Things a young Elon Musk thought would change the world


The Internet

Musk believed that the internet, born in the 1990s, “would fundamentally change humanity,” he said on the podcast.

“I wouldn’t consider this to be a deep insight, but rather an obvious one,” Musk said.

He compared the Internet to the human nervous system: “If you didn’t have a nervous system, you wouldn’t know what’s going on. Your fingers wouldn’t know what’s going on. Your toes wouldn’t know what’s going on. It would have to be broadcast.” , said.

“The way information used to work was by broadcast. A human would have to call another human or write them in a letter. [That was] Extremely slow diffusion. And if you wanted access to books and didn’t have a library, you don’t. That’s.”

I knew the Internet could change all that.

And while Musk only had minimal internet access at the time (just to use it for his physics studies, he said), he knew the Internet would be a “fundamental and profound change.”

“Now, you have instant access to all the books, and you can be in a remote location on top of the mountain and have access to all of humanity’s information if you have an Internet link,” he said on the podcast. “Now, suddenly, human organisms anywhere would have access to all the information instantly.”

Multiplanetary life

Musk believed that “making life multi-planet and making consciousness multi-planet” would change the world, he said on the podcast.

As a boy, Musk was influenced by a variety of science fiction books and believed that one day “[build] spaceships to extend the reach of the human species, “according to the book” Elon Musk “(Musk previously said that the science fiction series of seven” Foundation “books by scientist and author Isaac Asimov, for example, was” central to the creation of his aerospace company, SpaceX “.)

On May 30, SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts into orbit for the first time. It was a milestone for human space flight and brought Musk one step closer to achieving his ambitions on Mars.

Changing human genetics

Like a character in the 1997 movie, Gattaca undergoes genetic engineering to pursue his dream of space travel, according to Musk, when he was younger he believed that being able to change human genetics could change the world.

And it’s happening today, with technology like Crispr, Musk said on the podcast.

“I think it will be normal to change the human genome to get rid of disease or the propensity for various diseases,” he said. “That would be the first thing I would want to get out of it. If you have a situation where you are definitely going to die of cancer at age 55, I would prefer it be corrected.”

“There is the kind of extreme Gattaca stuff that it’s not actually edited into, but it’s edited for various enhancements and that sort of thing,” he said, “that will probably come, too.”

“I am not arguing for or against,” said Musk. “I’m just saying it’s more likely to come in the future.”

Sustainable energy

As a teenager, Musk felt a “personal obligation” to humanity’s destiny and was inspired to create “cleaner energy technology” one day, according to the book “Elon Musk.”

So he believed that sustainable energy would change the future.

“Sustainability was actually something I thought was important before the environmental implications became as obvious as they are,” he said on the podcast. “If you mine and burn hydrocarbons [compounds that form the basis of natural gas, oil and coal], then you will run out of them. It is not like extracting metals … We will never run out of metals, but we will run out of hydrocarbons. “

He said the future could bring a carbon tax that would raise the cost of burning fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, which is “obvious.”

In 2004, Musk invested and became a co-founder of the electric car company Tesla. He became CEO in 2008. On Wednesday, Tesla became the world’s most valuable automaker when the electric vehicle company’s market capitalization surpassed that of Toyota for the first time.

Artificial intelligence

“AI is also very important,” Musk said on the podcast.

In 2019, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Musk (who co-founded the OpenAI non-profit artificial intelligence research lab, but then left the company’s board) said that computers “will outdo us in every way. “including terrifying things like work interruption. of robots or even a possible AI race leading to a third world war.

AI is “capable of much more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential,” he said at the South by Southwest 2018 technology conference.

Musk also founded the artificial intelligence company Neuralink, because he believes that humans must merge with AI to avoid becoming irrelevant.

“We want a close link between collective human intelligence and digital intelligence,” he said at the SXSW conference, “and Neuralink is trying to help in that regard by trying to create a high-bandwidth interface between AI and the human brain.” .

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