Objectively, your opening statement is wrong. Plenty of people disputed the facts, found it controversial, and were offended by its message.

The statements in the memo, even when citing existing research, can hardly be called obvious or mundane. Acknowledged experts in the relevant fields dispute the finding, and argue interpretation. And bringing together subjective, and emotionally charged subjects such a business, gender, culture and bias are hardly benign - that's a high overlap with the list of causes for most conflicts.

That aside, my principle objection to the memo is it is completely missing a "so what" component. Let's assume the everything Damore says is objectively true (I don't agree with this, obviously), so what? He makes no argument that Google, or society, or the code that gets written by software engineers will in any way be objectively better. Whether that is measured by (subjective criteria anyway) the quality of the code, the business performance that results, the number of people killed or injured by faulty code, etc. he's silent on the subject. About all we can take away from the memo is that he, subjectively, thinks Google could be a better place for him to work at, if Google followed his suggestions. Since he no longer works at Google, the point is moot.

As a final point. It's been noted that Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, despite having female engineers making up only ~20-30% of their workforce are anyway above the industry average. And look, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are objectively out-performing the majority of their peers across most business metrics and most "nice places to work" metrics. So following Damore's suggestion would likely decrease the quality of the workplace environment for the majority of people at Google, risk reducing the quality of the business output of Google, and further exacerbate gender and equality issues in businesses across Silicon Valley.

It's becoming increasingly clear that no human can possibly have a functional grasp of all the knowledge required to make accurate diagnosis across all possible conditions. In the current model patients hope that they have something simple or obvious, and if not that their doctor can send them to the correct expert. This has far too many false positives and false negatives built in.

AI systems able to access comprehensive libraries of information are better at this type of work. Sure, I'd want an expert who can tailor search terms, accurately describe symptoms in a consistent manner, but for a number of years now I've been cheering every AI advance in clinical diagnosis. Can't come soon enough.

Yes, I read the article, it told me is that he doesn't know how he can get 100 tonnes down onto Mars but he's thinking that maybe he could get 100 tonnes down onto Ceres or Titan etc.

If radiation isn't a problem for Mars it's not a problem for any of the other choices, surely?

I also understand it's an "increased risk of cancer" thing, not a face-melting thing? Surviving long enough to die of cancer is going to be enough of a problem that the reduced lief expectancy is a side issue.

Not sure if you're joking.

18 attempts to land on Mars, 8 successes. Not the kind of odds that make me think it's easy.

The largest payload so far delivered, ~500kg. It hit the ground at 50+ kph.
You don't get many humans with useful suppliers into 500kg and they won't be walking away after a 50+ kph crash into the ground.

No one knows how to land a human onto Mars and there have been no useful tests of any ideas about how to do it.

Landing on Mars is hard.

Mars is at the bottom of a fairly deep gravity well and has a very thin atmosphere. This makes landing on Mars is challenging. The atmosphere is thick enough to cause problems but not thick enough for useful aerobreaking. Getting useful loads down to the ground is a a technically challenging problem, and getting back into orbit is just difficult enough to be annoyingly expensive.

The Moon, Ceres, Titan, Callisto, all are easier to land and take-off from than Mars, and since you can land and take-off with much less fuel there's a lot more useful payload capacity to work with. I guess that if you can get a human live to Mars, Titan and Callisto are equally possible.

I'm not convinced by Venus though, unless someone really thinks cloud-cities can be made to work.

This quickly becomes a jurisdiction specific discussion. "Independent Financial Advisers" in some jurisdictions are required to advise against the "whole of market", meaning that index trackers will be included in the advice.

Further, "fixed-fee" advice is unlikely to be the target for initial "robo" advisers, it's the individuals getting "free" advice who will first experience this type of service. As a result I believe that the end result will be an improvement of the qualty of advice since the remaining "free" human advisers will need to at least better the advice offered by the robot to remain in business.

MER is associated with the product, not the advice that leads to the product.

If the advice is to take an index tracker then MER is anyway going to be low.

First of this looks more like a decision tree or "spreadsheet" analysis than actually automated or "AI" advice. However it's an interesting step.

Offering good advice is difficult, takes time and is always subjective. As a result the quality of "free" advice has to be suspect - it's provided by low skilled individuals with low levels of experience, to people with poor ability to assess the quality of the advice they receive.

Sure, it's unlikely that automated investment advice is going to outperform the market, but I'd expect it to quickly outperform the human advice offered by inexperienced or low quality advisers. Either that or "AI" advice will fail to gain market share for companies that offer it.

Net result: overall quality of advice is more likely to go up from this than down.

"...to three-letter agencies. If we allow them in, we also allow the 'baddies' in -- and the NSA has proven to be at least as bad as the terrorists and criminals they're ostensibly monitoring."

Can you draw me a ven diagram for three letter agencies, baddies, criminals and terrorists, I'm getting confused.

Must be be a millennium thing, I don't remember it being so difficult 15 years ago...

Sure, whether a car runs Google Android Auto or Mercedes Cockpit isn't going to make someone select an electric compact over a SUV. But within a class there isn't much left to choose between unless you're a brand enthusiast.

The differences between mid-size sedans from different marques are trivial, they all conform to the same safety standards, same gas mileage, same breaking and acceleration, same air bags and cruise control, same luggage space, same tow package. Maybe the number of cup holders is different, and for some people that would be a deal breaker, but otherwise, most people couldn't care.

Brand loyalty is more about familiarity and lack of transparency than selecting for features.

Consumers are programmed to pick up on the buzz words the dealers feed them, whether that's engine size or standard features. Soon enough dealers will use the platform as a component of their adversing and sales pitch.

When I get a hire car I don't care who made it, but if it doesn't have Bluetooth, that's a deal breaker.

Forget acceleration or top speed, neither of which mean anything for the journeys I make, when I buy my next car, the interface for the Sat-Nav and the media system will be the deciding factor.