For this reason, even if you think that the absence of future generations is not a moral loss or that the end of civilisation would be a good thing (issues that I discuss in Part IV), it’s still very important to avoid AI takeover or the lock-in of bad values. There will be future generations of intelligent beings either way, and by preventing the takeover of the world by an AI with bad values, you are changing how good or bad the future is over the course of civilisation’s life span. That’s the main effect, rather than any impacts on civilisation’s life expectancy.

He said the basic research unit was not affordable and needed to be downsized. He was quite concerned about IBM’s software business, mainframe business, and midrange products. As I look back at my notes, it is clear he understood most, if not all, of the business issues we tackled over the ensuing years. What’s striking from my notes is the absence of any mention of culture, teamwork, customers, or leadership—the elements that turned

out to be the toughest challenges at IBM…

I went home with a deepening sense of fear. Could I pull this off? Who was going to help me?

The Thinking Machine - Stephen Witt

Introduction:

“This is the story of how a niche vendor of video game hardware became the most valuable company in the world. It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known. At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.

Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow.

TWENTY-ONE: Jensen

“Jensen contradicted himself frequently, sometimes offering opposing viewpoints within the same interview. He wasn’t playing devil’s advocate, exactly—he just liked to attack ideas from both sides. “He’s not trying to be a politician,” Horstmann said. “He’s not trying to stay on message. He’s trying to process real-time input, and he’s willing to entertain a contradictory thought for a while.” What might appear to be a definitive pronouncement was often just Jensen thinking out loud. Only once he started to repeat himself was it time to pay attention. When an idea really struck Jensen, it slowly built up steam over a period of days or even weeks. It cycled into his vocabulary and was repeated at every meeting. Concepts like the “zero-billion-dollar market” or the “speed of light” hadn’t come to Jensen in a flash; they’d arrived as polished nuggets of wisdom after spending months being tossed in the rock tumbler of his mind. Having arrived, they were then drilled so thoroughly into his employees that his staff sometimes sounded like characters from The Manchurian Candidate, repeating Jensen’s catchphrases verbatim with a glassy look in their eyes. Even employees who hadn’t worked at Nvidia for years could still recite the catechism from memory.

TWENTY-THREE: The Thinking Machine

“Looking back, it became clear to me that Jensen had wanted to lose his temper; he’d made a conscious decision to thrash me. Once the performance had started, his fury was genuine, but it was all in service of a larger point he wanted to make. It wasn’t just that Jensen didn’t read science fiction—it was that he actually hated science fiction. He was a

serious man.

The reason that Jensen had succeeded in fields where others had failed—parallel computing, AI, the Omniverse—was precisely because he didn’t tolerate airy speculation about the future. He examined technologies coldly, from first principles, swayed neither by optimism nor fear but only by a cold and patient sense of business logic that he alone could push to the outer limits of corporate foresight. Beyond that he did not look or care to imagine. The potential for human extinction was not a question of corporate strategy and thus, to him, was as foolish as drawing a dragon on the unexplored portion of the map.