World Government Summit
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (12)
Transcript
0:00InterviewerWhat a challenge to talk to one of the most in my opinion in life. We've seen within this part of the world great people like Al Khawarizmi who invented algorithm globally.
0:25InterviewerNewton, Henry Ford, the Wright brother, Albert Einstein and Elon Musk.
0:43InterviewerIt seem you are in rush. You want to go to places that nobody been. You are reinventing a certain industry. From the rocket industry with SpaceX to the car industry with Tesla.
1:04InterviewerWhat's your mission? Life. Why you do whatever you do?
1:09Elon MuskSure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here and we're having a really, really great time with my kids in Dubai. It's really been fantastic.
1:20Elon MuskI really encourage anyone who hasn't been to visit what a great city.
1:25InterviewerThank you.
1:30Elon MuskAnd in terms of the motivations, I guess there's sort of kind of a long version of the explanation, but essentially the when I was a kid I was wondering kind of what's the meaning of life?
1:49Elon MuskLike why are we here? What's it all about? And I came to the conclusion that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask. And the more that we can increase the scope and scale of human consciousness, the better we are able to ask these questions.
2:13Elon MuskSo I think that there are certain things that are necessary to ensure that the future is good. And some of those things are in the long term having long term sustainable transport and sustainable energy generation.
2:32Elon MuskAnd to be a space faring civilization and for humanity to be out there among the stars and be a multi planetary species. I mean, I think being a multi planet species and being out there among the stars is important for the long term survival of humanity.
2:54Elon MuskAnd that's one reason, kind of like life insurance for life collectively, life as we know it. But then the part that I find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure and it makes people excited about the future.
3:13Elon MuskIf you consider two one where we are forever confined to Earth until eventually something terrible happens, or another future where we are out there on many planets, maybe even going beyond the solar system.
3:28Elon MuskI think that second version is incredibly exciting and inspiring and there need to be reasons to get up in the morning. You know, life can't just be about solving problems, otherwise what's the point?
3:39Elon MuskThere's got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living.
3:46InterviewerSo what is life for you? I mean you look at our life and I heard you before speaking. Is it a dream?
3:56Elon MuskIs it real?
3:58InterviewerIs it a million D? What is life for Elon Musk I
4:05Elon Muskfind 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, like say 40 years ago you had video games.
4:25Elon MuskThe 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.
4:34InterviewerI played it.
4:35Elon MuskOh yeah, me too. Exactly. I played Pong. Exactly. It 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.
4:46Elon MuskBut now you can see a video game that's photorealistic, almost photorealistic, and millions of people playing simultaneously and you see where things are going with virtual reality and augmented reality.
5:01Elon MuskAnd if you extrapolate that out into the future with any rate of progress at all, like even 0.1% or something like that, a year, then eventually those games will be indistinguishable from reality.
5:16Elon MuskThey'll be so realistic, you will not be able to tell the difference between that game and the reality as we know it. And then it seems like, well, how do we know that that didn't happen in the past and that we're not in one of those games ourselves?
5:34InterviewerInteresting. Interesting.
5:37Elon MuskI mean, could be everything is possible in life. I mean there's, I mean, yeah, particularly like things seem to be accelerating to some. To something, isn't it?
5:49InterviewerI mean, if you look at our life seem in the past 100 years, life been accelerating quite fast.
5:57Elon MuskYeah.
5:57InterviewerIn the past 20, it's getting faster.
6:00Elon MuskFaster and faster.
6:00InterviewerIs it more slow? So my question is really how life will be in air 20, 30, 50 years from now. Our education, our transport, how do you see it?
6:12Elon MuskWell, 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 1903 with the Wright brothers.
6:26Elon MuskAnd then 66 years later, we put the first people on the moon. I mean that if you'd ask people say in 1900, what are the odds of man landing on the moon?
6:40Elon MuskThey would have said, that's ridiculous. If you try to talk to them about the Internet, they would not even know what the heck you even. What are you even talking about?
6:49Elon MuskLike, this sounds so crazy. But today with $100 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.
7:06Elon MuskIt'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.
7:20Elon MuskSo. And you can Google something and ask any question. It's like an article of wisdom that you can ask almost any question and get an instant response. It would be incredibly difficult to predict these things in the past, even the relatively recent past.
7:37Elon MuskSo I think the one thing that we can be quite certain of is that any predictions we make today for what the future will be like in 50 years will be wrong.
7:49Elon MuskThat's for sure. I mean, I think directionally I can tell you what I hope the future has as opposed to maybe what it will be, because this may just be wishful thinking.
8:02Elon MuskI mean, I hope we are out there on 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.
8:22Elon MuskI think all of this is possible within 50 years, and I think that would be very exciting to do that. And I think we'll see autonomy and artificial intelligence advance tremendously.
8:39Elon MuskThat's actually quite near term. My guess is in probably 10 years, it will be very unusual for cars to be built that are not fully autonomous.
8:52Interviewer10 years, 10 years from now?
8:54Elon MuskYeah, I think almost all cars built will be capable of full Autonomy in about 10 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.
9:15Elon MuskSo 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.
9:26Elon MuskAnd 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.
9:39Elon MuskYou just tell it where you want to go, and it takes you there with extreme levels of safety. And that'll be normal. It'll just be normal for elevators. There used to be elevator operators.
9:51Elon MuskYou get in, there'd be a guy moving a lever. Now you just get in, you press the button, and that's taken for granted. So autonomy will be widespread. I think one of the most troubling questions is artificial intelligence.
10:10Elon MuskAnd I don't. I don't mean narrow AI, like vehicle autonomy, I would put in the narrow AI class. It's narrowly trying to achieve a certain function. But deep artificial intelligence, or what is sometimes called artificial general intelligence, where you can have AI that is much, much Smarter than the smartest human on Earth.
10:36Elon MuskThis I think is a dangerous situation.
10:43InterviewerWhy it is dangerous? I mean there is two views. One view is artificial intelligence will help humanity. There is another school of think of thought. Is artificial intelligence a threat to humanity?
10:55InterviewerWhy is it?
10:57Elon MuskWell, I think it's both. You know, it's like one way to think of it is imagine were going to be visited. You imagine you're very confident that we were going to be visited by super intelligent aliens in let's say 10 years or 20 years at the most.
11:17Elon MuskSuper intelligent.
11:18InterviewerSo you think within 20 years?
11:19Elon MuskYeah.
11:20InterviewerSo have alien in air.
11:23Elon MuskWell, digital super intelligence will be like an alien.
11:27InterviewerIt will be like an alien. Yeah, but, but my question is, do you think there is other intelligent life outside the Earth?
11:38Elon MuskIt 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.
11:56Elon MuskNot true. Not true.
11:59InterviewerBut maybe we are. Of course I'd say maybe we are alien, Ellen. I mean if you look at this part of the world.
12:07Elon MuskYeah.
12:10InterviewerThey believe that human being are not from Earth, they came from somewhere else. Eve and Adam came from somewhere else to Earth. So in a way, human being alien to this land.
12:27InterviewerDo you think we'll make contact with alien within the next 50 years?
12:33Elon MuskWell, 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 smart enough to realize it.
12:52Elon MuskBut I can do some back of the envelope calculations. And any advanced alien civilization that was at all interested in populating the galaxy, even without exceeding the speed of light, even if you're only moving at say 10 or 20% of the speed of light, you could populate the entire galaxy and let's say 10 million years, maybe 20 million years max.
13:27Elon MuskThis is nothing. You know, in the grand scheme of things.
13:31InterviewerOnce you said you want to die on Mars.
13:34Elon MuskWhy I don't be clear. 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 some place to die, then why not Mars?
13:49Elon MuskYou know, if we're born on Earth, why not die on Mars? Seems like maybe 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 death Wish.
14:09Elon MuskAnd if I do die on Mars, I just don't want it to be on impact.
14:13InterviewerDone it. Okay, let's come back to Earth. Actually, you tweeted that you are building a tunnel under Washington dc. Why? What is it?
14:29Elon MuskWell, it's a secret plot. Just between us.
14:33InterviewerNobody. Have you?
14:34Elon MuskYeah, exactly. Please keep that secret. The. Well, I think this is going to sound a little. I mean, it seems like somewhat trivial 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.
14:59Elon MuskAnd when I say I don't mean a 2D plane of tunnels, I mean tunnels that go many levels deep. So you can always go deeper than you can go up.
15:12Elon MuskLike the deepest mines are taller than the tallest buildings. So you can have tunnels, a network of tunnels that is 20, 30, 40, 50 levels. As many levels as you want, really.
15:26Elon MuskAnd so, given that you can overcome the congestion situation in any city in the world, the challenge is just figuring out how do you build tunnels quickly and at low cost and with high safety.
15:45Elon MuskSo 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.
16:01Elon MuskAnd so I think that's why I think it's an important technology. And Washington, D.C. louisiana and most of the major American cities, most major cities in the world suffer from severe traffic issues.
16:13Elon MuskAnd it's mostly because you've got these buildings which are. You have tall buildings that are 3D and you have a road network that is one level. And then people generally want to go in and out of those buildings at the exact same time.
16:27Elon MuskSo then you get the traffic jam.
16:31InterviewerLet's come back to UAE and Dubai. The first time I met you, it was 4th of June, 2015 at your office in SpaceX and I asked you, would you have a presence in uae?
16:50InterviewerAnd your 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.
17:00InterviewerWhy now?
17:03Elon MuskWell, I think actually things are going reasonably well in China, so with some initial challenges figuring out charging and service infrastructure and various other things, but now it's actually going fairly well.
17:17Elon MuskAnd so the timing seemed to be good to really make a significant debut in this region, starting in Dubai.
17:31InterviewerIn your opinion, what is the new disturbing thing that will come? Technology next. What's next in technology?
17:39Elon MuskWhat's next in technology
17:43Interviewerthat will disturb the way we live, the way we think, the way we do business well.
17:50Elon MuskThe most near term impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars, like fully self driving cars. Like I said, that's going to be, that's going to happen much faster than people realize and that it's going to be a great convenience to be an autonomous car.
18:11Elon MuskBut there are many people whose jobs it is to drive. So if in fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people is driving in various forms.
18:28Elon MuskAnd so then we need to figure out new roles for what do those people do. But it will be very disruptive and very quick. Now I should characterize what I mean by quick because there are quick means different things to different people.
18:48Elon MuskThere are over 2 billion vehicles in the world, approaching 2 and a half billion cars and trucks in the world. The total new vehicle production capacity is about 100 million.
19:05Elon MuskWhich makes sense because the life of a car or truck before it's finally scrapped is about 20, 25 years. So the point at which we see full autonomy appear will not be the point at which there is massive societal upheaval because it will take a long time to make enough autonomous vehicles to disrupt employment.
19:31Elon MuskSo that that disruption I'm talking about will take place over about 20 years. But still 20 years is a short period of time to have I think something like 12 to 15% of the workforce be unemployed.
19:49InterviewerThank you. This is the largest global government summit. We have over 139 government here. If you want to advise government officials to be ready for the future, what is three things or three advice you'll give them?
20:10Elon MuskWell, I think the first bit of advice would be to really pay close attention to the development of artificial intelligence. I think this is what we need to just be very careful in how we adopt artificial intelligence and to make sure that researchers don't get carried away.
20:34Elon MuskBecause sometimes what happens is 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, you know, governments keep a close eye on artificial intelligence and make sure that it does not represent a danger to the public.
20:58Elon MuskLet's see. Secondly, I would say.
21:04Elon MuskWe do need to think about transport in general and there's the movement towards electric vehicles, sustainable transport. I think that's going to be good for many reasons. But again not something that happens immediately, that will happen slower than the self driving vehicles.
21:32Elon MuskSo that's probably something that happens over 30 or 40 years, the transition to electric vehicles. So thinking about that in context, the demand for electricity will increase dramatically. So currently, in terms of total energy usage in the world, it's about one third electricity, about one third transport, about one third heating.
22:01Elon MuskSo over time that will transition to almost all, not all, but predominantly electricity, which means that the demand for electricity will probably triple. So it's going to be very important to think about how do you make so much more electricity and.
22:28InterviewerSeem to have an easy job? That's it. There is no more challenges for them.
22:33Elon MuskNo, it will. Then I think maybe 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.
22:48Elon MuskAnd I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income. I don't think we're going to have a choice.
22:55InterviewerUniversal basic income.
22:57Elon MuskUniversal basic income. I think it's going to be necessary.
23:00InterviewerSo it means that unemployed people will be paid across the globe because there is no job machine robot is taking over.
23:09Elon MuskThere will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. That's simply the. And I want to be clear that these, these are not things that I think that I wish would happen.
23:21Elon MuskThese are things simply things that I think probably will happen. And since if my assessment is correct and they probably will happen, then we need to say what are we going to do about it?
23:35Elon MuskAnd I think some kind of a universal basic income is going to be necessary now. The output of goods and services will be extremely high. So with automation they will come abundance.
23:52Elon MuskThere will be. Almost everything will get very cheap. The. So it's, I think the biggest. I think we'll just end up doing a universal basic income. That's going to be necessary.
24:10Elon MuskThe 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.
24:31Elon MuskWhat's the meaning? 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?
24:48Elon MuskNo, I mean, I do think that there's a potential path here which is. And we're really getting into science fiction or, you know, sort of advanced science stuff, but having some sort of merger with biological intelligence and machine intelligence to some degree.
25:14Elon MuskWe are already a cyborg.
25:20Elon MuskYou think of the digital tools that you have, your phone, your computer, the applications that you have like the fact that as I was mentioning earlier, you can ask a question and instantly get an answer from Google or from other things.
25:36Elon MuskAnd, and so you already have a digital tertiary layer. I say tertiary because you can think of the limbic system, kind of the animal brain or the primal brain, and then the cortex, kind of the thinking, planning part of the brain and then your digital self as a third layer.
25:56Elon MuskSo you already have that. And I think if somebody dies, their digital ghost is still around all of their emails and the pictures that they posted and their social media that still lives even if they physically, if they died.
26:09Elon MuskSo over time, I think we'll 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, like when, and output, if anything is getting worse.
26:37Elon MuskYou know, we, we used to have like keyboards that we'd use a lot. Now we do most of our input through our thumbs on a phone and that's just very slow.
26:48Elon MuskA computer can communicate at a trillion bits per second, but your thumb can maybe do, I don't know, 10 bits per second or 100 if you being generous. So some high bandwidth interface to the brain I think will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.
27:23Elon MuskGetting pretty esoteric here. I don't know if this is.
27:25InterviewerIt's close. We got it. Always you think out of the box. Your idea so huge, you want to go to space. You decided to go to space. You did it.
27:42InterviewerYou decided that you were. You want to land your rocket back. You failed seven times, eight times.
27:48Elon MuskYeah.
27:50InterviewerThen it landed more times. Yeah. How do you come with this idea? Actually sometime they're pushing the human limit. You are always pushing the human limit. Why?
28:06Elon MuskWell, I think about what technology solution is necessary in order to achieve the particular goal and then try to make as much progress as in that direction as possible.
28:20Elon MuskSo in the case of space flight, the critical breakthrough that's necessary in space flight is rapid and complete reusability of rockets, just as we have for aircraft. You can imagine that if an aircraft was single use, almost no one would fly because you can buy like say a 747, might be $250 million, $300 million or something like that.
28:48Elon MuskYou'd need two of them for a round trip. But nobody's going to pay millions of dollars per ticket to fly to do air travel. So. But because you can reuse the aircraft tens of thousands of times.
29:06Elon MuskThe air travel becomes much more affordable. And the same is true of rockets. So our rocket costs $60 million roughly. So the capital cost, if it can be used once, is $60 million.
29:25Elon MuskBut if the capital cost, if it can be used a thousand times is $60,000. 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 air flight.
29:46Elon MuskSo it's extremely fundamental because Earth's gravity well is quite deep. Earth has fairly high gravity. The difficulty of making a rocket reusable is much greater than the difficulty of making an aircraft reusable.
30:02Elon MuskAnd that's why a fully reusable 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.
30:20Elon MuskFortunately, if Earth's gravity was even 10% stronger, I would say it would be impossible.
30:29InterviewerYou need a team around you to deliver a lot of idea. How do you choose your team? Based on what?
30:39Elon MuskWell, I suppose, honestly, it tends to be gut feel more than anything else. So when I interview somebody, my interview question is always the same. What do you ask?
30:55Elon MuskI 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 also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.
31:13Elon MuskAnd 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.
31:33InterviewerSo what was your biggest challenge in life?
31:39Elon MuskBiggest challenge in life?
31:50InterviewerNo chat?
31:50Elon MuskWell, no, there's a lot of them. I'm trying to say which is the worst.
32:00Elon MuskI think just thinking about how to spend time.
32:10Elon MuskOne 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, that's very difficult.
32:24Elon MuskYes.
32:27InterviewerTime is over. I'll ask you just one last question.
32:30Elon MuskSure.
32:30InterviewerIf you allowed me in the World Government Summit, we have so many people from, so many young people actually from. From across the globe. If you have an advice to them, young people globally who want to be like Elon Musk.
32:47InterviewerWhat's your advice to them?
32:50Elon MuskI think that probably they shouldn't want to Be you. I think it sounds better than it is.
32:58InterviewerOkay.
33:01Elon MuskYeah. 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'm not sure I would.
33:16Elon MuskI'm not sure I want to be me.
33:18InterviewerOkay.
33:20Elon MuskBut if, you know, I think advice, I mean, if you want to make progress in things. I think that the best analytical framework for understanding the future is physics.
33:40Elon MuskI'd recommend studying the thinking process around physics, not the equations. I mean, equations, certainly they're helpful, but the way of thinking in physics is the best framework for. For understanding things that are counterintuitive and, you know, always taking the position that you are some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong over time.
34:14Elon MuskOne of the biggest mistakes people generally make, and I'm guilty of it too, is wishful thinking. You know, like you want something to be true even if it isn't true, and so you ignore the things that you ignore the real truth because of what you want to be true.
34:32Elon MuskThis 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 you're always to some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong and solicit critical feedback, particularly from friends.
34:53Elon MuskLike 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 and say, really, I really do want to know.
35:08Elon MuskAnd then they'll tell you.
35:10InterviewerThank you very much. It's been.
35:22InterviewerIt is great for the World Government Summit to have a legend who's creating the future for humanity to share his thought, his idea, his vision, his challenges, and his hope for life.
35:37InterviewerThank you very much.
35:38Elon MuskThank you for having me.