People can dream with lottery tickets, that doesn't make them wise pension plans.
While I like the dreams Musk sells of self-driving cars so good they don't need steering wheels, of space colonisation and useful robot workers cheap enough that I could personally afford them, at this point I don't trust him in particular to actually deliver any of those things.
(And no, you can't convince me with some variant of "look at ${current version} of FSD" or "look at progress with Starship", etc., that's like responding to someone who doubts you can build a house by pointing to a pile of bricks: they're a necessary step, but aren't sufficient).
One of the places you could have learned this would be the article itself:
> most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading (the “free float”). For SpaceX, this means just the $75bn or so of stock it intends to issue in June—so its initial weight in the S&P 500 will be around 0.1%. The NASDAQ 100 is an exception, and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float, in an apparent effort to woo Mr Musk. Even so, SpaceX’s probable initial weight in this $40trn index will still only be around 0.5%.
To quote a message I wrote on a finance channel on telegram:
The TAM for "enterprise applications" at 28 T sounds both too much and too little: by the time the tech (and/or overall economy) allows it to reach that number, that number itself will look unimpressive, and this kind of scale seems to be reachable with ground-based more easily than with space based (at current energy prices, even that TAM is only about 2% of being Kardeshev 1).
Feels like Musk did vibe-economics for "how big is the global digital economy?", much like the claims about factories on the moon making data center satellites looks like he prompted grok with "if I tile the moon with solar powered factories and mass drivers to launch them, how many TW can it launch per year?"
The world's GDP is about 100T. That would mean more than 1/4 of every expenditure in the entire world would go into buying AI or by AI providers into their consumables.
While I essentially agree Musk is BSing, TAM doesn't imply "we can actually get this entire market". The TAM for the food sector is *all food*, not what one particular alcopop manufacturer can sell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market
AI today can't do all desk jobs, I don't know how far we even are from that given the spiky nature of ML, but it smells like this IPO is using that as the justification for the claim.
The TAM of a particular alcopop manufacturer is "all beverages sold on the area it distributes". Misrepresenting it as "all food" would be borderline fraud.
The TAM for AI right now is the sum of all revenue from all AI companies. That seems to be something around $100B, or about 0.3% of the number on that document.
If they plan to grow that market, that's a different indicator.
This is not a useful response to "how long does this last? I've been hearing it for a decade."
The phrase "late capitalism" itself has been used for just over a century now[0]; while I believe the USA is destroying what made the nation successful and will therefore probably[1] go into decline before 2035, there's no particular reason to tie the weird aspects of the economic system to the USA's political nonsense.
Also, the USSR would be the opposite example of your first sentence, as the collapse was a big surprise to everyone (both inside and outside the bloc) even a few years before it happened.
The Roman Empire would be the example for long-term decline, as that took one or more centuries depending on where you count the zenith (180 CE to 376 CE as the start, the Western Roman Empire was definitely dead by 476 CE).
But you seem to want to present it as a "in our lifetime" kind of thing; for that, I would suggest the British Empire, which peaked just before WW1, yet was obviously a broken power by the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956 just 42 years later though full decolonisation took longer (and if you ask Sinn Féin, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP, isn't really finished).
[1] There's a very narrow path where enough anti-corruption votes combine for a government which does something that, ironically, Trump promised in his first term: "drain the swamp". It can't just be "Dems win", it has to be broad consensus that not only takes this seriously but also is seen by the world to do so.
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
(Why do people try to criticise AI as "probabalistic" like this matters? Unreliable I get, but early Wikipedia and Geocities were as deterministically unreliable as the amateur and fiction sections respectively of a bookstore)
An economist exytrpolating tech trends is already a hard sell. And deterministic unreliability is atleast deterministic meaning you can choose to ignore, this is still better than probabilistic AI hubris
Actually "completely disconnected"? That would be impossibly expensive.
Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates.
My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay).
[1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are.
[2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.
Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.
I think the term 'social media' has outlived its purpose. It's too vague to be used in discussion. 'Social' seems a bit redundant, as isn't most media inherently social?
It's quite a nice, flattering term for these companies. They get to advertise their platforms as being 'social' (bringing people closer together, having firneds), and 'media' (wow look at all these fun, cool pics and videos!), when in reality, it's kinda the opposite.
I think we need to start naming things based on who actually owns these companies, the essence of their operations, and where they generate the most of their revenues from. Ad Platforms? Surveillance Boards?
It "only" takes about 8 million metric tons of aluminium to put a conductive aluminium loop of 1Ω resistance around the moon's equator*, solving all the energy problems that the poles are usually supposed to solve.
While this is way more than we can do any time soon**, that's the kind of mass you'd need to get up there to build the infrastructure for a colony of just high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of people, which is well short of "mega city".
** Last I looked, SpaceX's website was listing 100 million USD per ton to the moon; your guess is as good as mine if or when they'll deliver anything close to the price Musk suggests for serious colonisation efforts
While I like the dreams Musk sells of self-driving cars so good they don't need steering wheels, of space colonisation and useful robot workers cheap enough that I could personally afford them, at this point I don't trust him in particular to actually deliver any of those things.
(And no, you can't convince me with some variant of "look at ${current version} of FSD" or "look at progress with Starship", etc., that's like responding to someone who doubts you can build a house by pointing to a pile of bricks: they're a necessary step, but aren't sufficient).
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