Innovations That Will Change Your Life: A Conversation With Elon Musk January 8, 2014 A wide-ranging WorldPost conversation with Nathan Gardels in which Musk lays out the innovations he believes will reshape civilization — sustainable energy, a multi-planetary future, genetic code, and AI — and warns about a coming demographic implosion.
A wide-ranging WorldPost conversation with Nathan Gardels in which Musk lays out the innovations he believes will reshape civilization — sustainable energy, a multi-planetary future, genetic code, and AI — and warns about a coming demographic implosion.
Transcript Probably for apart from the Internet, where humanity essentially acquired a nervous system and all of humanity's knowledge was instantly accessible from anywhere there's sustainable energy. So the transition to sustainable production and consumption of energy, hopefully the extension of life to another planet. Writing genetics and AI, I'm more optimistic than Stephen Hawking or Martin Reese. Who's that? Scramer Royal. He thinks it's quite likely that civilization will end the century. But I'm personally more optimistic about civilization. And I did say multi planetary. You say what's the future you want? What's the future that seems. Oh that'd be a good one. Then I think you want to have a future where space faring civilization and multi planet species are out there exploring the stars. I think that'd be great. But I mean a strong second and I think for some people maybe it will be the first motivation is the preservation of the future of consciousness and human civilization as we know it. I mean I think we have effectively created kind of a superorganism. Before the Internet and particularly before advanced telecommunications, communication was incredibly slow. It would have to go from one person literally to another. Suddenly all the world's information, all of humanity's knowledge is instantly available to any person. That's just like one cell in your body having access to all the information about the rest of your body. We are going to face in the mid part of the century, and particularly the latter part of the century, a demographic implosion the likes of which we haven't seen, including the Black Plague. It's as though someone went through and killed half the population or at least of the future population. There's something better happen to turn this around. At this rate the only thing that will be left will be robots. Three generations of 50% birth rate, 50% replacement rate gets you to 12% of where you were. And those 12% all they're going to be doing is taking care of their grandparents. I mean eventually there just won't be people at that rate. The other, I mean I think religious extremism is obviously a concern, you know if that grows over time. Yeah, I won't mention the third one. I hope the AI is nice to us.