What is Life For Elon Musk?

What is life for ella Mosque?

I find this as I get older, I find that question to be maybe more and more confusing or troubling or uncertain, I think, particularly when you see the advancement of something like video games. You know, like say forty years ago you had video games. The most advanced video game would be like like Pong, where you had like two rectangles and a dot and you're like batting it back and forth.

I played it.

Oh yeah, like me too, exactly. I played exactly sort of dates you a little bit, but yeah, we both played the same game, and that was like, wow, that was a pretty fun game at the time.

But now you can.

See a video game that's photo realistic, almost photo realistic, and millions of people playing simultaneously, and and you see where things going with virtual reality and augmented reality. And if you extrapolate that out into the future with any rate of progress at all, like even zero point one percent or something like that a year, then eventually those games will be indistinguishable from reality. That will be so realistic you will not be able to tell the difference

Interesting.

Interesting, I mean it could.

Be anything is possible in life.

I mean there's like I mean, yeah, particularly like things seem to be accelerating to some judge to something.

Isn't it.

I mean, if we look at our life, a seem in the past one hundred year, li've been excavating quite fast.

Yeah, in the past twenty.

It's getting faster, faster and faster.

Is it more slow? So my question is really how life will be.

In air twenty thirty fifty y if from now, our education, our transport, how'd you see it?

Well?

I think this is one of those things that's quite difficult to predict when you think of say, I mean the first controlled powered flight was nineteen oh three with the Right brothers, and then sixty six years later we put the first people on the moon.

I mean that if you'd ask people, say, in nineteen.

Hundred, what are the odds of you know, man lanning on the moon, they would have said, that's ridiculous. And if you try to talk to them about the Internet, they would not even know what the heck you even what are you talking about, Like this sounds so crazy, but today with one hundred dollars device, you can.

Video conference with.

Anyone in the world on the other side of the world, and if you have a Wi Fi connection.

You know, just you.

It's basically free, free to have an instant visual communication with anyone or even with millions of people.

You know.

With social media you can communicate to millions of people simultaneously.

So and you can google something and ask any question.

It's like an article of wisdom that you can ask almost for any question, again an instant response. It would have been incredibly difficult to predict these things in the past, even the relatively recent past. So I think the one thing that we can be quite certain of is that any predictions we make today for the for what the future will be like in fifty years will be wrong,

Mars and maybe beyond Mars the moons of Jupiter. I hope we're.

Traveling frequently throughout the solar system, perhaps preparing for missions to nearby star systems. I think all of this is possible within fifty years, and I think that'd be very exciting to do that, and I think we'll see autonomy and artificial intelligence advanced tremendously. That's actually quite near term.

My guess is in probably.

Ten years, it will be very unusual for cars to be built that are not fully autonomous.

Ten years.

Yeah, I think almost all cars built will be capable of full autonomy in about ten years.

As it is.

The Tesla cars that are made today have the sensor system necessary for full autonomy, and we think probably enough compute power to be safer than a person. So it's mostly just a question of developing the software and uploading the software, and if it turns out that the compute power, that more compute power.

Is needed, we can easily upgrade the computer.

And so that's all Tesla's built since October of last year, and other manufacturers will follow and do the same thing. So getting in a car will be like getting in an elevator. You just tell it where you want to go and it takes you there with extreme levels of safety, and that'll be normal. That'll just be normal for elevators. There used to be elevator operators. You get in and be guy moving a lever. Now you just get in,

That is much much smarter than the smartest human on earth. This, I think is a dangerous situation.

Why it is dangerous? I mean there's two view.

One view is artificial intelligent tool health humanity. There's another school of think of thought, is artificial intelligent.

Is a threat to humanity? Why is it?

Well? I think it's both.

You know, It's like one way to think of it is imagine we're going to be visited. Imagine you're very confident that we were going to be visited by super intelligent aliens in let's say ten years or twenty years at the most, super intelligence.

So you think within twenty years, yes, I have alien in Earth.

Well, digital superintelligence will be like an alien, will be like a aien.

Yeah.

But my question is.

Do you think there is other intelligent life outside there?

It seems probable, But I think this is one of the great questions in physics and.

Philosophy is where are the aliens? Maybe they're among us. I don't know. Some people think I'm an alien.

Not true, not true, but maybe we are.

Maybe we are alien.

And I mean, if you look at this part of the world, they believe that human being are not from Earth. They came from somewhere else. Even maybe an Adam came from somewhere else to Earth. So in a way, human being alien to this land. Do you think we'll make contact with alien within the next fifty years.

Well, that's a really tough one to say.

I mean, if there are.

Super intelligent aliens out there, they're probably already observing us. That would seem quite likely, and we just are not spot enough to realize it.

But I can do some.

Back the Ovelock calculations, and any advanced aliens havealization that was at all interested in populating the galaxy, even without.

Without exceeding the speed of light.

Even if you're only moving at say ten or twenty percent of the speed of light.

You could populate the entire galaxy. And let's say ten.

Million years, maybe twenty million years max. This is nothing, you know, in the grand scheme of things.

Once you said, do you want to die in Mars?

Why?

I don't reclear. I don't want to die on Mars. It's like if I mean, we're all going to die someday, and if you're going to pick someplace to die, then why not Mars? You know, if if we're born on Earth, why not die on Mars. It seems like maybe it'd be quite exciting. But so I think given the choice of dying on Earth or dying on Mars, I'd say, yeah, sure, I'll die on Mars. But it's not some kind of Mars deathwash and and and if I do die on Mars, I just don't want it to be on impact.

Got it, Let's come back to Earth. Actually, you tweeted that you are building a tunnel under Washington, d C.

Why what is it?

Well, it's a secret plot just between us. How but you have new Yeah exactly, please keep that secret. The well I think this is going to sound a little I mean, it seems like somewhat trivial or or silly, but I've been saying this for many years now. But I think that the solution to urban congestion is a network of tunnels under cities. And you can when I I don't mean a two D plane of tunnels, I mean tunnels that go many levels deep, so you can always go deeper than you can go up, like the

At low cost and with high safety.

So if tunneling technology can be improved to the point where you can build tunnels fast, cheap and safe, then that would completely get rid of any traffic situations in cities. And so I think that's why I think it's an

Let's come back to Uee and Dubai.

The first time I met you, it was fourth of June twenty fifteen at your office in Space six, and I ask you would you have a presence a new ee A new answer was I'm busy with China, maybe not in the near future. And almost a year and a half later we are here. Same time goes quite fast.

Now, well, I think actually things are going recently well in China. So we have some initial challenges figuring out charging and service infrastructure and various other things, but now it's actually going fairly well, and so the timing seemed to be good to really make a significant debut in this region starting in Dubai.

A new opinion, what is then you would disturbing thing that will come technology next?

What's Dixson technology?

What's next in technology.

That will disturb the way we live, the way we think, the way we do business.

Well, the most near term impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars, like fully self driving cars. Like I said, that's going to be it's going to happen much faster than people realize, so and that it's going to be a great convenience to be an autonomous car. But there

Be to disrupt.

Employment, So that disruption I'm talking about will take place over about twenty years.

But still twenty years is a short period of time to.

Have I think something like twelve to fifteen percent of the workforce be unemployed.

Thank you.

This is the largest global government somewhat we have over one hundred and thirty nine government year. If you want to advance is government official tubiddy for the future? What is three things or three advice you'll give them?

Well, I think the first bit of advice would be to really pay close attention to the development of artificial intelligence.

I think this is we need.

To just be very careful in how we adopt artificial intelligence and to make sure that researchers don't get carried away, because sometimes what happens as a scientist can get so engrossed in their work they don't necessarily realize the ramifications of what they're doing. So I think it's important for public safety that we govern to keep a close eye on artificial intelligence and make sure that it does not represent a danger to the public.

Let's see. Secondly, I would.

Say we do need to think about transport in general, and there's the movement towards electric vehicles sustainable transport that I think that's going to be good for many reasons. But again not something that happens immediately. That'll happen slower than the self driving vehicles, So that's probably something that happens over thirty or forty years, the transition to electric vehicles. So thinking about that in context, the demand for electricity

And seem they have an easy job.

That's that's it, there's more, no more challenges for that.

No, Well, then I think maybe these these things do play into each other a little bit. But what to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge, and I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income. I don't think we're gonna have a choice basic income. Universal basic income, I think it's going to be necessary.

So to mean that unemployed people will.

Be paid across the lab Yeah, because there is no job machine robot is taking over.

There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. Okay, that's simply the I don't want to be clear that these these are not things that I think that I wish would happen. These are think simply things that I think probably will happen. And since if they if if my assessment is correct and they probably will happen, then we need to say what are we going to do about it? And I think some kind of a universal makes basic income is going to

It's going to be necessary.

The harder challenge, much harder challenge, is how do people then have meaning like a lot of people, they derive their meaning from their employment.

So if you.

Don't have if you're not needed, if there's not a need for your labor, how do you what's the meaning?

Do you? Do you have meaning? Do you feel useless?

These are much that's a much harder problem to deal with. And then how do we ensure that the future is going to be the future that we want that we still like.

Now?

I mean, I do think that there's a potential path here, which is and we're really getting into science fiction or create you know, sort of advanced science stuff, but having some sort of merger with biological intelligence and machine intelligence. To some degree, we are already a cybalk like uh, you think of like the digital tools that you have, your phone, your computer, the applications that you have, like the fact that, as as mentioned earlier, you can ask a question and instantly get an.

Answer from Google or you know, from other things.

And and so you already have a digital tertiary tertiary layer.

So over time I think we will probably see.

A closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. And it's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and your digital the digital extension of yourself, particularly output and output if anything is getting worse. You know, we used to have like keyboards that would use a lot. Now we do most of our input through our thumbs

If this is it, we got it.

Always you think out of the box.

Your idea is so huge, you want to go to space.

You decided to go to space.

You did it.

You decided that you want to You want to land your rocket back? You fail seven time, eight time, Yeah, and then landed.

What care account?

How do you come with this idea?

Actually, sometimes they're pushing the human limit. You are always pushing the human limit.

Why Well, I.

Mean, I think about what technology solution is necessary in order to achieve the particular goal, and then try to make as much progress in that direction as possible. So in the case of spaceflight, the critical breakthrough this necessary and spaceflight is rapid and complete reusability of rockets, just

Costs sixty million dollars roughly.

So a capital cost if it can be used once is sixty million dollars. But if the capital cost if it can be used a thousand times is sixty thousand dollars. So then if you can carry a lot of people per flight, then you can get the cost of spaceflight to be something not far from the cost of airflight.

So it's extremely fundamental.

Because Earth's gravity well is quite deep, Earth has a relatively fairly high gravity, the difficulty of making a rocket reusable is much greater than the difficulty of making aircraft reusable, and that's why fully reasonable rocket has never been developed thus far. But if you use the most advanced materials, most advanced design techniques, and you get everything just right, then I'm confident that.

You can do a fully reusable rocket.

Fortunately, if first gravity was even ten percent stronger, I would say it would be impossible.

You need a team around you to deliver a lot of idea.

How do you choose your team?

Me somewhat well.

I suppose honestly that it tends to be gut field more than anything else. So when I interview somebody, the mine of your questions is always the same. It's just I said, tell me the story of your life and.

The decisions that you made along the way and why you made them, and then.

And then, and also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them. And that that that question, I think is very important because the people that really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it, they know the little details, and the people that pretended to solve the problem, they can maybe go one level and then they get stuck.

So what was your biggest challenge in life?

The biggest challenge in life? Hm? Hm, no challenge, Well, no, there's a lot of them. I'm trying to stay which is the worst, I think, just thinking about how to spend time.

One of the biggest challenges, I think is making sure you have corrective feedback loop and then maintaining that corrective feedback loop over time, even when people want to tell you exactly what you want to hear.

Okay, that's very difficult. Yes, time is over.

I'll ask you just one last question if you allowed me, and the word government somewhat.

We have so many people from so many young people actually from across the globe.

If you have an advice to them, young people globally who want to be like El Mosque, what's your.

Advice of it.

I think that probably they shouldn't want to be you. I think it sounds better than it is. Yeah, it's not as much fun being me as you'd think. I don't know, you don't think so there's definitely it could be worse, for sure, but it's I I'm not sure

This is a very difficult trap to avoid.

And like I said, certainly one that I find myself in having problems with. But if you just take that approach of your always to some degree wrong, and your goal is to be less wrong and solicit critical feedback, particularly from friends, like friends, particularly friends. If somebody loves you, they want the best for you. They don't want to tell you the bad things. So you have to ask them, kay, you know, and said really, I really do want to know, and then they'll tell you.

Thank you very much. Uh, it's been