Based on his interview with Joe Rogan, he has absolutely no imagination about what it means if humans actually manage to build general AI. Rogan basically ends up introducting him to some basic ideas about transhumanism.
To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.
Which can be said for most of the survivorship-biased "greats" we talk about. Right time, right place.
(Although to be fair — and we can think of the Two Steves, or Bill and Paul — there are often a number of people at the right time and right place — so somehow the few we still talk about knew to take advantage of that right time and right place.)
I think you might have it backward. Luck here implies starting with exactly the same work ethic and abilities as millions of other people that all hope to one day see their numbers come up in the lottery of limited opportunities. It's not to say that successful people start off as lazy slackers as you say, but if you were to observe one such lazy slacker who's made a half-assed effort at building something that even just accidentally turned out to be a success, you might see that rare modicum of validation fuel them enough that the motivation transforms them into a workhorse. Often time, when the biography is written, lines are slightly redrawn to project the post-success persona back a few years pre-success. A completely different recounting of history thus ensues. Usually one where there was blood, sweat, and fire involved to get to that first ticket.
so you've moved the goalposts even further now and speculate that succesful people started out as slackers, got lucky, and that luck made them work harder
as an Asian, it amazes me how far Americans and Europeans will go to avoid a hard days work
There's weirdly many people who touch on the work around transhumanism but never heard the word before. There's a video of geohot basically talking about that idea, then someone from the audience mentions the name... and geohotz is confused. I'm honestly surprised.
The transhumanists tended to be philosopher types, the name coming from this kind of idea of humanism:
>Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. (wikipedia)
Whereas the other lot are often engineers / compsci / business people building stuff.
Are the assassinations because of something we already know about? some new advance that is still under wraps? or is it time travelers with knowledge about what he will do if left unchecked?
Please do.