都在地下。如果马斯克要在火星上建立一个殖民地，建立一个隧道网络是必不可少的。如果没有在地球上挖掘地下基础设施的专业知识，我们不太可能会看到马斯克完成他最具雄心的项目。 6、航空航天 2017年12月15日, SpaceX CRS-13从卡纳维拉尔角向国际空间站进行补给任务。 这是 SpaceX 公司 NASA 合同的第13次补给任务, 也是迄今为止第45次发射猎鹰9号火箭。 仅2017年一年就有18次发射，现在连火箭在移动的船上着陆也已司空见惯。但这次的任务不同。这是第一次举例说明SpaceX的核心功能以及它计划如何把我们带到火星——它是一枚完全重复使用的火箭。猎鹰9号全推力第一级曾于6月作为CRS - 11的一部分使用过。龙飞船于2015年首次作为CRS - 6的一部分使用过。猎鹰和龙给穿以前曾被重复使用过，这是第一次整个航天器都使用了先前的飞行部件。 对于埃隆·马斯克来说，这是太空旅行唯一合理的方式。如果每个火箭都是一次性的，我们永远不会离开这个星球。如果火箭变得像飞机一样，一次又一次地用于多次旅行，那么太空可以成为下一次空中旅行地——这是一种跨越很大距离的方式，向所有人开放。 归根结底，这关乎成本与重量的比例。将大量设备投入太空越便宜，太空就越有可能是一个好去处。但是，如果每次都必须建造一艘全新的航天器，那么成本就会一直居高不下。 价格范围的顶端是“消耗性发射系统”，例如Arianespace的Vega发射器和波音/洛克希德马丁Atlas V。这些大火箭可以把很多东西送入轨道，但不能重复使用。航天飞机（NASA）位于成本范围中间。航天飞机设计便宜且可重复使用，但固体火箭助推器和主要燃料箱的费用都增加了成本，最终限制了它的价值。 在价格范围的另一端是SpaceX的猎鹰火箭，SpaceX的猎鹰火箭已经显示出让飞船飞入天空的成本降低3-5倍了。但这不是马斯克最终目标。他不仅仅只是想把一艘太空船送上火星。 马斯克希望SpaceX在火星上安置100万人。为此, 他说我们需要"将每吨的发射成本再减少5万倍。" 从马斯克的角度来看，人类作为一个单一的行星物种是疯狂的，是灭绝的必然途径。我们探索，并远离地球，我们就会变得越不那么脆弱，越不容易受到超人工智能或地球自然资源的破坏带来的影响。 火星并不“好客”，但它是当下最好的选择。 火星上的大气和寒冷的气温将是一个障碍，但除此之外，它和地球有很多相似之处。 火星日和地球日的长度相似，温度范围大致相同，土地数量几乎相同。地表下有水，陆地和空中有大量重要元素。大气是不同的，但这就是为什么我们需要无聊公司和它的隧道。 关于在火星上挖掘隧道，还有另一个与成本有关的原因。要实现“5万倍”的成本优化，不仅需要可重复使用的火箭。这只是四个部分中的第一个： * 所有火箭技术的可重复使用性。 这就是SpaceX迄今为止所关注的内容。CRS-13显示，这已经成为现实。 * 在轨道上为火箭补充燃料。所需的燃料很多，但把所有需要到达火星的燃料都带上是不可行的。 * 在火星上生产推进剂的能力。 如果要在发射时还要带上返回时的燃料，成本就会变得很高。新殖民者要做的第一件事就是建造一个加油站。 * 生产合适的推进剂的能力。 所有的证据都表明在火星上制造合适的推进剂是可行的。 SpaceX飞行器将使用甲基硅氧烷，一种甲烷和氧气的混合物。为了制造甲烷，SpaceX将从火星大气层收集二氧化碳( 96 %的大气层是二氧化碳)并从地表开采水。通过这种方式，公司可以生产回程所需的所有燃料。 SpaceX计划在地球和火星之间建立一条空间高速公路, 其中包括找到一种方法, 以产生足够的燃料来维持从火星返回的旅程。 飞行器将不会是目前正在使用的猎鹰/龙组合。相反，SpaceX正在开发BFR - 大型猎鹰火箭。猎鹰9可以携带22,900千克到地球轨道（LEO），而BFR则可以携带500,000千克到地球轨道。该公司目前正在建造猛禽发动机，将来，火星之旅仅需80天。 但在我们成为火星人之前，我们仍然是地球上的人。在BFR建造之前，其他的猎鹰火箭仍在努力改善这座工厂的生活。这是你可以在马斯克的公司中看到的整体战略的一部分：建立一些真正有用的东西，为未来的疯狂计划提供资金。 使用可重复使用的火箭，使得我们能够以少得多的价格把东西放到低地球轨道上。 它甚至开始向商业现实开放太空探索。 SpaceX计划的商业可行性的一个很好的比较点是航空旅行。 如果波音在仅仅一次飞行后就把使用过的波音737注销的话, 从洛杉矶到拉斯维加斯每人要花费大约50万美元。 但现在，波音公司可以只收43美元。 这是马斯克想要带到太空飞行中的那种成本结构。到达火星不可能只是花费43美元，但它将从目前的无限大走向30万至50万美元。昂贵，但可行。 当我们开始降低轨道飞行器的成本时，SpaceX不仅让行星间旅行变得在经济上可行, 而且还涉及到行星内部的旅行。波音应该担心，它正在为马斯克的商业计划提供模型。除了使用BFR从地球到火星外，马斯克还看到了使用BFR从地球到地球的可能性，而且速度更快。 一条环绕地球的太空飞行路线, 即使是亚轨道飞行, 也会比普通飞行更快。 马斯克认为, 有了这样的飞行轨迹, 你可以在一小时内到达地球上的任何地方。最初只对富人开放, 随着更多人的利用，价格会下降，直到从伦敦到香港的航天旅行的定价与从伦敦到香港的定期航班相似。 我们的长远未来问题是马斯克认真对待的问题, 也是太空旅行之外的问题。 在气候变化、核战争以及其他各种人为灾难之间, 马斯克的想象中几乎没有什么威胁比人工智能更能影响人类的长期生存能力了。 2017年9月, 马斯克宣布他相信人工智能以及"国家一级"的优越性竞争是第三次世界大战的"最有可能"的原因。 当然, 在所有关于人工智能的人中, 马斯克的可信度很高——他的公司OpenAI刚成立不久，就干了一件其它人工智能都没有做过的事情。 7、人工智能 2017年8月，在Valve的Dota 2锦标赛期间，一位新的顶级玩家出现在在线游戏领域。在一周的时间里，这位选手在一场最艰苦的网络游戏中击败了包括世界冠军在内的一系列其他顶尖选手。这个玩家接触这个游戏才六个月。 OpenAI首次在竞争激烈的电子竞技中击败世界顶尖选手。国际象棋和围棋这样的传统棋类游戏 要复杂多了。 ——埃隆·马斯克（@elonmusk）2017年8月12日 这条推文描绘了马斯克和他的“非营利人工智能研究公司”OpenAI，在跟随谷歌的AlphaGo和Facebook的DarkForest的脚步。但对于马斯克和OpenAI，这不是玩游戏，关乎生死和人类的未来。在他看来，如果人工智能研究继续沿着目前的道路前进，人类就没有未来。 现在，人工智能是技术的核心组成部分。它不仅在显而易见的地方流行——Siri的自然语言处理，谷歌的RankBrain——还渗透进了几乎所有的科技行业。 人工智能研究的进展很快，马斯克认为这是对人类生存的威胁。谷歌，Facebook，亚马逊，苹果以及我们AI 100（如上图所示）中的所有公司都为人工智能的发展做出了贡献：更高的效率，更高的生产力、更少的人类工作，以及在理想情况下，为人类提供更高的生活质量——让我们能够做更多有趣、更有创造力的事情。 但是，这背后有巨大的潜在缺陷——超人工智能比人类更聪明，并且人类看不到它们的存在。 OpenAI的目的是加强人工智能研究。尽管你可以阅读DeepMind或Google Brain团队的研究论文，哪怕是苹果公司已经创建自己的机器学习期刊。上述的公司都非常隐蔽地从事人工智能研究。 OpenAI不仅要进行研究，  还要  “占据元数据层面，如平台和基础设施，以便为每个人提供更快速的研究”。为了实现这一目标，公司有两个核心部分： 研究：OpenAI吸引了该领域的一些最优秀的研究人员，希望他们有机会处理人工智能方面的一些最大问题。该小组定期将自己关于人工智能和机器学习的研究结果发布出来。此外，该团队还在自己的网站上发布更广泛的想法。 系统：OpenAI正在构建平台，以帮助其他人工智能研究人员更好地了解他们正在建设的机器。例如，该团队已经建立了一个  AI Gym——一个“用于开发和比较强化学习算法的工具包”。 OpenAI的整体愿景是在不受商业限制的情况下，将高质量的谷歌/苹果/ Facebook /亚马逊级别的人工智能研究成果公开出来。正如该公司在其介绍性博客文章中所说的那样，“由于我们的研究没有盈利义务，因此我们可以更好地关注人工智能对人类的积极影响。” 超人工智能真的是一个问题吗？这听起来太科幻了，即使对马斯克来说也是如此。至少比火星上殖民或者推动自动驾驶汽车的想法要更不切实际一些。但是，想象一个人工智能诱发的世界末日不难。这是对马斯克对人工智能领域其他人的批评。机器学习领袖吴恩达（Andrew Ng）表示，“担心超人工智能就像担心火星上的人口过剩一样”。 但这是马斯克的观点。没有人在考虑这件事。相反，他们都过于关注人工智能的商业可能性。他们看不到潜在的问题。 这个问题有两个层面： * 人工智能会无意识地做有害的事情 * 人工智能会有意识地做有害的事情 即使是目前非常低级的人工智能，也可能会出现第一个层面的问题。比如说我们建造了一个人工智能清洁机器人。这个机器人想要做的就是确保世界尽可能的干净。如果机器人只是想确保一切都是干净的，它有几个选择。第一个选择是清理所有的烂摊子。这是我们想要的结果，也是人工智能开发人员期望的结果。 但这不是唯一的选择。另一种可能性是，它首先会试图阻止混乱的发生。人类会造成混乱。“如果没有人类，就没有混乱，那么让我们干掉所有的人类！”增加了人工智能的效用函数，这对于人工智能来说，是一个完全合法的解决方案。 关于这个层面的人工智能安全研究是 OpenAI 的主要研究重点。2016年，该公司合作撰写了一篇题为“ 人工智能安全中的具体问题”的研究论文  。该论文确定了人工智能研究人员在推进任何类型的人工智能时需要强烈考虑的五个研究方面： 避免负面影响。 我们如何保证人工智能会完全遵循它编程，从而不会出现那种不惜一切代价履行自己的职责的情况？对于清洁机器人来说，这可能会破坏房间以加快清洁速度。 避免奖励黑客行为。 如果人工智能使用奖励功能来确定正确的行动方案，那么我们如何确保它不会尝试并最大化该奖励功能而不是执行行动呢？对于清洁人工智能，这可能是关闭其视觉系统，因此它就看不到混乱了。 可扩展的监督。 我们怎���才能确保即使在训练实例不多的情况下, 人工智能也能安全地训练？ 清洁机器人会知道它必须清理咖啡杯, 但它如何学会不“清理”在桌子上过夜的手机呢？ 安全的探索。 人工智能能否探索可能的结果并在不造成严重后果的情况下进行训练吗? 比如，如何在拖地的时候不试图拖走电源插座？ 对分布转移的鲁棒性。随着数据或环境的变化，人工智能能否继续以最佳方式执行，或者至少可以确定其模糊性并“优雅地失败”？如果清洁人工智能学会了在办公室里打扫卫生，那么它是否可以尝试清洁工厂的地板？ 已经有攻击来测试人工智能的极限了。鲁棒性是狭义人工智能特别关注的问题。当你在它们的舒适区之外测试它们的时候，工作效率有多高？答案并不乐观。图像识别机器学习算法经常错误地归类对抗性的例子——在图像中注入了特定的噪声。 这是一个良性的例子。然而，不难想象黑客会恶意利用这个缺陷。想象一下，在自动驾驶汽车中对人工智能进行对抗性攻击，在其编程中将“停车标志”变为“绿灯”。这不仅会比汽车刹车失灵更致命，这也是一种虚拟攻击，是高度可扩展的。 人工智能安全的核心问题可以归结为一个简单的问题：我们如何确保人工智能想要的是我们想要的？OpenAI正试图领导这一领域的研究。虽然它专注于这个领域，但它并不仅仅是唯一一个在这个领域工作的公司。还有Google Brain，斯坦福大学和加州大学伯克利分校的研究人员。 但是，在超人工智能的非具体问题方面，OpenAI是独一无二的。 这个担忧背后的关键是人工智能的学习速度。赢得Dota2的机器人是一个很好的例子。从四月份开始的时候开始，每次迭代都稳步增加了它的能力。 这张图表测量了OpenAI的最佳机器人TrueSkill的评分——类似于国际象棋中的ELO评分——这是该机器人对其它训练对手的OpenAI机器人的胜率的总结。 人类要花几年学会的技能，人工智能只需要花一个月的时间。DeepMind的AlphaZero在国际象棋人工智能上取得的成功更进一步。它学会了如何在数小时内击败最好的国际象棋电脑  。 从随机游戏开始，除了游戏规则以外，没有任何领域知识。AlphaZero在24小时内达到了象棋和将棋（日本象棋）以及围棋的超人类游戏水平，并在每个情况下都令人信服地击败了一个世界冠军。 人工智能通过强化学习来学习。人工智能会玩成千上万次游戏，从每次游戏中逐步学习。Alphazero 在5000张张量处理单元上同时运行, 这些处理单元是专门设计的, 用谷歌的 TensorFlow 框架来运行机器学习算法。最后，把这些学习结合起来，产生“ 超人类的游戏水平。” 这些仍然是狭义的人工智能实现。但是一个通用的人工智能，可以使用这些技术来引导自己。 人工智能已经在学习自我发展了。 “几个月前，我们推出了 AutoML 项目，这是一种可以自动设计机器学习模型的方法。... [我们]发现AutoML可以设计出与人类专家设计的神经网络相媲美的小型神经网络。“ ——Google Research Blog 通用人工智能可以测试数百万次的更新，然后从每个参数中挑选最佳参数，并将它们结合起来并立即变得更加智能。更聪明的通用人工智能将重新开始这个过程。这是加速回报的规律。未来将会越来越快。学得更快的人工智能发展得更快。 马斯克的观点是，我们是棋盘上的“皇帝”。在结束之前，我们不会意识到我们的错误。前一分钟我们还是地球上最高等的生物。可能下一分钟我们就被超越了。在几秒钟内，人工智能就大大超越了我们的能力。人类没有回头路。我们将成为人工智能至上的世界中的蚂蚁。 OpenAI，这个计划是为了让公众充分意识到人工智能可能构成的威胁，以便主动调节和控制它。然而，OpenAI并不是马斯克唯一的后手。他还投资了另一个领域来对冲人工智能的风险，来帮助人类免于人工智能带来的威胁，就像给人类的未来买保险一样。 这就是Neuralink——愿景是在我们被取代之前以数字的方式来增强人类 。 8、医疗保健 马斯克的大部分努力都是大规模的: 太空飞船到火星, 从华盛顿到纽约的隧道, 全球范围内的电动汽车制造工厂。 Neuralink是一个完全不同的野兽。它是关于微观、而不是宏观的；而关于精神的、而不是物质世界的。但正因为如此，它才能成为马斯克现有公司中最具挑战性的、也是最令人兴奋的。 马斯克并没有太过于宣传Neuralink。该项目真正被外界所知是在2017年3月发表在《华尔街日报》上的一篇文章中。 “建立一个大众市场的电动汽车产业和殖民火星对埃隆·马斯克来说并不够雄心勃勃。 这位亿万富翁企业家现在想要将电脑与人脑结合起来，以帮助人们跟上机器的步伐。” Neuralink是马斯克的项目，建立一个脑机接口（BMI），将人类大脑直接连接到计算机。几十年来BMI一直存在于研究中。但即使人体试验已经开始，目前的BMI依然存在两大问题： * 系统的带宽很低。我们有数十亿个神经元，但BMI在任何特定时间只记录一些神经元。这使得它们用于任何高保真系统都很困难。你可以用你的大脑在屏幕上移动光标，但是你无法拉小提琴。 * 界面的侵入性很高。植入需要神经外科手术和一个固定的硬连线连接到大脑。这意味着它只限于那些需要改变生活的人，而目前只限于那些生命可能不长的人，因为硬连线增加了直接感染大脑的概率。 这是Neuralink在短期内要解决的两个问题。该公司希望建立一种高带宽、微创的BMI，并获得FDA批准，以便在几年内开始用于现实生活中的患者，并在不久后用于其他人身上。鉴于人工智能的持续侵蚀，马斯克认为这是人类能够生存的唯一方式。 正如马斯克所看到的，人工智能的提升是由资本主义驱动的。像亚马逊这样的公司需要投入数百万美元来开发它的人工智能，如果不这样做，谷歌、微软和Facebook都会这样做的。问题不在于这 是否会导致超人造智能的产生，使人们处于尘埃之中，问题是何时。对于人类来说，没有正面的答案。 “即使在最温和的情况下，”马斯克说，“我们也会成为宠物。”最坏的情况将是人类时代的终结。 马斯克解决这个问题的方法之一就是OpenAI——努力确保我们在人工智能有机会将我们变成宠物之前主动监管人工智能。 有了Neuralink，他从另一个角度来应对人工智能挑战。我们的目标是增强人的智能水平，先发制人地将我们与数字世界结合起来，这样我们就可以在人工智能超越我们之前武装自己。 Neuralink有可能帮助患有中风、神经退化、癌症、脊髓损伤、截肢以及其他几十个其他医疗保健问题的人类。这些疾病每年使数以百万计的人受到影响，人们需要付出数百万美元的医疗费用。如果Neuralink项目取得成功，那么多年昂贵的治疗（以及在许多情况下危险的手术）可以用一个简单的微型脑植入物来代替。 在推出近一年后，该公司的网站仍然只有一个单独的页面，强调了公司需要招聘的人员，包括机械师、电气工程师和软件工程师。 该公司正在尝试建立一个多元化的团队，通过多学科的协助来进一步理解大脑, 并为之设计一个补丁。 BMI是大脑植入物，通常是几毫米见方的电极芯片，通过手术直接植入大脑。 电极从脑细胞，神经元中获取电活动，并将它们传送到计算机。在记录大脑活动时，动物（或人）执行一项任务，例如移动操纵杆以在屏幕上引导光标。然后科学家可以使用算法将大脑活动与运动联系起来，并教给一台计算机，当某些神经元发射时，光标应该向左移动。然后，你可以关闭操纵杆，并纯粹通过大脑活动移动光标。然后你就有了 BMI。 在过去的十年中，BMI背后的驱动力是军队。随着简易爆炸装置（IED）在阿富汗和伊拉克的普及，肢体丧失在士兵中越来越普遍。防弹衣有所改进，这意味着士兵不太可能在爆炸中死亡，但肢体并没有得到保护。从2000年到2015年，约有1,600名士兵被截肢。 帮助这些士兵是美国国防部高级研究计划局改革义肢计划的目标。他们为美国各地的研究团体提供资金，包括神经科学、生物医学工程和机器人技术，以开发新的植入物，新的假肢以及如何用前者控制后者的新理解。 这取得了重大进展、开始进行人体试验，一些病人能够控制和感知机器人手臂了。 Neuralink需要解决的问题包括带宽和侵入性。带宽问题可以通过这个图很容易地看到： 人脑中有大约85,000,000,000个神经元。截至2013年，从动物大脑同时记录的大多数神经元的记录大约为500个。随着时间的推移，单个植入物可能会有约2,000 个神经元。 目前的BMI只能提取所有可能信息的一小部分。在阅读本文时，当你移动手臂拿起一杯咖啡时，数以百万计的神经元参与了这个决定和运动。为了让一个截肢者能像控制原来的肢体那样控制假肢，需要同时记录更多的神经元。 一旦人类与BMI联系到一起，学习阶段就开始了。一个人学习如何以有限的带宽控制机械臂。这些算法学习哪些神经元是真正的信号，哪些是噪声，并更好地处理信息。这两个共生调整，直到这个人融合了他的新"臂膀”。 第二个问题有更多的变数。大脑通常被包裹在一层薄膜和无菌液体中, 与外界隔离。 它不喜欢入侵。有非侵入性BMI存在，但它们的带宽更低，因为它们无法辨别机器人控制所需的单个神经元活动。 Neuralink团队正在寻找方法，在尽量减少BMI侵入性的同时，仍然具有高带宽。无线是一个显而易见的选择，但自身也存在诸多问题： * 你如何获得设备的动力（电）？ 无线收发器功耗很大，处理和发送高带宽信息也需要大量的功率。 * 你如何从设备中散热？ 芯片、收发器和电池都会产生热量。大脑只能升温一两度，否则就会发生损伤。 另外，电极插入时会造成损伤。大脑的自然防御会逐渐将它们封装起来，将它们与大脑的其他部分隔离开来, 使它们变得无用。 这些都是BMI研究人员在过去20年中所面临的问题。但是马斯克在 Neuralink 组建的团队包括那些有着完全新颖的想法来克服这些问题的人。DJ Seo开发了“ 神经灰尘 ”（neural dust），这种微小的硅传感器节点可以传播到整个大脑皮层。在其他地方，研究人员正在开发一种“ 神经网格 ”，可将其注入静脉并传播到大脑中，并通过血管壁记录神经活动。 马斯克自己称这些植入物为“神经系带”（neural lace），并将想象出的网状物放置在皮层上，充当动物边缘系统和人体皮质系统之上的数字层。 目前，Neuralink的主要受益者可能是美国的30万患有脊髓损伤的人、550万患有阿尔茨海默氏症的人、另外250万患有中风或创伤性脑损伤的人。每个人都可以通过植入物进行治疗、这种植入物可以恢复运动、记忆或其他认知功能。在那之后，你可以在自己的手臂上快速注射一个BMI，几分钟后，你就成了一个活生生的机器人了。 让它变得更好 埃隆·马斯克的每个公司都是以人类未来是否存在为基础的： * 特斯拉：以化石燃料为动力的汽车将很快成为过去的遗迹，电动汽车将占据至高无上的地位——而替代能源将变得便宜而且便于使用。 * SpaceX：成为一个多行星的文明将比成为一个单行星的文明更好——以防地球发生非常糟糕的事情。 * OpenAI：一个超人工智能很可能是地球上所有生命的终结者，我们甚至可能直到太晚才意识到我们正在建造它——所以最好现在就阻止它。 这些对任何人来说，都是一种很大的赌注了，更不用说企业家了。当你看到马斯克和他的公司正在颠覆的各个行业时，记住这一点很重要。 这些公司代表了巨大的颠覆，其中一些规模在数万亿美元，因为它们的潜在收益远远超过赢得特定的垂直领域或市场——它是人类自身的未来。 然而，在这些高风险和创新背后却是一个相对“无聊”的基本策略：不是发明一些全新的东西，而是拿一些老旧的东西并使其变得更好。 在各行各业，马斯克和他的公司并没有通过发明全新的东西来改变规则——他们正在接受失败的想法，并让它们复活。 原文链接：https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/elon-musk-companies-disruption 拓展阅读 “疯狂”科学家菲尔·肯尼迪：为了研究“脑机接口”，他切开了自己大脑 编译组出品。编辑：郝鹏程 http://dlvr.it/QM5LyT