unono

PG should think about 'franchising' his operation. By that, I mean creating a systemic process for accrediting founders, choosing franchisees in big cities around the world, and a webapp to manage this all. He could scale the YC startup process to thousands of startups per batch. In fact, it might become a sign of failure to not be accredited by YC when seeking first round VC.

There's a lot wrong with that article. If the computer is smart enough to tell you what to do in social situations and can also read, write, and drive cars, the game is pretty much up.

There will be nothing humans can do that computers can't.

The best thing to do will be to plug everyone in to the Matrix, because otherwise millions of wars between people with really smart computers will break out. Wars that will feature weapons designed by smart computers i.e. drones with nuclear/chemical/biological weapons - deadly enough to kill everyone.

The safest route for humans in the coming years is for global scale cooperation to create a basic income, not a stipend, but self-contained self-sufficient virtual reality simulator so that we don't descend into chaos when some of us get access to hyper-intelligent computers.

It's quaint that the good professor thinks we'll just go on seeking jobs after taking coursera courses, and marketing sales letters to each other, but we hackers unfortunately know that that isn't an accurate prediction. The gravitas of the situation is far greater.

edit: Ted Talk by Daniel Suarez (author of Daemon and Freedom) on the drone threat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI

Where does a typical carpenter, web developer, entreprenuer, hedge fund manager's reputation come from?

Word of mouth from previous clients. In the beginning a company with needs hires you and your reputation builds over time.

As I said above, I think Boeing does a fine job of minimizing errors. The AMA, teaching hospitals and local hospitals don't.

Because the consumer won't buy from you if you don't have a good track record. If a big company with a good brand name like Boeing or Airbus hired you for that, they might buy it. A company with reputation on the line will be more likely to invest in quality control than your local hospital (which usually refuses to publish any statistics or prices).

Spot on.

To add a point, licensing will shift the blame from corporations and their management to workers. This will mean that the blame won't be placed on management cheaping out on processes to ensure safety, but instead the 'bad apple' developer. This is bad for both consumers and workers.

Licensing in all industries, especially in medicine and law needs to be abolished ASAP. it has devastated many lives (it's too costly to get multiple opinions) and robbed the middle class in every town across America.

Hackers need to do something about the big companies abusing the app store system. Google, Apple, Amazon are taking far too much fees from independent developers.

- Apple's store especially needs to be killed fast for innovation to thrive, Apple is turning out to be the new Microsoft, Tim Cook should fear the wrath of developers

- and Google needs to be reminded that it's business could swiftly vanish if it isn't pro-developer and pro-consumer, a 30 percent cut for what amounts to hosting a file is way too much.

Totally disagree with that.

As someone who was once a non-programmer but became one, and as someone who as taught and witnessed former 'dumb guys' as you're trying not to verbalize transform into productive programmers, I first-hand experience that contradicts what you're saying.

The data from Khan Academy also suggests there's no 'dumb people' out there. Time and again, they've found formerly incompetent learners to catch up and often exceed the class. (Salman Khan himself taught his niece from behind the average level grade 8 to university level within 2 years).

The real culprit is a bad education system, and we should applaud the pioneers attempting to destroy the failed system.

Good comment, but I have to disagree with it.

The web and app stores are extensions of google/apple etc. There's people making money across the country and around the world.

The difference between auto workers and programmers is that programmers are not workers, but 'inventors'.

A better comparison is mechanical engineers in the 50s and programmers today.

Good mechanical engineers designed or started factories, and there was so much work that the backlog has still not been filled even today. The same can be said for programmers today.

There is the 'creative class' and everyone else. The true creatives never had a problem finding work, and that's the real 'education crisis'. Far too many 'creatively illiterate' being churned out by our failed education system.

Interesting. I'd never have thought of LA as a tech hub, but it kind of makes sense. Defense and tv/movies are big in LA and they never have recessions.

I don't understand. If people are offline, they're less likely to be consuming the products hackers create, and therefore not paying hackers.

I wasn't working then, but from my understanding (might be wrong), it was 'html coders' that had difficulty finding jobs, not actual coders.

I don't know, I used to be excited by spectator sports in my teen years, but as I got older and more intelligent, I found other spectator sports like politics and business much more fun.

Also, I get more of a kick from movies, even sport movies, in that short-duration time period you mention.

Sports are one of the few things keeping people cutting the cable tv cord, we as hackers are losing big money from that situation.

Also, sports are one of the few times that people log off from their computers. That's another huge loss in revenue for us hackers.

The bigger question is - why does sport exist anymore? It comes from a time before movies,books,tv,video games,facebook,pinterest.

Want to stay fit? Do some bodybuilding and some swimming.

Want to focus your mind tactically? Plan your app empire.

Hackers need to find creative ways to destroy the sport industry, just as PG urges us to find creative ways to destroy Hollywood.

Programming is fundamentally different from most other occupations. We are actually building factories - automating manual tasks. If developer jobs start to become scarce, we'll be nearing a situation where there are no jobs at all for anyone. So, as a programmer, you're never at risk of falling into poverty.

This is an absolutely great idea. More people need to think like this, just straight out offer a service. If everyone was taught this simple truth - Always Be Closing - there would be no unemployment lines.

There are two types of people, those who feel energized being around people and those who feel energized by internal deliberation. Offices exist to satisfy the first category.

What is happening though is that the valuable work of today is conducted by internal deliberation (building apps, predicting prices, writing compelling blog posts).

As it becomes more possible for people to distribute their work without a company (app stores and the like), the office will be bled dry.

That won't happen. The kind of person who needs to live in a car doesn't have any political clout.

(Small tip - you can get banned from here talking like that - you wouldn't talk like that in person in polite society. Read the rules).

The situation you described, 'build cheap apartments', is already the current situation. It hasn't worked has it?

Land ownership is a heavily regulated industry, and wherever you have regulations you get distortions in the market caused by political activity (electrician/plumber unions, local land owners etc).

The tech companies should be in on this. They have to pay higher salaries to retain employees because rent costs so much. If they lobbied for more abundant housing they could decrease the salaries they have to pay and save a bundle.

The cost of producing a car is only a few thousand dollars, and a robo-car is just a car with a few extra smartphones. San Francisco spends about $40,000 per street homeless person http://www.triplepundit.com/2013/05/hult-gov-policy-homeless...

Even in slums in India people are capable of affording low cost cars like tata nano's. And with the great efficiencies brought about by robo-cars, they would be even cheaper to manufacture and sell.

And the above doesn't factor in the value of land. Much of rent/mortgage goes into paying off the actual land-owner (usually a bank). Take away that exorbitant cost and robo-cars would actually be much cheaper than even a small apartment. At $700/month, $8,400 per year VS $10,000 one-time cost robo-car.

There's an easy solution to this - electric robo-cars. With self-driving cars that can roam around, and thus not violate city ordinances against parking, there would be no homeless. Electric charging is fairly cheap and the city could even pay it for those deemed destitute.

A robo-car with shower, kitchenette, bedroom would radically transform the situation for poor people worldwide.

The crowd-work industry is woefully immature at the moment. However, it's potential is far greater, 1000000x or more.

The way to imagine it is that all work that gets done in the world could be split up into pieces and coordinated by software. When there is a lot of this crowd-work to go around, prices will rise and crowd-workers will earn a reasonable income.

Much of enterprise software today is already this, the filling in forms and systemic procedures. However, it hasn't been intelligently designed to be distributed through the internet, instead having been mostly a transfer of pen and paper forms into a computer.

Another type of crowd-work is of the physical variety, what amazon, uber, task-rabbit do. There are complaints that these reduce wages, but I don't buy that. There is pent-up demand for things that currently don't get done. For example, I might hire someone to clean my house, but the current mechanisms are too much effort. If there was an uber-like button to press, I might do it every once in a while.

I could get carried away and talk about this for hours so I'll stop. But the essential point is to reorganize all work through web and mobile interfaces, have human -> computer -> human, instead of the inefficient human -> human system.

Poverty is a great opportunity for startups. There's huge pent up demand for crowd sourcing of the Mechanical Turk variety. There's no real reason a person shouldn't be able to work anytime, using just a smartphone, and earn a middle class income. This is going to be huge next year, 2014 will be the year of the crowd-work.

dragonwriter's right, I should have put that as an edit. But even from 'stock price', a reasonable person would infer market cap.

So PG would be really good at delegating, another plus point for him as future Microsoft CEO.

Airbnb and Heroku. And all this is since 2004, with tiny funds, and early 20s kids. Imagine how he'd do with unlimited money and talent.

PG hasn't been running a startup, but managing hundreds of them.

A large company is just a large number of small groups.

A startup is a small group.

PG is someone who has proven effective at managing to give a big ROI from managing quite a few small groups. Hence he is eminently suited to running a large corporation.

That's a good comment, however, I have to disagree. Those management problems are software problems. And I'm sure PG, as well as the other software talents at MS would relish the opportunity to systematize it in software.

Microsoft's problem has been growth, and that's because they appear to always miss capitalizing on the new thing (web,search,mobile,social,tablets) - all things a startup guy is most talented at.

They lack vision, a guy who has vision himself and can herd cats (visionaries) is the best thing for them. PG's about as good as anyone at that.