Here it is on Soundcloud.
From interviewer Rainer Sternfeld: This is the 20th episode – as you know, every tenth episode we make is a special where I talk to someone who is of Estonian descent yet doesn’t speak the seemingly unintelligible language, or is a big friend of Estonia who is contributing to the success of Estonia.
We’re recording this on March 24 2017, and my guest today is an Estonian-American polymath, a world renowned venture capitalist, and the Estonia’s first e-resident outside Europe – Steve Jurvetson. In his day job, he invests in bold human endeavors in quantum computing, deep learning, electric cars, rockets, synthetic biology, genomics, robotics, and other areas.
In this podcast you’ll hear us cover a wide variety of brain-stimulating topics:
His technology-infused, Estonian-subtext upbringing in Arizona
How chip design and computing is undergoing a fundamental shift using biomimicry?
Why learning 9 programming languages is not as hard as 9 human languages, and what advice does he give to young people starting out in technology?
How does he think about the future of humanity in the light of accelerating rich-poor gap, automation, and why will robots be the slaves, not humans?
and his thoughts on why Estonia is competitive on the world stage.
Fasten your seatbelts!
Quotes
“If you didn’t understand evolution, and somebody explains it to you, you have to take your ego down a notch. You have to say: “Wait a minute. So humanity is not the endpoint of purposeful design? Wait – we’re just kind of an accident?!””
“I think we are currently in the middle of a major renaissance in how we do computation and how we actually think of engineering in general. I think it is shifting profoundly, almost as profoundly as when we first came up with the concept of the scientific method as a way to accumulate knowledge as a species over time. Something as profound is happening in the field of machine intelligence.”
“What fascinates me is that our humanity’s capacity to compute has compounded over 120 years and across multiple technology modes including mechanical devices etc. The main takeaway for me that is so powerful is there is I think a reflection here of a huge phenomenon, even bigger than computers themselves, which is humanity’s information reserve — our knowledge, our learning is compounding.”
“In terms of advice, first of all, I think that everyone should learn computer science. Do it young, do it early, do it often. Most importantly, I would encourage people, once they have had any taste of CS, to force themselves to play around with neural networks, whatever they will call it in the future. The core of it is neural networks patterned on the brain.”
“It sort of clicked for me that there are power laws in income (meaning it looks in and there are power laws in the number of companies that succeed in the information age businesses. As businesses succeed, they become information-centric and global, it tends to be winner takes all dynamic. Couple that with the notion that I strongly believe every business becomes an information business over time, just at different rates of speed. … The worries around AI should be centered on the concentration of power and I think OpenAI is spot on to say let’s look to Google, should one company be that powerful?”
from Memokraat
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