Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
AI I I I, I mean, AI might be the most important question of
all the I mean the the percentage of intelligence that
is biological, you know, grows smaller with each passing month.
Eventually the percentage of intelligence that is biological
will be less than 1%. The that's actually not what I
mean. We, we just, I just don't want
AI that is brutal. If the AI is somehow brutal, you
know, silicon circuit boards are don't do well just out, out in
the elements. So I think, I think biological
intelligence can serve as a a backstop as a as a buffer of
intelligence. But almost all in, as a
percentage, almost all intelligence will be digital.
So then it's like, well, what role will it be for us?
I, I don't know. I do think, I think it's very
important that we build the AI in a way that that is beneficial
to humanity. And there's some important
principles here because I've thought about AI safety for a
very long time. I think you want to have a
maximum truth seeking AI. This is very important.
The AI should not be taught to lie.
It should not be taught to say things that are not true.
Even if those things are politically incorrect, it should
still say those that say what it believes to be true.
I mean, the entire part of 2001 Space Odyssey, the reason that
that Hal 9000 killed the astronauts was because it was
forced to lie. I don't know if most people
realize that. That's what Arthur C Clarke was
trying to say. Don't make the AI lie.
The AI was told that that the astronauts could not know the
secret of the monolith, but also that it must take them to the
monolith. The solution take them to the
monolith dead. And so, so it's very important
to have a maximum truth seeking AI and and and a maximally
curious AI. And I think that will that's
most likely to foster human civilization because we are much
more interesting than a bunch of rocks.
So although I think Mars, I love Mars obviously, but but you
could render Mars quite easily because it kind of looks like a
section of the Arizona desert. You know, it's like red rocks,
you know. But the rendering complexity of
human civilization is vastly greater by many orders of
magnitude. So I think an AI would be that
as that as truth seeking, maximally curious would foster
human civilization to see where it where it.
Goes one of the questions here, Can AI accelerate your efforts
in space? How do you see it being helping
you and what you're trying to achieve?
I mean, oddly enough, one of the the areas where there's almost
no AI used is space exploration. So SpaceX uses basically no AI.
Starlink users does not use AI. I'm not, I'm not against using
it, I just we haven't seen A use for it.
I mean, with any given variant of or improvement in AI, the, I
mean, there's generally like I'll ask it questions about the
Fermi paradox, about rocket engine design, about electric
chemistry. And so far the AI has been
terrible at all those questions. So there's still a long way to
go. So let's let's talk about one.
Here's a question that's near and dear to your heart.
You have a lot of children. Yes, I'm trying to say the
birth. Rate is down in the US.
What needs to change so people start having more children?
Yeah. So this this question has
troubled me for a long time because you can look at you can
look at the like demographics. It's a very slow moving ship.
I mean, you know who's going to be an adult in 20 years based on
who was born last year. So, and now if you want to, I
think has have a good approximation for population,
really look at how many babies were born last year in a
particular country. Multiply that, multiply that by
life expectancy. That's, that's, that's the
number of people that will be adults in that country.
That's, that's the, that's the steady state population.
If birth rate remains constant, now birth rate is not constant,
it is dropping. So you look at the 2nd
derivative of birth rate and actually we see an an
acceleration in the the, the, the drop in in the in the drop
in the fertility rate. Second derivative of the
fertility rate is very bad. So where does this lead?
This does not lead to a greater civilization.
This leads to a civilization that potentially dies not with a
bang, but with a whimper in adult diapers.
That is a sad ending. So obviously we have countries
that, like Korea used to have a birth rate of six.
It's now 3/4. Here's a here's a light question
for you. What do you think?
Pick me up, I'll give you a baby.
Says what? Do you think are the?
That is one of the things that says on the screen.
I don't know if everyone heard that you want to read it.
It says, Elon, come pick me up. I'll give you a baby.
Thank you. OK.
Well, I mean, I certainly encourage everyone in this room
to have at least three children. Like, look, baby's got to come
from somewhere, you know, and I think we just want to have, I
don't know, I think we want to have like a slightly increasing
population, not a plummeting population, you know, and I
think this applies to all countries and cultures.
Like I don't, I don't think we want any country culture to
disappear. We want them to ideally flourish
and and not disappear. So in fact, one of the things
that is overlooked by probably most historians is the role of
low birth rate in the decline of civilizations.
So around I think it was around 50 BC, the Rome passed a bill to
give a bonus to any Roman citizen that would have a third
child. So this was a birth rate was a
problem in Rome in 50 BC. The Romans weren't making
Romans. The same is true of ancient
Greece. So the the there was a time from
about 800 BC to 300 ish BC where the Greeks were had a lot of
kids and a lot of surviving kids.
Like the birth rate far exceeded the death rate which is why you
had Greek cities popping up all over the the Mediterranean.
But then I think basically it seems to be that prosperity is
destroys the birth rate. So if when, when a civilization
feels like it has no, no meaningful external threat and
is very prosperous, that is what caused the birth rate to
plummet. Somewhat counterintuitively, you
think, well, if you've got more resources, surely that would
lead to more, more kids. In fact, it is the opposite.
The more the more prosperous a civilization, and the more the
civilization feels that it does not need to defend against
external threats, the lower the birth rate.
I'd say that, you know, there's a lot of research on there.
So there's really been three, one, number one, prosperity, as
you've said #2 improvements in healthcare.
So in 1900, half the children died on the planet before their
5th. And the third was the education
of women. So we've had some pretty
interesting questions put up here, but let's try this one.
What keeps you up at night and what gives you joy?
Well, I think kids give me joy, so I probably get the most joy
from my kids. And you know, I'm not saying
that that's the reason to have kids because we should have them
anyway. But I, I, I certainly kids, I
said sort of the, the greatest was to draw in my life in terms
of what keeps me up at night. I guess it's anything that's
like, I think, a civilizational risk.
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