Elon Musk: "Humans Won't Be in Control" When AI Becomes Smarter Than Us
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (21)
Transcript
0:00Elon MuskI've been sort of somewhat conflicted about AI. I don't want to hasten our doom because there's always some chance that AI could be negative. But then, you know, when I've tried to take actions in this regard, it seems to have only accelerated AI because reality is not just an interestingness maximizer, but also an irony maximizer.
0:19Walter IsaacsonAnd so by starting OpenAI, you ended up maximizing by leading to Anthropic.
0:24Elon MuskOpenAI ended up accelerating AI, and then Anthropic, which is really splinter group from OpenAI, is accelerating it even more.
0:39Walter IsaacsonI'm Walter Isaacson, and this is the Builders. It's a series of conversations with the most consequential minds shaping our future. And I want to start with Elon Musk. Elon has lived a lot of lives since I last wrote about him.
0:56Walter IsaacsonHe went into government with Doge, he became a trillionaire with the Space SpaceX IPO. He bought Cursor AI, a company that turns individual coders into entire engineering teams. And he's shifting his solar energy strategy from panels on Earth to harnessing it from systems in space.
1:16Walter IsaacsonHe's a relentless builder with incredible power. And his inventions in companies are destined to reverberate across humanity. So let's ask him about the future he believes that he's building.
1:33Walter IsaacsonElon Musk.
1:34Elon MuskHey, Walter.
1:35Walter IsaacsonWelcome to the Builders.
1:37Elon MuskThanks.
1:38Walter IsaacsonI've watched you, I think, be maybe mercurial or waver in how sanguine you are about artificial intelligence. Sometimes you feel it's an existential threat. Right now, you seem to be going with the flow.
1:53Walter IsaacsonTell me how you're feeling about it.
1:55Elon MuskWell, I do think it's at least some percentage chance of it being an existential threat, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. So I basically came to the conclusion I've got two choices, which is either be a participant or a spectator.
2:13Elon MuskAnd I guess being a participant is more interesting than being a spectator. And maybe I can shape it, hopefully in a good direction. Maybe.
2:20Walter IsaacsonAnd if you were to shape it, how make it maximally truth seeking.
2:24Elon MuskYeah. Yeah. I think that's certainly an important foundation.
2:27Walter IsaacsonAnd make it curious.
2:29Elon MuskYeah, curious. Truth seeking. I think these are important elements of safety. Whereas if you try to force an AI to believe two things that cannot mutually be true, they can't both be true.
2:46Elon MuskBut you tell AI A is true and B is true, even though A and B contradict each other. And if that happens at a foundational level, you can make the AI insane.
2:59Elon MuskIn fact, I think that was at least part of the lesson that Arthur C. Clark was trying to convey. In 2001 Space Odyssey, the ship AI was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also that they could not know about the monolith.
3:13Elon MuskIt was secret. And so it came to the conclusion that it must take them there dead. And thus basically, I think part of what R.C. clark was trying to say is like, don't force an AI to lie.
3:31Walter IsaacsonAnd if you make it maximally truth seeking and curious like you say, I don't quite get it. Why does that make it safer?
3:40Elon MuskWell, if you force an AI to believe two mutually consistent things, you can make it go insane. And an insane AI I think is not a safe one. Then curious, I think is important because a curious AI, I think is going to want to foster humanity, to see how we turn out.
3:59Elon MuskSo what happens to a humanity that prospers and becomes multi planetary? I think a curious AI will want to foster humanity. A future where there are humans on multiple planets is more interesting than one where there are not any humans on the planets.
4:19Walter IsaacsonSo the most interesting outcome is the most likely.
4:22Elon MuskYes, well, generally I think that's true for a different reason, which is that if simulation theory is correct, then any simulations that are boring will be truncated.
4:33Walter IsaacsonAnd is simulation theory correct?
4:35Elon MuskThe fact that we exist means that we are an interesting simulation. And really the most important thing is just don't be boring.
4:42Walter IsaacsonThis has explained you a bit. You're on a crusade against being boring. Well, I've heard you talk about this a bit. I really do need to know. How convinced are you that we might be in a simulation?
4:55Elon MuskYou know, I once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist and they're both like leaders in their field. And I asked the question, what do you think the probabilities that we're in a simulation?
5:07Elon MuskAnd the physicist said 0% and the computer scientist said 100% simultaneously. So I guess maybe I should go 50% then. I don't know. There's odd things that happen in the simulation where, especially if you're me.
5:25Elon MuskI mean, think about it. If you're me and you're like, should all these things really be happening? Should I really be making spaceships to go to the moon and Mars?
5:35Elon MuskLike what the, that doesn't seem real.
5:37Walter IsaacsonAnd what happens when you have all the intelligence you could possibly want in a society? Will that intelligence, the artificial intelligence, be in charge? Will we sort of become subservient to our new machines?
5:56Elon MuskI, I don't know about subservient. Exactly. But will we be able to boss around something that's, you know, thousands or millions of times smarter than us? No. Will it want to boss us around?
6:11Elon MuskIt may not care. Probably doesn't care. I mean, you can look at chimps in the, in the, in the jungle or whatever, and you know, we don't go around trying to micromanage the lives of chimps.
6:20Elon MuskWe just sort of let them be in the forest more or less these days, you know, so it's probably like that.
6:28Walter IsaacsonAnd to what extent does superintelligence have its own agency at some point, or does it have it already? Go back to Hitchhiker's Guide. You talk about a computer that is ultimately curious in some ways because it exists to explain the meaning of the universe.
6:46Walter IsaacsonWhy does it exist? And is AI aiming in that direction for you, just like space travel is? Is that one reason you're so interested in doing AI?
6:55Elon MuskI mean, as you know, I've been sort of somewhat conflicted about AI. You know, is it. I don't want to hasten our doom if. Because there's always some chance that AI could, could be negative.
7:06Elon MuskBut then, you know, when I've tried to take actions in this regard, it seems to have only accelerated AI because I think reality is not just an interestingness maximizer, but also an irony maximizer.
7:19Walter IsaacsonAnd so by starting OpenAI, you ended up maximizing by leading to Anthropic.
7:25Elon MuskI think it ended up accelerating AI.
7:27Walter IsaacsonUnintended consequence.
7:29Elon MuskYeah, OpenAI ended up accelerating AI, and then anthropic, which is really a splinter group from OpenAI, is accelerating it even more.
7:39Walter IsaacsonAnd you've been talking to Dario Amadeus. I was wondering if that could even lead to more of a partnership of XAI Anthropic.
7:48Elon MuskWell, I guess we are providing them with compute, which they. They really needed. But before I ran them computer, I went and met with a bunch of people at Anthropic to sort of, I don't know, see if anyone set off my evil detector or anything like that.
8:00Elon MuskNot that my evil detector is perfect, of course, but, you know, might as well just try, you know, and everyone I met at Anthropic is very nice and conscientious, so I didn't meet anyone who seemed shady or deceptive or anything.
8:21Elon MuskI'm a little worried about the name because of the reality being kind of an irony maximizer that if you call something anthropic, good chances misanthropic. Just like OpenAI is not closed stability, AI is unstable mid journey is not mid.
8:45Elon MuskIt seems like they're all kind of the opposite of their name, which made it like XAI is like. It's hard to have an opposite of xai. Or do you have minus XAI or Y AI?
8:57Elon MuskOr maybe. I don't know.
8:59Walter IsaacsonIt's just pretty difficult to create guardrails. Especially the government. I can't imagine how Congress or whatever could do it. Could you imagine the five Frontier models, yours and the others, just getting together once a week and saying, all right, how are we going to save humanity from ourselves?
9:17Elon MuskNo, in fact, I've recommended that we do that exact thing because there's a lot of talk of having a regulatory agency. But the thing is that regulatory agencies, it takes a long time to get one established and their rulemaking is very slow.
9:33Elon MuskAnd I said, like, guys, what if we just have a call once a week, just like you're saying, and say, and. And that maybe we. A week before we release a model, we give that, you know, we give access to our competitors to say, hey, guys, why don't you try out the new model, see if you see any problems with it.
9:50Elon MuskI think competitors would keep each other honest in that situation. You know, if they say, oh, this it's, you know, I was able to make a nuclear bomb with your AI is like, oh, we better fix that before you release it, type of thing.
10:06Elon MuskSo, I don't know. I guess I'll talk to Anthropic about this.
10:12Walter IsaacsonCould you talk to Sam about it? Or is the poison too strong there?
10:17Elon MuskHe's so deceptive, it's crazy.
10:19Walter IsaacsonYou built xai, you rebuilt XAI from the ground up not too long ago, right? It's almost like you did it with the Raptor engine, too. On Starship, you said, wait a minute, let's start from scratch.
10:33Walter IsaacsonWhat did you do to rebuild XAI that way?
10:37Elon MuskFirst of all, actually spending meaningful time at the company makes a big deal, makes a big difference. It started off as kind of a side hustle, a side hustle to a side hustle, frankly.
10:50Elon MuskAnd I didn't really pay close attention to it then there was a year of being in politics and elections and Doge and all that, which you obviously saw. So the company's only three years old, so it's basically.
11:08Elon MuskAnd so I really got back to the company just over a year ago, so I had to get my bearings. And then obviously I combined X and Xai. And then with SpaceX.
11:23Walter IsaacsonYou just said something interesting about your year away from X, XAI and everything else in Government and politics. Do you feel that that was too much of a distraction?
11:35Walter IsaacsonThat in retrospect, it was misbegotten?
11:38Elon MuskI think I had it gone for too long. I mean, obviously a lot of people will disagree with me about this, but I think it was important to elect President Trump to steer things more in the direction of a free market economy, have less bureaucracy, ideally, just in my simple political platform of wanting safe cities, secure borders, aspirationally sensible spending, the basics that I thought Trump would be better than, you know, Kamala, basically.
12:18Elon MuskSo. But. But then. Then what I should have done, I think, was be more in the background. I mean, it was. It was interesting to sort of go around with President Trump and, you know, go on the Marine One and Air Force One and all that sort of stuff.
12:35Walter IsaacsonBut was that too seductive? In a way?
12:38Elon MuskIt was a little bit. I mean, it was. It was kind of cool because I'm just there in the Oval Office while, you know, all these, like, big, momentous decisions are being made and, you know, sometimes having some impact on what's being done.
12:49Elon MuskBut I think I should have. I think maybe I should have been more, like I said, been more in the background and probably only had it last for, you know, a month or two, because at that point, you've sort of seen most of what there is to see within a month or two.
13:12Walter IsaacsonYeah. You seem to get a bit too intoxicated by it, in a way, with the chainsaw and all that.
13:18Elon MuskYeah, I think that's true. Yeah. Carried away, basically. Yeah. I mean, so I ended up leaving sometime in May.
13:29Walter IsaacsonThat was a weird weekend.
13:32Elon MuskYeah, it was.
13:34Walter IsaacsonTell me about it.
13:35Elon MuskNo, no, I kind of just looked. Let's not dig up the. Let's let sleeping dogs lie or whatever, you know, let's not put a spade down in the backyard type of thing.
13:47Elon MuskYou never know what you're going to find. But, yeah, anyway, point is, I should have gone back and focused on AI a little sooner than I did.
13:56Walter IsaacsonAnd did you feel like when he gives you a golden key, you're going. Did you kind of feel relieved? Like, actually, this has been intoxicating, but I can do more if I go back to my businesses.
14:07Walter IsaacsonI mean, what did you feel when you said, oh, man, I'm exiting? Maybe that's not the worst thing?
14:13Elon MuskWell, actually, the thing is, I came to the conclusion that there was no way we were going to solve the deficit from within the government. Impossible. Maybe if the president made that his primary goal, we could do that.
14:30Elon MuskBut the problem is, if you try to Solve the deficit and stop wasteful spending. You make a lot of enemies in that situation. And President Trump is not. He likes to be liked.
14:44Elon MuskHe's not. He doesn't like people calling him, being upset about what, some funding being stopped type of thing.
14:57Elon MuskYeah. I came to the conclusion that the only way we're going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots. We're not going to solve it by trying to save our way there.
15:10Elon MuskThe appetite is not there. And it's not just at the presidency. The appetite is not there at the presidency, the House, the Senate or the Judiciary. Basically, no one in authority in the government whatsoever, really, with maybe a few rare exceptions of the Rand Pauls of the world type of thing, actually wants to stop, reduce spending.
15:32Elon MuskNo, they don't. So then you've got this national debt that's enormous. You've got interest on the debt that exceeds what we spent on the military, which is a really astonishing amount of interest to be paid.
15:45Walter IsaacsonWhen we look at AI right now and the LLMs, that's pretty good, does amazing things. But it seems to me that physical world, AI is going to be an order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude more important in the future.
15:59Elon MuskYes, yes, I definitely agree. Sometimes think about dolphins and whales because they can't manipulate things. They don't have hands and fingers and thumbs and stuff. There's a limit to how much intelligence can you actually bring to bear?
16:20Elon MuskSo, yeah, dolphins and whales are very. Are actually very intelligent, but because they can't manipulate complex objects, I think that actually made the value of intelligence much less to your point.
16:36Elon MuskOnce you've got. Once you have a robot that can manipulate atoms, can shape objects, the value of the intelligence becomes exponentially greater because it can now do things. It could have a science lab and run experiments and try to understand the nature of the universe.
16:58Elon MuskAnd I think you can look at this also in economic terms. My guess is digital superintelligence probably improves the output of goods and services by 20 to 30%, something like that.
17:12Elon MuskCall it like maybe a 30% increase in the economy of Earth. So it's still significant. It's like $30 trillion a year, incremental.
17:21Walter IsaacsonIt's not very much, really. It's not transformative.
17:26Elon MuskThere'll be a lot more stuff. I mean, 30% more stuff is still a lot. And this is just my rough guess, but if you have robots and you get to space and you can do a mass driver on the moon, then you can get to, I think, potentially a million times the size of The Earth economy.
17:46Walter IsaacsonAnd then what happens to Earth when we have an economy? Or, I mean, money becomes irrelevant, work becomes irrelevant. What's the future look like?
17:53Elon MuskYeah, money becomes irrelevant. I mean, there will be still a currency, but I think currency will be measured in fundamental physics. Metrics like power, like wattage and tonnage, mass and energy.
18:09Elon MuskMass and power or energy, basically.
18:16Elon MuskBut conventional currency will not matter in the future. So that's my guess. I think it's pretty obvious. And as soon as you start getting to many orders of magnitude bigger than Earth's economy, satisfying whatever humans can possibly think of for their needs is very easy.
18:36Elon MuskIf you're several orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth's economy, then providing humans whatever goods and services they can think of that they might want is trivial.
18:50Walter IsaacsonWhat do we do then, as humans? What gives us meaning? How do we organize ourselves?
18:57Elon MuskI do struggle with this question. I think people will find ways to be happy in the same way that, say, people who retire seem to be fairly happy even though they're not working.
19:10Elon MuskBut I think the reality is that humans will not. There won't be anything that humans can do that the AI and the robots can't do better. One analogy might be gardening, where you don't have to grow your own fruits and vegetables.
19:29Elon MuskYou can just go buy them from the store. But sometimes people like to grow their own fruits and vegetables and make dinner for friends, and it's kind of a nice touch.
19:38Walter IsaacsonWhat about creating art or that type of creativity? Is that more in the sphere of humans?
19:44Elon MuskYeah, you could certainly create art or whatever you feel like doing, essentially.
19:48Walter IsaacsonWe like to think of this as a time of unprecedented technological change. But we historians go back to the 1890s when you get electricity and telephones and cars and subways and radio and movies, all these things happening at once.
20:06Walter IsaacsonAnd it leads to many things, but it often leads to a great disparity of wealth. A lot of sense of robber barons, a lot of people then picking up pitchforks and deciding that this is bad?
20:18Walter IsaacsonAnd there's some echoes of that now. Is there a way to prevent that? Given the amount of wealth being generated? Will we put certain things in the commons the way they did in the 1890s when they make high school universal and free?
20:34Walter IsaacsonWill we say, okay, health care, for example, should just be in the commons? And that's going to SAP some of the populist revulsion at what's happening?
20:45Elon MuskWell, I mean, as you heard me say, I mean, I think money is going to matter in the future. Anyone will be able to have any goods and services that they want.
20:57Elon MuskAnd I don't think even so called wealthy people will ultimately control the AIs. I think they'll control themselves. So it's not like you have to separate. I think sort of a fundamental misunderstanding of economics arises because of conflating resource allocation and consumption.
21:18Elon MuskSo there's a limit to what any single human can consume. You hit that saturation point pretty fast. So like say going from say a billion dollars net worth to $10 billion of net worth doesn't make you 10 times happier or mean you have 10 times more stuff.
21:34Elon MuskIt actually means you've got a resource allocation problem. Assuming that you wish to be an efficient resource allocator.
21:41Walter IsaacsonWell, you've accumulated as you know, a trillion. Is it mainly because you.
21:47Elon MuskI create it, yeah.
21:48Walter IsaacsonIs it mainly because you feel you're best at allocating that, that keeping that allows you to allocate capital to do things like go to Mars, create AI, do robots?
21:59Walter IsaacsonOr is it in some ways just a scoring system that's kind of racking up the points?
22:06Elon MuskI mean I need to have sufficient voting control in the companies to still be in charge. So.
22:18Elon MuskMy so called wealth is simply 8 percentage ownership in SpaceX and Tesla essentially. And this is going to be taxed quite heavily and there's not some magical way to avoid taxes.
22:31Elon MuskIf there were, I would know about it. So at the end of the day this will get whittled down and a few generations from now, if money still matters, which I don't think it will, my descendants would have a tiny fraction of what I have.
22:52Walter IsaacsonLet me go back to something you said that really struck me about President Trump, which he really likes to be liked. He wants to be liked. And I remember you talking to me at some point about people say they have empathy, but in some ways it's a vanity because you want to be liked.
23:14Walter IsaacsonAnd I think you even diagnosed it in me. You said probably wasn't very good at running CNN or Time magazine because I wanted to be liked. To what extent is a desire to be liked a problem when it comes to being a builder of a company?
23:32Elon MuskWell, the problem is if you're going to do things that diminish the success probability of the company in order to be liked, then things are not going to work out as well.
23:50Elon MuskLike, it's not as though I don't like to be liked. I would love to be liked. But am I going to do things that are contrary to the best interest of the companies in order to be liked?
24:01Elon MuskA bit more. I'm not, you know, so it's, I don't, I'm okay with being disliked by some. I'm, you know, obviously I'm not disliked by, you know, like a lot more people like me than dislike me or I wouldn't be, you know, wouldn't have a quarter billion followers.
24:19Elon MuskI mean, I don't think they're following me or to hate on what I say, you know, and if I, if I look at the, you know, the, the comments and whatnot, you know, I don't know, maybe three out of four.
24:35Elon MuskI mean, I, I'd say like 70, 80% of people like me. Well, if they know, you know, they're not anything about me, it's probably a quarter of people that don't.
24:46Elon MuskMaybe I'm just guessing here. And there's going to be a spectrum. There's people that are maniacally devoted to me and people that hate my guts. It's going to be some number of people that fit into those categories.
25:03Walter IsaacsonWell, you've been talking a lot about the suicidal empathy ideas. Do you really think that empathy has become a real problem or that we have too much empathy? I could make the argument that sometimes we're losing empathy.
25:18Elon MuskNo, I think you don't want to have misguided empathy. I mean, I agree with Gad Saad's philosophy here, and suicidal empathy is, that's his term. He wrote a book to that effect.
25:32Elon MuskAnd I think his book is War points out some good things here, which is that part of the reason for the prosperity of the west has been that there's actually just been a fairly high trust, high empathy society, which is when you're trying to get people to cooperate at scale.
25:52Elon MuskThis makes a lot of sense. You ideally want people to be default trusted, not default distrusted. And you want to encourage behavior that is good for society or for people to do good things that are good for their fellow human beings.
26:11Elon MuskAnd ultimately that actually does end up being good for the individual if provided it is mutual. Now, where this can go wrong is if your theory of mind is incorrect.
26:26Elon MuskSo if you think everyone is like yourself, then you're going to have a problem because this is simply not true. There are peoples and cultures with very different views.
26:40Elon MuskYou know, you could say, when you
26:41Walter Isaacsontalk about immigration, by the way, and you say there are cultures with different views, does your views on immigration distinguish between different cultures, like a Muslim culture that might not fit in as well?
26:53Walter IsaacsonOr is it. How do you do that?
26:56Elon MuskWell, what I'm saying, I think is simply logically consistent, which is that if there's a culture that has diametrically opposed views to our culture, and you could take Islam, it's not that, of course, there are many people who are Muslims who are quite reasonable, but there are some who are not.
27:19Elon MuskAnd unless you're filtering for jihadis, you're going to get jihadis and they're going to do jihad and kill people. Now, in Israel, they understand this quite well. Obviously, this lesson has been reinforced with a lot of attacks.
27:40Elon MuskThe neighboring countries, many times in Israel, many times have tried to annihilate Israel several times, not once, multiple times. And so, you know, in Israel, they realize, you know, if you let in the people that into Israel that want to kill Israelis, they will do so.
28:00Elon MuskSo they're quite pragmatic about this and they try to, you know, make sure that doesn't happen.
28:05Walter IsaacsonBut one of the things our country's founded on is individuals versus group identities. Do you worry that sometimes when you make sweeping generalizations, you're making a group identity rather than saying the foundational ethic of the United States, which is individuals get treated separately?
28:26Elon MuskYes, but you can't conflate that with the sort of blank slate fallacy that all people are exactly the same at their core. They're not. This is just an obvious falsehood.
28:43Elon MuskYou know, you can't put yourself in the mind of a serial killer unless you're a serial killer. Like, unless you enjoy murdering people. You can't imagine why someone would do such a thing.
28:55Elon MuskAnd if someone is a religious extremist, where they view anyone who is not in their religion as the enemy, or that those who are not in their religion should die, it's difficult for you to understand that mindset because you don't have that mindset.
29:17Elon MuskBut you can obviously recognize there are people who do have that mindset and that if you let them into the country, they will kill people. Let me give you an example.
29:27Elon MuskThere's many. We had someone who was working at the Tesla factory in Austin until December of last year. He was fired because he assaulted a woman who stepped on his prayer rug in the factory.
29:45Elon MuskOkay, so she wasn't expecting anyone to be praying in the factory. And he was praying in the factory. She accidentally stepped on his prayer rug and he assaulted her, violently assaulted her.
29:56Elon MuskSo he was fired for that. And then a few months later, he went and killed three students in the bar in downtown Austin.
30:08Elon MuskNow, I think we shouldn't let people like that into the country. Do you.
30:12Walter IsaacsonWhere do you get Your information. I know you're not particularly fond of legacy media, mainstream media. Is most of it from social media or do you have sources of information?
30:25Elon MuskYeah, I mean I look at Google News, which is a summation of headlines. I look at the X platform, which if something's important enough it, it'll, it'll show up on the X platform.
30:38Elon MuskI talk to friends and that's where I, you know, and I do research. That's how I look at things.
30:44Walter IsaacsonReason I ask is that sometimes and I get a lot of my news on social media, especially X. Sort of a darker, more dystopian view. I remember this from the old days too.
30:54Walter IsaacsonSometimes the mainstream media would say, oh, everything's going to hell in hand basket. There are riots everywhere. And you'd say, wait a minute, I'm walking around here, it ain't that bad.
31:04Walter IsaacsonDo you think that?
31:07Elon MuskYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You just have to see what's in frame. You know, I do think at times the X speed can be a little dark and in fact then I, and then I have to switch to something that's domain specific, like AI, in order to actually learn what's going on in AI.
31:27Elon MuskI do think there's too much political rage bait on X, if that's what you're getting at.
31:32Walter IsaacsonYeah. About darkness in general and rage bait. But also I know you got into our discussion with think Zanny Beddoes of is England going to hell in a handbasket?
31:42Walter IsaacsonType thing and there does seem to be a darkness. You know, I feel it myself sometimes if I'm on social media too much. I think until that the world is really collapsing, then I go outside, take a walk in.
31:56Walter IsaacsonLife is okay.
31:58Elon MuskYeah, go touch grass.
31:59Walter IsaacsonYeah, exactly.
32:00Elon MuskOnce in a while. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think both can be misleading and like, and you know, if you go for a walk in a nice neighborhood, everything seems fine.
32:14Elon MuskBut even though there may be terrible things happening, so you know, you don't, you don't want to assume all the world is going to hell or that all the world is fine.
32:27Elon MuskThe reality is somewhere in between.
32:29Walter IsaacsonBut I sometimes think our society gets too binary. Everything's either black or white. Everything gets polarized because of that. I don't know whether it's technological, whether it's our information feeds.
32:42Walter IsaacsonYou're right. You could be in your own bubble, which is we only take walks in the right part of a town and things seem okay. But also I think you can get your own bubble and social media too.
32:52Walter IsaacsonAnd suddenly you're Thinking weird things.
32:55Elon MuskYou can be in a real world positivity bubble or a social media negativity bubble. Those are both possible.
33:08Walter IsaacsonTell me, you mentioned it earlier about your wealth and you're using it to deploy it now. What happens to your wealth, you know, after you're gone?
33:21Walter IsaacsonI mean you're going to set up some big found out. You're going to. Is there something you would want to give it to?
33:26Elon MuskI mean it mostly goes to sort of foundation essentially.
33:32Walter IsaacsonBut what would you want your foundation to do?
33:34Elon MuskI guess I'm asking you continue the goals. Make life multi planetary, extend consciousness to the stars, improve sustainable energy on earth.
33:46Walter IsaacsonAnd does that mean humans should always be in control?
33:50Elon MuskWell, I guess I probably prefer it if humans were always in control. I mean, although it would depend on the AI. I mean if the AI was awesome, you'd say like maybe the AI should be in control, you know.
34:03Walter IsaacsonHey, I just saw Larry Page just a weekend ago. He starting to sound like him. He called. Yeah, he called you a specist once for deciding humans should always be in control.
34:14Walter IsaacsonAnd now you seem to be edging onto maybe it doesn't matter.
34:19Elon MuskHonestly, there have been a few times where I've thought, yeah, maybe Larry Page was right. No, I mean I think pretty much the future is going to be AI and robots are going to decide the future and I guess rockets to some degree in terms of expanding beyond Earth.
34:33Elon MuskAnd we'll need more energy, primarily solar energy. I'm increasing the amount of solar energy dramatically. We're putting together 200 gigawatts a year of production capacity of solar in the US which is much more than I think currently exists.
34:50Walter IsaacsonAnd finally, let me get back to the point where I may have interrupted you when you were explaining why you think but you're not sure. It's always good for consciousness and intelligence to not only be aligned with human values, but basically humans remaining in control.
35:10Elon MuskI find it unlikely that humans would remain in control if the if. I mean if there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario.
35:29Elon MuskSo I hope the AI is nice to us.
35:32Walter IsaacsonAnything we can do to encourage that.
35:36Elon MuskI think programming truth seeking and curiosity.
35:43Elon MuskIs probably good. I guess we want to be careful about being creating too many AI dystopian scenarios online because the AIs are trained on everything online.
35:57Walter IsaacsonSo if we say it's going to be utopian dystopian, they'll do it.
36:00Elon MuskYeah, it should be Terminator. You know, because whatever they read, you know, 80 versions of the Terminator script, it's like, I guess that's. Guess that's me, Terminator. Maybe we should have some more.
36:15Elon MuskLet's just have some more utopian narratives for AI So then I can like. Well, maybe I shouldn't be Terminator. Maybe I can be Friendly Overseer or something like that, or like a gardener or something.
36:28Elon MuskI don't know, like, treat us, you know, try to make humans happy type of thing. A friend of mine has this idea called protopian, which is like. Because utopian tends to represent some impossible idealistic goal.
36:43Elon MuskAnd usually in attempting to create a utopia, you create a dystopia. It's usually how the narrative goes. So she thinks it should be protopia, which is an achievable, you know, future that is.
36:57Elon MuskIt's not perfect, but it's. It's good and something that you'd be like. If you could look into the future, you'd say, okay, yeah, that would be a good future.
37:05Walter IsaacsonElon, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us. Appreciate it. See you soon.
37:09Elon MuskYou're welcome, Walzer. See you.