I'm on team humanity. In spite all our failings, I want humanity to succeed and reach for the stars. Success means having a livable planet. For idealists like me who are also realists, the only way to get everyone working toward this future is to put it in their self-interest. Anything else just. won't. work.
To dedicate yourself in a practical way to the future of humanity, Tesla's one of the few games around.
- you are ignoring the benefits that EVs could bring, as well as synergies with future technology improvements. Radically better battery technology coupled with cheap, affordable solar might be a game changer of unprecedented scale.
- On the other hand, there's no proof that "drastically reducing the low-occupancy car miles driven" or "reversing the car growth trend" is either feasible or beneficial (how do you achieve the goal? Any measure is likely to have side-effects. I haven't seen any realistic proposal that doesn't have potentially horrible side-effects).
Lastly, let me just tell you that I love it when people living in developed countries know what developing countries should do (which is typically "stay poor", but delivered in a more politically-correct way)
What are the horrible side effects of car pools?
There are no horrible side effects to "a healthier population"; however, the prohibition showed us that there may indeed be bad side-effects to banning alcohol consumption & distribution (which could be argued as a measure that leads to a healthier population).
As a city dweller I look forward to a future with less air and noise pollution.
I don't have much faith that laws can solve the problem, so the spread of electric technology is my best hope.
> We must drastically reduce the low-occupancy car miles driven and reverse the car growth trend in developing countries.
Any solution that ignores self-interest at the personal and state level is not a solution that can be banked on to work.
50% is hardly a small improvement. In some areas you are looking at a 70+% improvement.
Asking people to swallow standard of living deductions is a lot harder than them getting a slightly different type of car.
A nonprofit would depend on goodwill, not self interest, and to my mind, only one of those things is reliable.
He had an older brother, who was, by the younger brother's own admission, a notch above himself in the intelligence department. The older brother was said to have been bored working at Google.
My suspicion is: someone in dire need of intellectual engagement might want to work at Tesla simply because of the opportunity to exercise one's mental capacity in a challenge of equivalent magnitude. (Not Tesla specifically: I suspect any company with similarly-driven heavily-pushed technical production would suffice, for a person with the knowledge of that sphere.)
Imagine Einstein or Hawking sorting paper in an office. How do you think their minds would feel in such an uncreative, unproductive environment? I'd wager they'd suffocate soon without an opportunity to express their intellect in a meaningful way. Same story, I suspect, happens with the brilliant engineers and designers at Tesla.
(Which isn't to say that the nightmare-ish conditions they're being put through are necessarily worth it, or that they can't find an outlet for their capacities elsewhere. Working for a company is simpler, in that one doesn't need to make as many choices as an independent entrepreneur would have to. It's also prestigious – since the company has a big name – which may or may not play its role.)
Einstein is the perfect counterexample: Had he not worked at a boring paperwork job in the patent office, he wouldn't have had enough mental capacity to devise his theories.
That job was not as boring as commonly understood. He had to examine patents about time synchronization devices that used light signals between trains. That led him to think about what would later become relativity.
I feel like you're over selling this by a lot, especially the Hawkings and paper comparison. Someone moving from Google to Tesla because of "boredom" is likely due to the industry more than the intellectual challenge. People go to work at Tesla because they believe in Musk's "vision" of a better world.
From what I understand (comparing my knowledge of the younger brother and the younger brother's gushing over the older's intellect), the older brother was a real big head. I know people get bored when their intellectual capacity has not met a worthy rival of a problem. I extrapolated.
Do those two areas provide similar technological challenges? Obviously, they're both about coding the backbone of the product, and I understand that visuals are, often, a big part of a game engine, which could translate to visual editing. Is that what you meant?
Yep, exactly. You're shifting your knowledge and skill of computational related programming into another field just to have more of a challenge.
At my own place I've seen engineers internally transfer to take on new challenges. Not surprisingly the trend of this is front-end -> back-end/ops -> video.