Light Start – The People Edition: Musk, Hawking, West, Khalifa, and Chen
Brett Venter
Elon Musk talks some smack about Apple, insists he likes the company
Being Elon Musk is hard. He’s on the forefront of a lot of technology so people hang onto every word he says. Musk, speaking to a German magazine, called Apple the “Tesla graveyard” when it comes to engineering. Musk reportedly said “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.” And that’s the sort of smack-talk that is going to be repeated everywhere. To be fair, Musk was kinda-sorta joking and he has since followed up his statements with this tweet.
The real risks of artificial intelligence, according to Stephen Hawking
We’re not sure about you, but when Stephen Hawking talks, we pay attention. That way we’re almost certainly going to learn something. So when Hawking started talking about the risks that artificial intelligence poses to the human race in his recent Reddit AMA, we listened. And the risks are… unexpected. According to Hawking, “A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” He uses the example of humans disregarding ants when creating a building project to illustrate the possible repercussions of AI creation — his solution is to look at creating a “beneficial” AI rather than just a super-smart artificial intelligence. We can see his point there.
Kanye West joins the rest of the world in hating in-app purchases
Rapper Kanye West has taken to Twitter to complain (very forcefully) about in-app purchases in children’s games, which is the sort of problem that normal people are expected to have. But having kids will do that to you, as the West family are finding out. Normally we wouldn’t bother with the doings of Kanye and the rest of the family but his wife has her own mobile game containing in-app purchases… and it’s pretty blatantly targeted at the kids market. Okay, fine, we just needed another name to add to the Light Start list this morning and this fits the bill.
Another YouTube video pips the 1 billion views mark – It’s happening faster now
It took freaking ages for the first YouTube video to pass 1 billion views and when it happened, it was PSY’s Gangnam Style which skyrocketed into first place in just 160 days. Since that milestone (which pipped Justin Bieber to the finish so we’re not complaining) there have been several other videos that have reached 1 billion views. The tenth video on YouTube to do so is Wiz Khalifa’s See You Again, which is part of the Furious 7 soundtrack. The time for videos to hit the billion is getting shorter (though PSY is still the record holder) and next on the list is this video.
The future of BlackBerry’s hardware and operating system is a little uncertain
BlackBerry fans, your world might be changing. Or maybe it won’t but a recent interview giving by BlackBerry CEO John Chen suggests that the company is going to be heading wherever the market takes them — if that’s down the Android path, then that’s the way that the company will be going. There seems to be only one real certainty, aside from a push for profitability in the next year or so for the company. BlackBerry is going to be sticking with security — if that means pulling out of the hardware market entirely (rather than releasing BB10 handsets or even switching to Android devices — assuming BB can’t make a go of it) then that’s what BlackBerry are going to do.
