Elon Musk is the most daring entrepreneur of our time. There are few industrialists in history who could match Elon Musk's relentless drive and ingenious vision. A modern alloy of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, Musk is the man behind PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity, each of which has sent shock waves throughout American business and industry. More than any other executive today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as a science fiction fantasy.
In this lively, investigative account, veteran technology journalist Ashlee Vance offers an unprecedented look into the remarkable life and times of Silicon Valley's most audacious businessman. Written with exclusive access to Musk, his family, and his friends, the book traces his journey from his difficult upbringing in South Africa to his ascent to the pinnacle of the global business world. Vance spent more than fifty hours in conversation with Musk and interviewed close to three hundred people to tell the tumultuous stories of Musk's world-changing companies and to paint a portrait of a complex man who has renewed American industry and sparked new levels of innovationâall while making plenty of enemies along the way.
In 1992, Elon Musk arrived in the United States as a ferociously driven immigrant bent on realizing his wildest dreams. Since then, Musk's roller-coaster life has brought him grave disappointments alongside massive successes. After being forced out of PayPal, fending off a life-threatening case of malaria, and dealing with the death of his infant son, Musk abandoned Silicon Valley for Los Angeles. He spent the next few years baffling his friends by blowing his entire fortune on rocket ships and electric cars. Cut to 2012, however, and Musk had mounted one of the greatest resurrections in business history: Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity had enjoyed unparalleled success, and Musk's net worth soared to more than $5 billion. At a time when many American companies are more interested in chasing easy money than in taking bold risks on radical new technology, Musk stands out as the only businessman with enough dynamism and vision to tackleâand even revolutionizeâthree industries at once.
Vance makes the case that Musk's success heralds a return to the original ambition and invention that made America an economic and intellectual powerhouse. Elon Musk is a brilliant, penetrating examination of what Musk's career means for a technology industry undergoing dramatic change and offers a taste of what could be an incredible century ahead.
What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.
But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain.
Five thousand years later, their progenyâseven distinct races now three billion strongâembark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown, to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.
A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom is a comprehensive analysis of the concept of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and the potential consequences of such a development. Bostrom explores the capabilities unique to the human brain that have allowed our species to hold a dominant position on Earth. This dominance could be challenged if machine intelligence exceeds our own, presenting a superintelligence that could become extremely powerful, possibly beyond our control.
The book delves into whether it is possible to construct an initial seed AI in such a way that an intelligence explosion could be survivable. Bostrom presents a controlled approach to this explosive potential, addressing topics such as oracles, genies, singletons, boxing methods, tripwires, mind crime, humanity's cosmic endowment, differential technological development, indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation, technology couplings, Malthusian economics, dystopian evolution, artificial intelligence, biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence.
With lucid writing, Bostrom guides the reader through this complex landscape, making it accessible and engaging. Superintelligence does not merely lay out the challenges ahead; it offers a reconceptualization of our essential tasks in the face of the future of intelligent life and the fate of humanity itself.