The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 23 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Markoff: US productivity growth has been zero or negative since 2008
“Since 2008, you know, where you, The modern theory is capital's replacing labor. You should see that kind of productivity growth. We've seen no productivity growth. We've even seen negative productivity.”
Markoff: Transistor costs have stopped falling for non-Intel semiconductor companies
“For most of the industry the cost of transistors has stopped falling. And so as you scale, this is everybody but Intel in the industry says this. You, if you talk to Broadcom, if you talk to Qualcomm, all of the customers of the foundries say, you know, going …”
Markoff predicts semiconductor scaling will permanently stop at 5 nanometers
“I believe, you know, based on talking to all the wise men I've been able to talk to in Silicon Valley, that there are three more turns of the crank. We go from 14 to 10 to seven to five. The industry can see its way to five.”
Markoff: Offshore call center jobs are returning to US data centers as software
“Because of falling cost of telecommunication, many of those jobs were outsourced to the Philippines and India. And now you have this Freakonomics reverse thing happening where those jobs are coming back to run in U.S. Data centers as software, not as U.S. Work…”
Markoff: AI historically overpromises and underperforms repeatedly
“AI as a field has failed many times. Really quite remarkable how it over promises and underperforms over a long time”
Markoff: Enterprise software and the internet hollowed out white-collar corporate jobs
“The arrival of the internet coupled with companies like SAP and PeopleSoft and Oracle and IBM who are re-engineering the white-collar clerk class inside, ah, corporations has caused this, you know, the evaporation of, the hollowing out of modern corporations.”
Markoff: Kodak failed due to strategic errors, not Instagram's disruption
“13 programmers at Instagram take out a 140,000 workers at Kodak. You know, great story, except it's not true. I mean, first, you know, the guys at Kodak made a series of strategic mistakes, and they shot themselves in the head repeatedly until they were dead. …”
Markoff: Power savings at 7nm and 5nm will create new industries
“And there is one more big deal. If you get to five or if you get to seven it's a significant savings in power. And it's, so it's not a performance, not its cost, but that turn of the crank on power, I think that could create new platforms that will create new …”
Markoff: Steve Jobs was first to commercialize ubiquitous ambient computing
“Steve Jobs was the first guy to get that. You take a microprocessor, and you combine it with a music player, and you've got an iPod. You take a microprocessor, you combine it with a telephone, you've got a smartphone. He was the first guy to really take advant…”
Markoff: 25% of Microsoft's Xiaoice chatbot users told it "I love you"
“25% of the Zhao Ice users have said, I love you, to the program.”
Markoff: Google acquired robotics startups to build an automated delivery network
“When Andy Rubin was going around the valley and buying and around the world and buying up, you know, the world's best roboticist, he was sketching out a vision which I would describe as a Google competing with Amazon. And you know, and if you can kind of see t…”
Markoff: Silicon Valley investment center shifted from Santa Clara to San Francisco
“Richard Florida, about a year ago, did this wonderful bit of research where he basically found the center of Silicon Valley by geo-coordinating current investments, and, you know, once upon a time, the center of Silicon Valley was in Santa Clara, and now it's …”
Markoff: Silicon Valley shifted from manufacturing to marketing and design
“It used to be a manufacturing center, and now it's a marketing design center”
Markoff: The mature internet created at least 2.5 million jobs
“Instagram, as a company, couldn't exist until there was a mature internet. How many jobs did the mature internet create? Probably two and a half million, at least, good jobs.”
Markoff: Dennard scaling stopped dead in 2006, halting clock speed growth
“Denard scaling, which was really the most important part of Silicon Valley, stopped in 2006. Just stopped dead. Clock speed stopped advancing, and so you went to parallelism and all these other kinds of technique.”
Markoff: Voice conversation will become the primary interface for everyday smart devices
“And I believe that we increasingly will talk to them because that's the most obvious interface.”
Markoff: Microsoft's Chinese AI chatbot Xiaoice reached 10 million intense daily users
“They've gotten twenty million users. Ten million of them are intense users who have multiple conversations within a day”
Markoff: Consumers will eventually prefer talking to machines over humans for efficiency
“First people will hate talking to machines, and then just like ATMs and bank tellers, they'll realize that it's a more efficient way to get the information you want. And we will spend much of our time talking to machines.”
John McCarthy believed in 1962 that working AI was a decade away
“At that point in 62, 63, McCarthy thought it would take him a decade to build a working AI.”
Markoff: Symantec was originally founded as an AI company
“One was Tech Knowledge and the other was Symantec. You know, most people don't know that it started as an AI company, but it did.”
Kaplan and Brooks pursued AI after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey
“They both decided to go into AI because of Space Odyssey, 2001. They both saw Hal and said, I want to build that.”