Elon Musk Unveils Apocalyptic Vision For The World

Elon Musk is no stranger to futurecasting a foreboding dystopia ahead for mankind, as we noted recently. But during a  speech he gave today at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island, Musk turned up the future-fearmongery amplifier to "11".

As a reminder, in the past, when he was asked about whether humans are living inside a computer simulation, Musk made headlines last year by saying he thinks the chances are one in billions that we aren’t.

“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot,” Musk stated.  

“That’s where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.”

Here Musk is referring to the exponential growth of technology, the lynchpin of the Singularity theory. If in 40 years we’ve gone from the two-dimensional pong to the cusp of augmented and virtual reality, imagine where we’ll be in another forty, or a hundred, or 400. And that is where he began today...

But today, Musk discussed a broad range of topics from energy sources in the future...

"It"s inevitable," Musk said, speaking of shift to sustainable energy. "But it matters if it happens sooner or later."

As for those pushing some other type of fusion, Musk notes that the sun is a giant fusion reactor in the sky. "It"s really reliable," he said. "It comes up every day. if it doesn"t we"ve got (other) problems)."

To Tesla"s share price:

Musk said he has been on record several times as saying its stock price "is higher than we have any right to deserve" especially based on current and past performance.

"The stock price obviously reflects a lot of optimism on where we will be in the future," he said. "Those expectations sometimes get out of control. I hate disappointing people, I am trying really hard to meet those expectations."

Musk added that he won"t be selling any stock "unless I have to for taxes," and said "I"m going down with the ship... I"ll be the last [to sell]."

Musk addressed government regulation and incentives:

"It sure is important to get the rules right," Musk said. "Regulations are immortal. They never die unless somebody actually goes and kills them. A lot of times regulations can be put in place for all the right reasons but nobody goes back and kills them because they no longer make sense."

Musk also focused on the importance of incentives, saying whatever societies incentivize tends to be what happens. "It"s economics 101," he said.

And what drives him:

"I want to be able to think about the future and feel good about that, to dream what we can to have the future be as good as possible. To be inspired by what is likely to happen and to look forward to the next day. How do we make sure things are great? That"s the underlying principle behind Tesla and SpaceX."

Within 20 years, he said driving a car will be like having a horse (i.e. rare and totally optional). "There will not be a steering wheel."

“There will be people that will have non-autonomous cars, like people have horses,” he said.

“It just would be unusual to use that as a mode of transport.”

But what started off as the latest sales pitch for electric cars quickly devolved into a bizarre rant that among other things, touched on Elon Musk"s gloomy, apocalyptic vision of how the world could end... (via ReCode)

Musk called on the government to proactively regulate artificial intelligence before things advance too far.

“Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he said.

“AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.”

“Normally the way regulations are set up is a while bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” he continued.

“It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

Musk has been concerned about AI for years, and he’s working on technology that would connect the human brain to the computer software meant to mimic it.

Full interview below (Musk begins talking around 42 minutes in)...

The End Of The Cycle: "Government Will Gladly Enter War To Cleanse The Balance Sheet And Cull The Herd"

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne)) via SHTFplan.com,

In the days following the 241^st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the country is in an even more precarious position than it was in 1776. 

We face a situation of a fiat currency about to collapse as the consumer-based economy follows.  Whether orchestrated by our imperialistic government or following actions of a hostile foreign nation (prompted or unprompted) the government will gladly enter a war to “cleanse” the balance sheet and cull the herd.  Concurrently, the country is deeply divided domestically along lines of racial unrest.

The country also faces a threat to its existence in the face of Muslim extremists who are fostered by the traitorous socialist-Marxists in our government who enabled their entry under Obama as protected “refugees.”  U.S. policy in every arena is a chariot drawn by horses with no driver, jerking toward the “Blues” of the socialist Democrats or the “Reds” of the socialist, pseudo-Republicans in the domestic quagmire, the Circus Maximus partially in ruin after years of Barack Hussein Obama II’s reign.

The superficial and superfluous, in the meantime, becomes the public focus and hence the distraction: “Simulacra and simulation,” so to speak.  The majority have gone forward in their consumer-driven Habitrail according to the sacred Hallmark Calendar…the one that has a “THX-1138 Consumer Day” at least one day every month.  The one with a fixed venue: everyone left the house to shop, to eat, to plan on the big barbecue in the afternoon.  Finally, in the evening, everyone then piled into the cars to watch the fireworks.  Then they all went home, to mount the treadmill again in the morning.

The fireworks: thousands of tons of them, made in the People’s Republic of China.  It was a perfect, patriotic display, complete with “Ooh’s” and “Aah’s” as the Communist-Chinese fireworks simulated the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air.  Make no mistake: it is nighttime, and although our flag is still there, the country that it symbolizes is not whole anymore.  We have become an entitlement nation, where those who did not work and contribute to the system believe they are entitled to the fruits of those whose labors enable the country to keep chugging along.

The government believes it is entitled to what those who pay taxes earn.  And those who support the system?  We believe that we are entitled to reset everything based on the merits of hard work and conservative values: an automatic, bloodless reset.  All these “entitlement” mindsets, forgetting that everything is cyclical.  We are at the end of the cycle for the United States.  We peaked long ago, and now we are deep in the decline-phase.  The Founding Fathers summed up in words what we are truly entitled to…a loss of our freedoms following the moral and societal degradation that we have allowed as a nation.  Some fostered it (the Marxists) and we the conservatives allowed them to do it.

We didn’t put a stop to the degradation that occurred through the decades, and this is the result.  A law-abiding people is most easily controlled by the law.  There is no news today!  There is no coverage over what is happening in the rest of the world!  Where was the coverage…live…when the Egyptians were fed up with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood and enlisted the aid of the army…and aided it, rioting in the streets to oust those extremists that Obama allowed to take power?  Where was the true coverage of the coup d’états we fostered, supported, and enabled in Ukraine and in Libya?  No, the “coverage” is limited to the lives of tabloid celebrities and distortions of any objectivity.  Why?

To keep the citizens dumbed down, uninformed, working, taxed, consuming, mesmerized by sports and sex, and stultified to prevent them from taking any action against a government that is becoming more tyrannical, more repressive by the day.

The media obfuscates: they aid, and in turn are aided by, the government.  Benghazi, Libya.  An embassy of the United States destroyed, and the ambassador and four members of his consulate killed, and nothing…nothing…has happened to the perpetrators.  The Secretary of Defense just released a report that the armed forces of the United States are in severe disarray and lacking both manpower and materials.  Most of us (the conservatives) are recognizing all of this.

Thomas Jefferson wrote about the Tree of Liberty.

The situation was arrived upon because the populace overall does not take any personal responsibility.  That reason covers the entire spectrum of the basis for the entitlement mentality.  Conservatives have lied to themselves, saying “It’ll all balance out eventually,” or “We’ll just vote the bums out of office and it’ll be made right,” or “Somebody will take care of it.”  The “somebody” needed to be us.  The problem is that Americans don’t sack the Curia or burn down the Bastille.  Americans fear the lack of law-abiding action, fear the potential for anarchy.

But anarchy can also take form when the law-abiding do not put a stop to the lawmakers and their machinery turning a Republic into a tyranny: the controlled, purposed anarchy that follows is an anarchy of lawless laws, that only serve to empower the powerful and subjugate the subjects.

The payment of taxes serves to feed the jailers and build the ever-growing cage of surveillance and control that is inexorably tightening upon society and every citizen.  The 8-year destructive actions of Obama left the country on the verge of collapse and war, with only agonal breathing on its deathbed: the country visits its own wake.  Now we have an administration that supplies the formerly anaerobic society with about 4 liters of oxygen per minute when a full 16 is called for: a “watered-down” Republicanism with fifth columnists preserving Obamacare and that hand of government control is still tightening on the throat of the people.  The hand is a mail gauntlet with the thin veneer of a velvet overlay.

In just 3 ½ years, that velvet will fade, and the gauntlet will fully and openly reemerge once more.  If we make it for that length of time.  In truth, we face a larger problem that we have never encountered since the country’s founding.  We face the dual threat of war (orchestrated or otherwise) and a concurrent collapse of the economy, complete with civil war/social upheaval domestically.  The funeral dirge has been playing awhile, now.

Bottom Line: All of this is the planned and deliberate globalists’ agenda: to destroy the United States from without and from within, by any means necessary.

To truly celebrate the “birthday” of the United States, it will have to be “born again.”  The possibility exists that this means being born from the ashes of what remains after it hits rock bottom…through warfare, internal collapse, or a combination of both.  Society (and the stance of individual men) are both fragile things.  We also face the problem of needing to act, but it may be too late to act until everything is taken to the ground.  What will emerge from that is then up to those who survive the initial event.  Food for thought, after Independence Day, perhaps at the Twilight’s Last Gleaming.

Goldman Building "Robo-Adviser" For Its 'Poor' Clients (A.K.A. Those With Only $1 Million To Invest)

For all you "poor" people (and you know who we"re talking about...all you people with only around $1 million of liquid investable assets) out there who always wanted to invest their money with Goldman Sachs but didn"t have the $50 million net worth required to become a private wealth client, today may just be your lucky day. 

But don"t think for one second that you"re going to get the same access to Goldman"s proprietary "market color" as GSAM"s wealthier private clients, or even be able to speak with one of Goldman"s massively overpaid advisers for that matter.  No, for all you peons who make up the "mass affluent market," Goldman will gladly take your money but if you want advice you"ll have to go through their brand new "Robo-Adviser."

As Reuters points out today, in an effort to diversify risk away from the super wealthy, Goldman Sachs is actively hiring developers to code a "Robo-Adviser" for the "mass affluent market"...which basically means rich but not "Goldman" rich.

The robo platform would sit within the bank"s rapidly growing investment management division, according to the ad. The unit, which Goldman has been trying to build out in recent years to diversify its revenue, posted a record $1.38 trillion in assets under supervision at the end of 2016.

Goldman has for years grappled with how to tap into the mass affluent segment, broadly defined as those with less than $1 million in investable assets, without diluting the brand of its private wealth business which is considered a jewel within the bank, according to people familiar with the matter. Goldman"s U.S. private wealth business typically advises clients with an account size of around $50 million.

Goldman has in the past considered expanding Ayco, a wealth advisory firm it purchased in 2003, as a way to push more deeply into the mass affluent segment, the people added.

While the robo-advice market was initially developed by startups such as Wealthfront and Betterment with ambitions of upending the traditional financial advice sector, large firms such as Charles Schwab Corp (SCHW.N) and Vanguard have launched similar services.

In an effort to save these programmers some time, might we kindly suggest you start with the "Buy The Fucking Dip" simulation as it"s likely the only component of your new "Robo-Adviser" that will get any real airplay.