It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonists would starve to death a few months after the Earth resupply ships stopped arriving.

By far, the people most certain to the answer to that question are those convinced that it used to be so much better, the belief being particularly strong among those who weren't alive yet.

This is like Trump promising $5K if republicans win the midterms. It's just a PR stunt.

Imagine trying to reason out the tax implications of something like this. The privacy implications. Everything.

Elon: "I really wanted to, but lawyers wouldn't let me!"

No way to see that coming.

Assuming all goes well, I agree. OTOH, returning old equipment back into service after it had been written off is a little risky, don't you think?

It's perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world's militaries have been doing it for years.

It's also possible to deliberately dial down the machine's combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.

OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?

You better get real worried if you get caught up detained and charged in a case in which people think it is a superhero movie on screen instead of about whatever you are or are not guilty of, and people start talking about "unleashing stuff against Humanity."

As they say, what's remarkable isn't that the dog plays a good game of poker; it's that the dog is able to play poker at all.

If the audience comes away with diverging opinions about the interpretations you saw in it, then lots of people will watch and discuss it. That's what it's really about right? Tech, sales, "innovation," gender wars.... not Elizabeth Holmes per se as more than a case study.

they "trust" me. dumb fucks.

As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine. I predict we'll see some pretty spectacular Youtube videos of people making themselves (and their car) two-dimensional.

I wonder how the performance of 2 networked 512GB Mac Studios would compare to the performance of a (hypothetical) single Mac Studio with 1TB of RAM?

My intuition says that the network linking the two machines would be a bottleneck, but I don't know if that's a minor performance problem or a major one.

If only his cautionary words about the risks of AI software development had been heeded, he would have been a big name in the never-ending dumbeat about the "sotware crisis" for the last 50 years!

I predict it could cost as much as $150 Billion!

Do I hear $200B? We're making shit up - go large!

Agreed, and centralized coordination is a HUGE simplifying assumption to the task at hand.

My day job is a (saas) app that's about 20 years old and has been worked on continuously by a team that has varied in size from about 5 to now about 15. It is complicated and connects to several external services. There are parts of the app that are too hairy for AI to reason about. But we have found, recently, that AI is surprisingly good at explaining how some rather complicated (but well written) parts of the app work.
The 2-3 really hairy parts of the app are written in an arbitrarily complicated way that I would never have used and long to rewrite - but they work. Nobody on the team is happy with it - and there is no corporate memory of anyone being happy working with these parts.
We have exceptional test coverage (>95% by lines), so it's just a matter of time before we decide to lay out an AI agent team to rewrite some of the horrible stuff in a way that is much more palatable to both human and agent. This is not something I would have suggested as possible 4-6 months ago.