The Roadster demonstration tonight gives us the opportunity to step back from our perceptive restraints and see that the world doesn’t have to be as it always was.
I watched a car doing obviously impossible things.
The Roadster broke a preconception tonight. It did what everyone knew a car couldn’t. Hold onto that feeling of being wrong, because that’s what coming from not knowing asks of us before we judge anything else.
So here’s my question:
Why don’t we apply what increases our lethality in war and cuts blood and treasure to the medical needs of the American people?
We have multiple opportunities to create a world we can’t even imagine if we come from not knowing and consider the opportunities available to us, which are being developed by those using their talents assisted by artificial intelligence.
It’s already happening in medicine:
- Cancer: Tempus has built one of the largest cancer databases anywhere, linking tumor genetics to outcomes and using AI to match patients with treatments and trials.
- Drug discovery: AlphaFold mapped the shapes of hundreds of millions of proteins, earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and is now being used to design drugs.
- AI-designed medicine: Insilico Medicine used AI to find and design a drug for a fatal lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and got it into human trials in a fraction of the usual time and cost.
- Heart disease: Mayo Clinic’s AI reads an ordinary 10-second EKG and flags a weak heart before the patient feels a thing.
- Alzheimer’s: AI is reading scans, blood markers and speech to catch Alzheimer’s years earlier, when treatment has a chance.
And in education. Booker T. Washington built Tuskegee to lift the people he cared about. AI can be the Tuskegee of our generation, for every American, starting with those who’ve been left behind:
- Waterford UPSTART: a free, at-home learning program for preschoolers. Among low-income kids, 68% of UPSTART kids finished kindergarten with solid literacy skills, compared with 50% of kids who didn’t use it.
- Nigeria: in a World Bank pilot, six weeks of after-school AI tutoring produced roughly two years’ worth of learning gains.
- Harvard: physics students with an AI tutor learned about twice as much in less time.
- Stanford Tutor CoPilot: AI coaching human tutors in high-poverty schools lifted the students who needed it most.
- Khanmigo: Khan Academy’s nonprofit AI tutor teaches the thinking instead of handing over the answer.
See the full list of these benefits, with sources, on Facts for Reality: The Off-Ramp to Abundance.
The headwind to this is like a lot of cost-plus contracts: it’s been a gravy train where the American people support big companies which have no incentive to produce economically. The more they spend, the more they make. That’s how we got the $640 toilet seat.
The demonstration tonight is by a company which develops using its own private funds. It puts its money on the line first and asks to be paid only when the product works.
Now Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk are going into the War Department, a cost-plus customer if there ever was one. The question is whether they’ll be allowed to do what they really can do, and already do, in private enterprise. If they are, America will benefit incredibly: shorter wars, fewer casualties and no bloat.
You’re going to be asked to deny yourself the benefits described previously by those who want to continue to satisfy their lust for greed and avarice by keeping control of information and the system’s procurement.
Don’t fall for the con by those who are trying to keep the power from us.
— Ross