One-on-One with Elon Musk
Elon Musk
| SpaceX CEO/CTO, and Tesla Motors Chief Product Architect Elon Musk recently sat down and shared his visions of the future, from Mars colonization the the Hyperloop, to the threat of artificial intelligence. |
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From Tesla to SpaceX to artificial intelligence, Elon Musk recently sat down at MIT's AeroAstro Centenial Symposium and discussed these topics.
The session featuring entrepreneur, inventor, SpaceX CEO/CTO, and Tesla Motors Chief Product Architect Elon Musk. Musk shared his visions of aerospace’s future, and took questions from the audience.
"In terms of competitiveness, I think it mostly comes down to our pace of innovation—our pace of innovation is much, much faster than the big aerospace companies," states Musk on the company's competitive advantage. "That's generally true of innovation—when it's big companies versus small, the smaller [companies] are generally better at innovation ... Smaller companies would just die if they didn't try innovating."
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He states that humanity must decide whether it's going to be a single-planet species or a multi-planet species, Musk said. "Multi-planet will last a lot longer, propagate far longer" than would a humankind restricted to one planet. It's “planetary redundancy—backing up the biosphere. We've got all of our eggs in one basket here ... Some risks are extremely difficult to mitigate, and some we ultimately may not be able to mitigate ... The question is, should we [colonize Mars] now, or wait for some point in future. I think the wise moment is to do it now."
Musk is well known for promoting a worldwide goal of creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. A "mission" to Mars—for learning about the planet, getting photos, and so on—is "not the thing that fundamentally changes the future of humanity," Musk said. Though there are plenty of problems to deal with on Earth, there ought to be "some small amount [of resources] given over to the establishment of a colony on Mars—less than 1 percent of our resources. It's not as important as, say, healthcare. But it’s more important than, say, cosmetics."
"With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out." |
"I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence," he says.
"I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out."
Humans have an "open window" for inter-planetary colonization for the first, and maybe the last, time in Earth's history. "We hope the window will be open forever, but it may also close. If you look at the history of technology, [such as in] ancient Egypt, they built incredible, giant pyramids, and then forgot how to build them ... There's clearly been a cycle with technology." Hopefully the current momentum of technology can continue upward indefinitely, Musk said, "but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there’s some bad thing that happens. For 1 percent of our resources, we can buy life insurance for life collectively. And I think that would be a good thing to do."
SOURCE MIT AeroAstro
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