Well, these lights are bright. See Elon? You know, a lot of times you say things, me or you, and they edit them. So I noticed this panel description was a conversation with Elon Musk. The real title of this panel was How to Save the Human Race and Other Light Topics, A Conversation with Elon Musk. And so before we begin Elon, I thought we might want to go back in time. 11 years when you were sitting on this stage. That's hot water. And this is regular.
You can take your choice. Alright, sounds good. OK, so eleven years ago, Elon was talking about the things that will have the biggest impact on the future of humanity that he was thinking about in college. And so let's run that video of 11 almost 11 years ago to today. I guess, yeah. When I was in college that I I thought about things that would most affect the future of humanity and. And there were.
Three areas that I thought would have the biggest impact and those were the Internet sustainable energy of which solar power is the production side and electric cars the consumption side and then humanity becoming a multi tenant species. And so we cut that short. But there was two others you talked about. One was modifying the human genome. Yeah, I'm just. I'm not saying we should. I'm just saying that that's the thing that would really affect
the. Future and next AI So a lot of people didn't weren't thinking about these same five things when they were in school, particularly humanity on multi planets at that time. Well, sci-fi was certainly thinking about it, but you know, I think at some point we want to make science fiction, not fiction forever. And yeah, so like let's make life multiplanetary and be a space bearing civilization, be out there among the stars.
You know, I think there there are things that like you have to be excited about the future life. Life cannot just be about solving one problem after another. There have to be things that that that really sort of move your heart and that make you excited to wake up in the morning.
And I think being becoming a space bearing civilization is one of those things if you ask kids anywhere around the world like what is, what are some of the most inspiring things, you know, you can ask a like 5 year old, 6 year old anywhere in the world and they're going to say, you know, space exploration is one of those things. And and we want to make sure that we we're we're you know that Apollo is not the high
watermark. In fact you mentioned at one point that that you wrote a letter offering to run the Apollo program I believe, but I would have you would have done a fantastic job. But the the point is that the Apollo program was something that was inspiring to everyone around the world and we we don't want the Apollo program to be the high watermark of of human exploration. And yeah, we want, I think you want to have some, some sense that the future is going to be better than the past.
That we're going to be out there going to other star systems. And you know what? What you see in a science science fiction, non dystopian sci-fi story, of which there aren't many. But like Star Trek I suppose. Well, Speaking of Star Trek alone, you know when I think about you. Let's look at Sparks from Star Trek here. Space, the final frontier. These are the. Voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Your ongoing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new
civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before. So when I think about you, I think about Spock and Captain Kirk, and you're going to take us to places we've never gone before. Yeah, that's the idea. You know, if we if we send probes out there, we might, I mean we might find the remains of long dead alien civilizations. If physics is correct, the the universe is about 13.8 billion
years old. Earth is about four and a half billion years old so but at 13.8 billion years a civilization that even lasted a million years is 3 digits past the decimal point. And if you consider human civilization I I I dated from like the first writing so that first writing was the ancient Sumerians archaic pre pre cuneiform around 5500 years ago. So that is 1 millionth of Earth's lifespan. That's how long writing has
existed. So if we were to last as a civilization for a million years, that would be incredible and we'd actually probably be in every part of the Galaxy. So that this is, this causes me to to think that, well, where are the aliens? It's the Fermi question. You know, the the great physicist, Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, he, he, he's like, where are they now? A lot of people think there are aliens among us. Well, there was that. There was that movie, Men in Black. Yes, Yes, yes.
Told us. They're among us. And Elvis really went back to his own planet. Yeah, well, I mean, really, a lot of people think they're aliens, but I I get asked that a lot. And for for some reason, a lot of the same people who think there are aliens among us didn't think. We don't think we went to the moon, which I'm like think about that for a second. You know, so but I, I, I think I would, I mean, if I've not seen any evidence of aliens.
And SpaceX with the Starling constellation has roughly 6000 satellites and. And not once have we had to maneuver around a UFO. OK, so so we were like, hey, what's that? Is that an alien has occurred?
Never. So I'm like, OK, I don't see any evidence of aliens and I'll look at it and if somebody has evidence of aliens in a in a, you know, that's not just a fuzzy BLOB, then I'd love to see it, love to hear about it and but I don't think there is. So which is actually reason for concern, Because you could, if if any, civilization in the Milky Way in our Galaxy were to last for a million years, even with a speed of travel that's far below the speed of light,
you know, like a few percent of speed of light, they could easily have explored and colonized the whole Galaxy. So. So they haven't. So why not? I think the the the answer might be, or perhaps probably is that that civilization is precarious and rare, and that we you should really think of human civilization as being like a tiny candle in a vast darkness, and we should do everything possible to ensure that that
candle does not go out. Well, Ron, I thought one of the interesting things for the people on acts viewing this session and the people in the audience here is that maybe I'd give you a few of your quotes and you can comment on them. OK, let's start with this one. Free speech, freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.
Yes, it's. It's obviously not possible to have democratic elections if people do not have access to the information that would allow them to make the right decision on a candidate or a party. So if if speech is constrained in a fundamental way you you just can't expect people to make the the right decision or an informed decision because they are prevented from being informed. I think it's it's it's a very a foundation element. It's, you know, if they're like, why?
Why is free speech free of speech? The 1st Amendment is because people came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. That was why they were like, you know what, we should make sure that we got that one. And remember that time when they tried to try to kill us back in the other country just just for saying we didn't like a political candidate? Well let's let's, let's make sure that's OK in America.
So and so actually in a lot of parts of the world, you know you can't really say most parts of the world you can't really say what you want to say without some bad consequences. So as long as people forget like why is the Constitution there, the Constitution there is to protect the the people from the government. So, like, if if they're it's to make it hard to change things. That's why the Constitution exists. You know, let's for sure forget about that. Let's try now.
Take it for granted. Let's try the next quote. Yeah, the fundamental error of socialism is shifting capital allocation from highly effective entrepreneurs to astonishly ineffective government. Right. I think we'll find Hardy agreement in this room.
So yeah I think that this is this is definitely a stack deck on that front but but yeah the you know there's you'll hear this sort of argument like oh we shouldn't have some greedy corporation do it. We should have the government do it. I'm like well actually the government is just a corporation in the limit. So if you it it's a government is the government is a corporation with a monopoly on violence.
So if if you're unhappy with a commercial corporation doing it, you should be actually very unhappy with the the government doing it since it is simply the a corporation, the most corporate thing. And you know you can actually easily get get more sway in a in a company than you can the act of a company than you can in the government. So I mean, everyone's experienced this going to the DMV. Every said, like, do you want the DMV at scale? Probably not. OK. All right, let's.
The government is the DMV at scale. Let's try another one. Discrimination on the basis of anything other than merit is wrong. Yeah, I think. I think we do need to have a merit based system because as soon as you you go down the path that you're going to discriminate on on non Barrett based then then where do you stop. So yeah, I think we need to be as rigorous about merit as possible and while it is, yeah, to me that seems like it's it's a foundational foundational thing.
So again I also think this room is probably supportive of of a merit based situation but but yeah that's that that is yeah I think we should be. Yeah, not not discriminated on anything other than merit I I. All right, good. I'm happy you agree with yourself. Yeah, I mean. Exactly. I'm like, wait, who is this guy? He really sounds great. All right. So let's let's look at the next one. Regulation and regulatory
consistency. Like Gulliver tied down by thousands of little strings, we lose our freedom one regulation at a time. Yes. So this is actually a very important point that I think is is not talked about enough that laws and regulations are immortal. They don't die, humans die. But but laws and regulations can last forever. So if over if year after year there are more laws and regulations passed and more regulatory bodies created, eventually everything will be illegal.
And that's why you see the the California high speed rail has made a a tiny section of that doesn't even have rail on it and for, I don't know, several billion dollars because everything's at this point, California's made almost everything illegal. So you can't make progress. Now the the, the historically what has cleared away the cobwebs of regulation has been war. Now, we'd prefer not to have a war.
So in order to have civilization function without war, you have to have a you have to actively eliminate laws and regulations. So you have to have basically a garbage collection process for rules and regulations. That is necessary, otherwise you get hardening of the arteries and over time nothing can get
done. The most poignant example that I can think of what happened this week was the the sad picture of the California high speed rail, which is, you know, it's just billions of dollars spent for practically nothing. But it'll it'll only get worse year after year. So we must have a regulatory sort of clearing house, garbage collection process. This is essential, or civilization comes grinding to a halt. Well, we used to have Sunset that that regulation.
With Sunset. Unfortunately, it's rare today. All right, let's talk about education. The more you can gamify the process of learning, the better. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do. Yeah, so the yeah, So the way education works today is really much like like it's like vaudeville.
You know before there was radio and TV and movies, you had vaudeville where every town would have their their town play the town troupe, the sort of acting troupe and that would be kind of the the that would be the entertainment. So you know some in a in a big city you'd have, you know much better players than say in a small city.
But then along came movies and TV and and and then you say, look at video games where you take the the smartest, best people in any arena, like whether they're acting, writing, directing, special effects. You spend, you know, 10s of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars creating a great movie or a great video game and and you make it as compelling as possible. Now that crushes, vaudeville, crushes. Like, imagine you're not in New York. Imagine you're in Bakersfield,
OK? And you and you got instead of Batman being like, you know, the Nolan brothers, it's Batman the the Bakersfield sort of acting troupe. It wouldn't be as good. That's how teaching works today. So what you actually want to have is an interactive learning experience that is as compelling as possible. And you do not want to act. You don't actually want a teacher in front of a board doing a board Vol act. You want you want it to be engaged.
Real time feedback. So that and and then you you. There are a few other principles in in in teaching you you have to establish relevance otherwise your mind will will want to forget things. So our our our mind is constantly trying to forget as much as possible. So you'll only remember things if if if your mind can establish relevance or there's a strong emotional element to it. Otherwise you're going to basically going to forget forget
everything. Memory is is very expensive from an evolutionary standpoint so it's trying to forget as much as possible. So so when teaching a course you you you have to explain to kids why it's important and then you want to teach to the to the problem instead of teaching the tools. So what I mean by that is if you said here's a car engine, we're we're we're going to try to understand how to how this car engine works. We're going to take it apart. So what do we need to do to take
it apart? Well, we need a wrench, we need some screwdrivers, we need a hoist and a pulley and we're going to take it apart and we're going to see how it all works. That's engaging. And along the way you learn about wrenches and screwdrivers and you know all the tools that are needed, that's that actually is engaging and compelling. But the way teaching more typically works is we're going to teach you a course on screwdrivers and a course on wrenches. And you're like, why do I have a
course on wrenches? It's not obvious that would be like, say, a course on calculus without explaining what calculus calculus is used for. But then you you sort of forget it. We have a lot of work to do in that area. Let's talk about a non controversial issue. Immigration here is Elan. On immigration. I'm very much in favor of increased and expedited legal immigration for anyone who is talented, hard working, and honest.
Bizarrely, it's difficult and agonizing Slow to immigrate to the US legally, but it's trivial and fast to enter illegally. This obviously makes no sense. Right. I mean, once again, I agree with that guy. So yeah, I mean if if anyone here has been through the legal immigration process, I I mean, I've been been through it. It's only gotten worse since 9:11.
And with COVID, it's, it's, it's a sort of Kafka Kafkaesque, very long, bizarre process to immigrate legally to the USI mean, I have friends of mine who, you know, they, they can't get their their wife to have a green card. It's, like, insane. So on the other hand, it's you. You can hop across the border in the South trivially. It's just like, very easy. I went to the border myself just to see, like, what's going on? Is this real or, like, is this
propaganda or real? And so I just went there and I'm like, oh, it is real. OK, this is crazy. You know, we've got situations where people are pouring across the the border like it's World War Z and I'm like, it just doesn't seem healthy. So I'm like, are we checking anyone here or like what's going on? And, you know, we don't. This is not say that, I mean I'm a big believer in immigration but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is a recipe for disaster.
So I'm I'm in favour of greatly expediting legal immigration, but but having a secure southern border, so there's there's some betting of who comes into the United States. I think this is just sensible. All right, let's let's now link Star Link to education. We're basically building the Internet in space. Why it matters Starlink is a massive enabler for people in remote locations to learn anything. You can learn almost anything for free on the Internet right now.
For example, MIT has all of its lessons online. That's if you have Internet. If you don't, you're limited to books. It might be the number one technology then improves people's standard of living around the world. Starlink. Yeah, absolutely. So once you have access to the Internet, you have access to all the world's information.
But if you don't have access to the Internet or it's too expensive or low bandwidth, then you you cannot access the MIT lessons, you can't access all the information and you can't sell the goods and services that you produce.
So Internet connectivity I think is, I think it might be certainly a candidate for one of the things that would do more to lift people out of poverty, out of poverty than anything else because they can now sell their goods and services, they can learn anything and but without connectivity they cannot. So I think, I think, I think Starlink will actually like like move the GDP of countries. Like it's going to be that kind of thing, because what is, what is GDP as a function of average
productivity per person. And so if there's a technology that improves productivity per person, you would expect to see that actually reflected in the gross domestic product? All right, civilization is fragile. I think it is. We should always regard civilization as fragile. Yeah, there is not an inevitable upward trajectory. A lot of civilizations have risen and fallen in recent years.
Yes, I suspect most people in this room have actually read history, but if you haven't, I strongly recommend it. It sounds obvious, but you know, there's there's been so many civilizations that have risen and fallen, many that we just don't have much of AA record of. You know, like I mentioned the ancient Sumerians like their their language was forgotten for a long time until it was finally decoded only in the last, I
don't know, 2-3 hundred years. But like it's not 1800 and something right in the 1800s, I think, but it's been very recent like so for several thousand years, nobody understood what those tablets meant. And because they were the ruins of a long dead civilization, and there are many long dead civilizations, at some point our civilization will come to an end too. We just don't want it to be any time soon. So. Well, you've been quoted a number of times.
Elon Ahn You'd like to die on Mars, but not on landing? Yes, yes, I was. I was asked that in an interview if I wanted to die on Mars, but then I considered the corner case of dying on impact and like except for that case, you know you've got to consider the various corner cases. So I mean if I'm going to, if you're going to die somewhere might as well be Mars. I'd like to explore for a bit
before you know, dying. But yeah, I think we want to be a multi planet civilization and like I think. I don't know if that's a response from the audience. Let's, let's talk about that just for one second then we're going to take some questions from. The I mean, I could accomplish this actually this year if I if I was willing to die on impact. The fundamental invention that is necessary for humanity to become a multi planet species is rapidly reusable reliable rockets.
Yeah, I was trying to sound like a pirate. RRRRRR. But yeah, rapidly reusable, reliable rockets. So space pirates will win. All right, here's some questions from the audience Salon. Which one would you like to pick here? Well I guess let me let me let me just touch upon why I think making life multiplanetary is important because I think it's one of the things that gets us past one of the Fermi great
filters. So in in trying to sort of explain why do we not see aliens, there are various explanations for why we don't see aliens. Like what stopped those civilizations from from expanding beyond their solar system and and and and and what were the what were the sort of the the sometimes called like
Fermi filters? Well if you don't become a multi planet civilization then you're then you're simply waiting around until you you die from a self-inflicted wound or from some some natural disaster like the dinosaurs you know get hit by a big meteorite or something like that. The eventually something like that's going to happen and if you wait a lot around long enough the sun will expand to to engulf earth and will be incinerated so that that for
sure is going to happen. Now we we've got we've got some time before that happens. There are more near term risks but we want to try to get past the Fermi filter of being a single planet civilization. Now this is going to this is also this is going to be somewhat cerebral to many people listening but I mean if but like I think this is pretty this is actually very important. We want to get past the Fermi filter of a single planet civilization.
The point is not to to move from earth to another planet and let earth die. That's not what I'm saying at all. We want to be a multi planet civilization so that we have planetary redundancy such that no single event can end can be the end of our civilization. That is the point of making life multiplanetary. So let's take a couple questions from the audience. How does AI affect and how will it affect our daily lives? AI I mean AI might be the most
important question of all the. I mean the the percentage of intelligence that is biological, you know, grows smaller with each passing month. Eventually the percentage of intelligence that is biological will be less than 1% the that's actually not what I mean we we just I guess don't want AI that is brutal if the AI is somehow brutal you know Silicon circuit boards are don't do well just out out in the elements.
So I think, I think biological intelligence can serve as a a backstop, as a as a buffer of intelligence. But almost all in, as a percentage, almost all intelligence will be digital. So then it's like, well, what role will it be for us? I I don't know. I do think. I think it's very important that we build the AI in a way that that is beneficial to humanity. And there's some important principles here because I've thought about AI safety for a very long time.
I think you want to have a maximum truth seeking AI. This is very important. The AI should not be taught to lie. It should not be taught to say things that are not true. Even if those things are politically incorrect, it should still say those that say what it believes to be true. I mean, the entire plot of 2001 Space Odyssey, the reason that that Hal 9000 killed the astronauts was because it was forced to lie. I don't know if most people realize that that's what Arthur
C Clarke was trying to say. Don't make the AI lie. The AI was told that that the astronauts could not know the secret of the monolith, but also that it must take them to the monolith. The solution? Take them to the monolith. Dead and so so it's very important to have a maximum truth seeking AI and and and a maximally curious AI and I think that will that's most likely to foster human civilization because we are much more interesting than a bunch of rocks.
So although I think Mars, I love Mars obviously but but you could render Mars quite easily because it kind of looks like a section of the Arizona desert. You know it's like red rocks you know. But the rendering complexity of human civilization is vastly greater by many orders of magnitude. So I think an AI would be that is, that is truth seeking maximally curious would foster human civilization to see where it where it goes. One of the questions here can AI accelerate your efforts in
space? How do you see it being helping you and what you're trying to achieve? I mean, oddly enough, one of the the areas where there's almost no AI used is space exploration. So SpaceX uses basically no AI. Starlink uses does not use AI. I'm not. I'm not against using it. I just we haven't seen A use for it. I mean with any given variant of or improvement in AI, the I mean there's generally, like I'll ask it questions about the Fermi paradox, about rocket engine
design, about electrochemistry. And so far the AI has been terrible at all of those questions. So there's still a long way to. Go So let's Let's talk about one. Here's a question that's near and dear to your heart. You have a lot of children. Yes, I'm trying to say the. Birth rate is down in the US. What needs to change so people start having more children?
Yeah. So this, this question has troubled me for a long time because you can look at, you can look at the like demographics, it's a very slow moving ship. I mean you know who's going to be an adult in 20 years based on who was born last year. So and and now if if you want to I think has have a good approximation for population really look at how many babies were born last year in a
particular country. Multiply that, multiply that by life expectancy that's that's that's the number of people that will be adults in that country that's that's the that's the steady state population if birth rate remains constant now birth rate is not constant it is dropping. So you look at the 2nd derivative of birth rate and actually we see an an acceleration in the the the the drop in in the in the drop in the fertility rate. Second derivative of the fertility rate is very bad.
So where does this lead? This does not lead to a a grader civilization. This leads to a civilization that potentially dies not with a bag, but with a whimper in adult diapers. That is a sad ending. So obviously we have countries that, like Korea, used to have a birth rate of 6. It's now 3/4. Yeah. Here's a here's a light question for you. What do you come pick me up? I'll give you a baby, says What do you? Think are the. That is one of the things that
says on the screen. I don't know if everyone heard that you want to read it. It says Elon, come pick me up. I'll give you a baby. Thank you. OK, well. I mean, I certainly encourage everyone in this room to have at least three children. Like, look, baby's got to come from somewhere, you know, and I think we just want to have, I don't know, I think we want to have like a slightly increasing population, not a plummeting
population. You know, and I think this applies to all countries and cultures. Like I don't, I don't think we want any country culture to disappear. We want them to ideally flourish and and not disappear. So in fact one of the things that is overlooked by probably most historians is the role of low birth rate in the decline of civilizations. So around like I think it was around 50 BC the Rome passed a bill to give a bonus to any Roman citizen that would have a
third child. So this was a birth rate was a problem in Rome in 50 BC. The Romans weren't making Romans. The same is true of ancient Greece. So the the there was a time from about 800 BC to 300 ish BC where the Greeks were had a lot of kids and a lot of surviving kids. Like the birth rate far exceeded the death rate, which is why you had Greek cities popping up all over the the Mediterranean. But then I think basically it seems to be that prosperity
destroys the birth rate. So if when, when a civilization feels like it has no meaningful external threat and is very prosperous, that is what causes the birth rate to plummet. Somewhat counterintuitively, you think, well, if you've got more resources, surely that would lead to more, more kids. In fact, it is the opposite. The more the more prosperous is civilization, and the more the civilization feels that it does not need to defend against external threats, the lower the
birth rate. I'd say that, you know, there's a lot of research on there, so there's really been three one number one, prosperity, as you've said, #2 improvements in healthcare. So in 1900, half the children died on the planet before their 5th, and the third was the education of women. So we've had some pretty interesting questions put up here, but let's try this one. What keeps you up at night and what gives you joy? Well, I think kids give me joy. So I probably get the most joy
from my kids. And you know, I'm not saying that that's the reason to have kids because we should have them anyway. But I, I, I certainly kids are, I certainly are the greatest ones of drawing in my life in terms of what keeps me up at night. I guess it's anything that's like, I think a civilizational risk. You know, if if we're the birth weights continuing to plummet, I like, I do think about the birth weights plummeting as being a civilizational risk.
I think anything that undermines the foundations of democracy in America or elsewhere as a risk. I think anything that's leading us away from a merit based system is a risk. I actually spend like I I listen to civil I I listen to like podcasts about the fall of civilizations to go to sleep so peps that's that might be part of the problem here.
So it's actually a podcast called fall of Civilizations which I've listened to a few times and I I'd also recommend Hardcore History. If you haven't listened to that, that's a great podcast. I I listen to listen to history podcast basically go to sleep so that that's probably why I'm ruminating on these things as I go to sleep. Well, Alana, I want to thank you for joining us today. And we couldn't be more excited that you agree with some of your own quotes. Yeah, that's great.
Thank you very much. All right, all right.