TIME Person of the Year (excerpt)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:00InterviewerWhat's more important, rockets or cars? Actually that's a good first question.
0:04Elon MuskWell, I guess, I guess they're both important. I guess my career is Mars and cars.
0:11InterviewerMars and cars.
0:13Elon MuskSo you know, I think we need to transition to sustainable energy and become a spacefaring civilization, starting with space.
0:24InterviewerWhy haven't you gone? You know, Bezos went up, Branson went up. Do you want to go up? Is that on your to do list in 22 or how do you think about that yourself?
0:36InterviewerI
0:38Elon Muskwill go up at some point, but the, I mean there is an underlying philosophy that, by which I aspire to guide my actions and that is to take the set of actions that maximize the probability that the future is good and hopefully not pave the road to hell with good intentions.
0:59Elon MuskSo the, you know, SpaceX is, the point of SpaceX is to help make humanity a space faring civilization and ultimately a multi planet species so as to expand the scope and scale of consciousness and ultimately better understand what questions to ask about the answer, which is the
1:19Intervieweruniverse switching to risk in the context of Tesla and autopilot auto driving. I mean, and one of our competitors had a big piece on that this weekend that it's not all the way thought through and it's, you know, back to risk.
1:35InterviewerHow do you think about. Obviously that's not zero risk either. You're paving the way in that area.
1:40Elon MuskAutonomy, it's an incredibly important innovation because people spend hours, many hours a week, ultimately many months of their lives probably in cars and stuck in traffic. And then there's a lot of people that die in auto accidents worldwide there's about a million automotive deaths per year, so the vast majority of which are due to driver error.
2:09Elon MuskSo, and so if we can have autonomy that would potentially solve, you know, save on the order of a million lives per year. And there's about 10 million serious accidents where there's a permanent injury per year.
2:24Elon MuskSo it's one of those things where, you know, you're not going to get rewarded for necessarily for the, for lives that you save, but you will definitely be blamed for lives that you don't save.
2:38Elon MuskSo and I mean there's a, there was a, you know, something, sorry, something somebody said to me at the beginning of when we pursuing autonomy. He said that, you know, even if you save 90% of the lives, the 10% that you don't save are going to sue you.
2:55InterviewerRight. A lot of people are worried about democracy, the future of democracy, the state of democracy. Part of that's tied to Silicon Valley.
3:03Elon MuskWe have democracy?
3:04InterviewerWell, I don't know. Yeah. Are you? My question is, are you worried about democracy?
3:08Elon MuskWhere
3:12InterviewerHere, for a start. Here.
3:16Elon MuskThings are going okay in the grand scheme of things. You know, it's easy to complain, but I mean, the fact of the matter is this is the most prosperous time in human history, so.
3:30Elon MuskBut people's expectations always adjust to however good things get. People's expectations will always kind of recalibrate to how things are. But, you know, if we stand back and say, like, okay, is there really some point in history where you'd rather be?
3:49Elon MuskAnd by the way, have you actually read history? This wasn't great. So I think, you know, we should be, I think, probably happier with the way things are than maybe sometimes people are.