Or lead to 40%+ unemployment rates for an already shrinking middle class, without replacement in any other industry since AIs are effectively slaves and create the same economic problems they created in the Roman Empire and the American South.

Ironic statement, considering you're using a computer to type that message. People said almost the exact same thing when PCs started to popularize. Robots are not going to cause a long-term economic issue. I am 100% sure there will be many lost jobs, but there will also be many new ones.

I'm also not sure if I'm looking forward to a future that 80% of humanity will be eventually redundant except for genetic material. This is far away now, but that's where machine learning will take us. I'm not a Luddite, but I can't see us as a species handling this properly, and this time (unlike the Roman and Civil War times), there are nukes around and idiots like Trump who wield them. I love the tech, but I honestly believe we'll f*ck this up as a species.

And what about medicine? Through medicine (not specifically drugs) we are making humans live through things we were never meant to be able to survive. Humans with disabilities are capable of living a relatively normal life. This results in excessive population growth and a reversal of human evolution, since faults in our gene pools are allowed. But, I don't see this as such a bad thing. The symbiosis, augmentation, and/or biological replacement of technology in human life is, in my opinion, a necessity for us to become "beyond human".

As for Tesla, the only reason they went for NVIDIA GPUs was because the Titan XP was the fastest single GPU they could get for that workload.

I'm pretty sure Tesla went for Nvidia long before Pascal was even created. Many of Nvidia's automotive hardware is minuscule compared to a Titan XP.

I meant business/investment wise ... VR... I have no idea why investors think VR is a huge deal.

There are two reasons to invest in something: A. To ensure a product of personal interest will succeed. B. To rake in cash without putting in any effort. Option A is more altruistic; these investors aren't expecting immediate results, but they know that if their money gives their investment some momentum, they'll surely see a profit. Option B are the kind of people who invest in technology that is already well-established. These are the kind of people who can easily predict when and how much money they'll get back. These are the kinds of people who would never dare invest in VR.

Toyota Selects Nvidia, Intel Feels Heat

According to Egil Juliussen, director research, Infotainment & ADAS at IHS Automotive, Toyota has become the fourth major car OEM publicly committed to Nvidia’s Drive PX for their highly automated vehicle. The other three OEMs are Audi, Daimler, and VW Group. In addition to those OEMs — which include the world’s two biggest carmakers Toyota and VW, Juliussen added that Nvidia also previously picked up smaller OEMs including Volvo, Tesla and Nio (formerly known as NextEV). Since tier ones such as Bosch and ZF have also embraced Nvidia’s hardware platform, Juliussen believes that this “will probably help Nvidia getting other OEMs on board.” .... Asked why Nvidia appears to be gaining partners, many industry analysts pointed out that OEMs and developers are a little turned off by Mobileye/Intel’s closed approach to the automated vehicle platform. The Linley Group’s Demler said, “We’re seeing tier ones and carmakers signing up to use Drive PX because it gives them a better development platform than Mobileye’s closed system.” Noting that Intel’s Mobileye acquisition will take months to close, Demler said, “There currently is no competitor that can offer the same platform for development, training, and inference.” He added, “It’s doubtful Mobileye-Intel will open up their platform to match CUDA-DNN, Drive PX, etc.” Asked about the Intel/Mobileye/BMW platform, Magney said that its approach is similar to Nvidia’s, but the architectures are different. He said, “Led by the processor companies, we are seeing a race to provide as much of the AV [automated vehicle] stack as possible. Rather than a node here or there, the big chip companies are all trying to assemble an eco-system of hardware, software and development tools. They are all offering up "platforms" with the hardware and software components, plus the development tools and simulations to build up the solutions.” Nvidia’s lead in picking up more design wins can be also explained by the fact that it is seen as “the market leader in democratizing AI,” Magney observed. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?_mc=RSS_EET_EDT&doc_id=1331727&page_number=1 [spoiler] http://m.eet.com/content/images/edn/Nvidia%20vs%20Intel%20may%202017_1494471980.png [/spoiler]