World Government Summit

hello good morning good morning good to see you alone it's been almost six years where we I sat with you here in this platform with a great audience uh it was your first trip to Dubai with your family I hope you enjoyed it yeah it was wonderful I'm very much into it um and I I'm I see my my head is Gigantic on this day my head has grown larger since we last met is it is it is it because of Twitter yeah I don't know perhaps it um Twitter is it's certainly um quite the roller coaster uh Elon just you know it's been it's been six years within six feet we've seen a tremendous thing since our our last conversation we've seen the pandemic Russian Ukrainian War uh development of uh chat gbt uh you launched Starship you recently also acquired Twitter can I ask

you this question why why why you bought Twitter why didn't you create your own platform maybe it was cheaper for you I mean I thought about creating something from scratch um but I I thought it would Twitter would perhaps accelerate progress versus creating something from scratch by three to five years um and um I think we are seeing just a tremendous technology acceleration uh that you know three to five years is actually worth a lot uh so I mean if you think I was a little worried about the direction that and the effect of social media on the world and especially Twitter and um I thought it was very important for there to be a maximally trusted sort of digital Public Square um where people you know within countries and internationally could communicate

uh with um you know the least amount of censorship uh Allowed by law obviously that varies a lot by jurisdiction but I think in general um you know social media companies should adhere to the laws of of countries and not try to put a thumb on the scale beyond the laws of countries um so and I think this is something that is probably agreeable to um the you know the legislators and and the people of most countries so so I think it's that's the general idea is just um to reflect the values of of the people um as opposed to imposing the values of essentially San Francisco and Berkeley um which are somewhat of a niche ideology um as compared to the rest of the world and but but you know Twitter was I think doing a little too much to impose um a niche as a

it's near San Francisco Berkeley ideology on the world um so you know I I thought the it was important for the future of civilization to try to correct that uh thumb on the scale if you will um and and uh and just have Twitter more accurately reflect uh like I said the the values of the the people of Earth um that's that's the that's the intention um and uh hopefully as we succeed in doing that um yeah uh but how do you see Twitter if we we say it five years down the road what's your vision for for this platform what what should it do well I think it'd be I'd like to you know have the sort of long-term vision for something called uh x.

com from back way back in the day uh which is kind of like a um sort of like an everything app um where it's just massively useful it does you know payments uh does um uh so it provides Financial Services provides information flow um really anything digital um and um it also provides secure Communications um so it relates to you know I think it would be as useful as possible as entertaining as possible um and thank you I went to uh find out what's going on and what's really going on um then you could should be able to go on on you know X the X app and uh and find out so it's a sort of source a sort of a source of Truth and a maximally useful I guess app is about the wrong word but system um and and Twitter is essentially an accelerant to that sort of

maximally useful everything app um yeah how how you are gonna I mean if you look at Twitter today I mean it's it's a platform sometimes there is a lot of misinformation in Twitter sometimes I don't feel comfortable even because there is some way there is this negative between Nation between people between different ethnic group that is the same thing how we are how we are going to fix this issue where you are you are in a mission with for Humanity to get them together yeah um I think there's um there's something that we're putting a lot of efforts into called Community notes um it's currently just in English but we will be expanding it to all languages that is I think quite a good way to assess the truth of things where it's the community itself basically

the you know the people of Earth who are basically what you know um not exactly voting but but competing to provide the most accurate information so it's sort of a competition for truth um and I think it's a very powerful concept to have a competition for truth um because you also said like what what is true it's because what may be true to some may not be viewed as true to others but you want to have the closest approximation of that so I think the community notes thing is very powerful um I think we are trying to have as many organizations uh and people and institutions uh verified as being legitimately those people and organizations is is important um and to have the organizational affiliation clearly identified so that if you want to find out if somebody's

actually if an account is actually saved from A Member of Parliament or a journalist or uh if uh let's say if a Twitter handle is actually belongs to say Disney Corporation or something like that you you can you can go on Twitter and it's it's sort of an identity layer of the internet and you you can confirm that that is a fact the case and and I think once you've got these sort of interlocking um sort of identities uh it's actually very hard to be deceptive in that case uh because and it's also you have a reputation to protect at that point so I think then people are far more likely to be measured in their response um and um we will be more reasonable since they have reputational value at that point um so these are some of the ideas that I have um and

you know I'm not saying that for sure it will succeed or that it's going to be perfect but I I I I am confident that it will over time you know head into in a good direction um and I think that the evidence for that will be do people find it useful um you know as we're measuring sort of the you know total user minutes but not just user minutes um unregretted use minutes which I think that the key figure of marriage um you know because um well for example Tick Tock has a very high usage I often hear people say well I spent two hours on Tick Tock but I regret those two hours um I'm not just trying to knock Tick Tock but it's just we don't want that to be the case with Twitter we want to say like okay you spent half an hour on Twitter that you found it to

be useful and entertaining and um a good thing in your life and ultimately be a force for good for civilization that that's the aspiration thank you uh Elon we have over 150 government within the world government Summit global leaders they have 8 billion customer their citizen how government can use Twitter bitter to service citizens yeah um well I I think generally um I would recommend um you know really communicating a lot on Twitter and uh I I think it's good for people to speak in in their voice as opposed to how they think they should speak you know like um you know sometimes like people think well I I should speak in this like but it ends up sounding I think somewhat at times somewhat stiff but and not not real um you know like if you read a press

release from Corporation it just sounds like propaganda so I would encourage uh CEOs and um of companies and uh you know legislators and um you know ministers and so forth to to speak authentically uh and to you know if there's a say a particular policy to explain it um and um and I I think there's you know sometimes a concern about criticism but I I think at the end of the day you know it's having some some criticism is is fine you know it's not that it's really not that bad um um I mean I I I'm constantly attacked on on Twitter frankly um and I I don't mind uh it's it's um you know you have to be somewhat thick skinned I suppose at times you know just because you're gonna they're really trying to twist a knife um but but I but I think I think just like

I said just uh as a form for communication um it's great and um and I would just encourage more communication um and and like I said to to sort of speak in an authentic voice like like sometimes people will have someone else be their sort of Twitter manager or something like that and I think I it's just people should just do their own tweets you know it sounds uh it and and like sometimes you make a mistake or something it's fine um but I think just doing your own tweets just like you would do your own you know you give a talk here or you would you know have a meeting at a summit or something uh I think that's that's the way to do it is is to actually do do the tweets yourself um and um and convey the message that you want directly um yeah so but you

know I mean one thing I should say I know this is called the world government Summit um but uh I think we should be maybe a little bit concerned about uh actually becoming too much of a single World Government um if I may say that we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having um frankly this may sound a little odd too much cooperation between governments um you know if you know if you look at say the history and the rise and fall of civilizations um the really all throughout history civilizations have risen and Fallen but it hasn't meant the Doom of humanity as a whole because they've been they've been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances and so um you know say like while Rome was falling you know Islam was

rising and uh so you had like a uh you know the the sort of caliphate doing incredibly well while Rome was doing terribly um and that actually ended up being a source of preservation of knowledge uh and uh and many as scientific advancements and so um so I think we want to be a little bit cautious about uh being too much of a will of a single uh civilization because if we are too much of a single civilization then if we're if the whole the whole thing May collapse um I don't know obviously not suggesting war or anything like that but I think we want to be a little bit wary of actually cooperating too much it sounds a little odd but um but we just we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if uh if something does go wrong with some

part of civilization that the whole thing doesn't collapse uh and and you know Humanity keeps moving forward thank you uh I you see I I hear you I agree and disagree with you a certain point and I think you know it's today people they don't fight with sword anymore I mean they have nuclear weapons so there is there is this conflict the whole civilization will be gone the whole human civilization will be gone and what we are trying to do here at the Emirates actually is to do exactly what you are saying we have 180 nationality you have every single race every single religion and we are trying to create a model that show the world that doesn't matter who you are what your color what's your religion where you're from you Humanity can live in peace and harmony

yeah I mean that would be good yeah my my last question I'll go to Twitter uh again then we'll move out of Twitter if you allowed us uh I mean you've been running Twitter as at the chairman at the owner at the CEO and that's take a lot of time did you identify a CEO and when you are going to hire him well um I I think I need to um stabilize the organization um and just make sure it's in a financially healthy place um and that the the product roadmap is clearly laid out um so I don't know I'm guessing probably towards the end of this year um which would be good timing to um find uh someone else to run the company because I think it should be in a stable position around uh you know at the end of this year uh Elon uh if we move to other subjects I mean at

the summit here we have speaker who speak about state of the word state of geopolitical of the world for the next 10 decade state of the economy of the world you know now and in the next 10 years if I ask you about the state of Technology if you can elaborate a bit then brief us how do you see technology in the next 10 years from now let's see 10 years it's always difficult to predict technology with Precision especially over a 10-year time frame when it is changing so much um I mean there's there's obviously the transition to sustainable energy uh with the solar wind batteries and electric vehicles um and and that that's if you look at the percentage growth of that that is a very high percentage growth although because of the massive industrial base

of um of the current sort of um fossil fuel economy it it even like even if all for example if electric cars were 100 of production immediately it would take 20 years to replace the fleet so this is still something that is quite gradual you know it's measured in just a few you know 30 30 40 years type of time frame um on a more sort of near-term time frame I think artificial intelligence is something we need to be um quite concerned about and really be uh attentive to the safety of of AI um you mentioned a chat gbt earlier um you know I I played a significant role in the creation of openai um essentially at the time I was concerned that Google was not paying enough attention to AI safety and so I I with a number of other people um created opening and

although initially it was created as an open source non-profit and now it is closed source and for-profit I don't have any stake in open AI anymore nor am I on the board nor do I control it in any way um but the chat GPS here I think has Illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become um because the AI has been Advanced for a while it just didn't have a user interface that was um accessible to most people um so what really chat gbt has done is just put an accessible user interface on AI technology that is this has been present for a few years um and there are much more advanced versions for that that are coming out um so I think we you know I think we need to really be I think we need to regulate AIC quite frankly um because if you think of any

um technology which is potentially a risk to uh civil to to people like if it's an aircraft or uh your cars or medicine we have regulatory bodies that oversee the public safety of cars and planes and Medicine and I think we should probably we should have a a similar sort of regulatory oversight for artificial intelligence because um it is I think actually a bigger risk to society than uh cars or planes or medicine um so um and this basically have to slow down AI a little bit but I think that that might also be a good thing um the the challenge here is that a government regulatory uh authorities tend to be set up in reaction to something bad that happened so if you look at say aircraft or or cars um you know the cars were unregulated at the beginning aircraft

were unregulated uh but they had lots of um you know airplane crashes and in some cases manufacturers that were cutting Corners um and and a lot of people were dying so they the public was not happy about that and so they established a regulatory authority to improve safety and now commercial airliners are extremely safe um if you were to drive somewhere it's a safety for a mile of a commercial airliner is better than a car and cars are also extremely safe compared to where they used to be so um but if you say if you look at say the introduction of seat belts the Auto industry fought the introduction of seat belts as a safety measure for I think 10 or 15 years before finally The Regulators made them put seat belts and cars and that greatly improved the

safety of cars and that airbags were another big Improvement in safety so my concern is that with AI if if there's something rather if something goes wrong um the reaction might be too slow from a regulatory standpoint um so I I would say like it you know if it's like one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization um positive or negative it has great great promise great capability but it also with that comes great danger I mean like I say nuclear it you know just discovery of sort of nuclear physics uh you had nuclear power generation but also nuclear bombs um so anyway I think we should be quite concerned about it and we should uh have some regulation of what is it if I fundamentally um a risk to the public uh yeah very great let me move to another

subject Elon education I mean you have your own philosophy about education with AI education might change dramatically when you tell us briefly about your philosophy of education and number two do any 12 years of schooling and four years of University well um with respect to education I think in general uh some things that we could do to make it more compelling would be to explain to Children why we are teaching a particular subject um so uh the human mind has evoked to really forget anything that it deems um unimportant so um if that human memory is really quite quite bad relative to the memory of your phone your phone is can remember the entire contents of an encyclopedia down to last a letter in pixel um but human memories is terrible by comparison

so the mind is constantly trying to forget things actually um so if you but if you explain the the why why a subject is being taught um that will then establish relevance and it's much more likely to result in motivation for kids um and and then also if you if you teach uh knowledge especially in the Sciences as solutions to a problem um it's much more effective so uh like let's say you're trying to understand an internal combustion engine well it's actually better to sort of take that apart and and then say okay well what tools do we need to use to take it apart we need a wrench and screwdriver and various other things uh to take it apart well then then you understand that the reason for the tools and so like for for mathematics and and it's I like tools

and in physics and Engineering um but if you if you but if you teach to the problem and say and then you understand then you establish the relevance of the tools then you it's actually much easier to remember um mathematics and physics uh because they'll help explain how the world works um as opposed to teaching them without explaining why and simply teaching them it's like instead of having teaching to the problem teaching currently people teach the tool it would be like having a course on on screwdrivers or course on wrenches um but not understanding why you have a course you're learning about screwdrivers and wrenches um I think this is really quite a fundamental principle that should be applied in education um and and I think sometimes we do we do

teach classes that are that children do not find useful and and where the answer to the why is actually not going to be a very good answer um you know most people I think will do not find advanced mathematics useful and are unlikely to find it useful in their life um or the elements that they do find useful could be taught very quickly as general principles um I also think that critical thinking is something that should be taught to children out of a relatively young age um as effectively like a mental firewall um to really think about when somebody tells you something is it cogent is it true or what is the probability that it is true um and so that you can to be taught to reject things that are untrue or more likely to be untrue um and favor things that

are more likely to be true um critical thinking I think is very helpful for people to learn so is it 12 years of schooling you are with or without 12 fears um well yours is a long time I suppose I mean humans just do take a long time to mature so there's emotional maturity physical maturity and mental maturity that is happening simultaneously with the education um I suppose it could be done in 10 years perhaps it does not need 12.

um but but then is someone mature at age 16 they're more likely to be mature at age 18.

so I guess 12 years is probably not bad um we probably don't need an additional four or five or six years in in college and university that seems probably excessive I think we'll probably shave a few years off and be fine okay kids will love it by the way yeah uh but you know social media but we spend so many hours on social media I mean the average sometime in certain country three four hours in social media and sometimes when we go to our kids we we see them spending also long hours part of his knowledge do you have any rule for your kids I mean how much they can spend in social media right you know I'm certainly not uh try to restrict social media for my kids although that might have been a mistake um depending on which kid it is that I mean they've

really been programmed by Reddit and YouTube I'd say um more than anything else Reddit in YouTube um I think probably I would limit social media a bit more than I have in the past uh and just you know let's take note of what they're watching because I think you know at this point they're being like programmed by some social media algorithm which you may or may not agree with um so I I think probably one is to supervise uh children's use of social media um and be wary of them getting programmed by some algorithm written in the Silicon Valley you know which you know maybe not be what you want uh Elon you've been working very hard I mean since six years ago we met you you look much younger by the way about six years ago thanks but I I know that he's been

working for almost 20 hours a day you sleep and the sofa in the office maybe Twitter office Tesla office you told me once we I I was with you at Tesla's office how do you balance your life I mean with this stress with so many different you know you're on so many different companies how do you balance it well I I mean I I should point out that I a 20-hour workday is uh relatively unusual and and rather painful uh but but I I do sleep six hours a night so um and if I sleep less than six hours and I I find that I am I might be awake longer but I get less done so um but I I do have a worker ridiculous amount I think relative to most people and in that it's pretty much seven days a week and mostly from when I wake up to when I go to sleep um I'm not suggesting

this is good for everyone and I think frankly I would like to work a bit less on that so um say Tesla Tesla went through some very difficult times where it was on the Ragged edge of survival and and uh really if I if I didn't give it everything I got it the company could have easily gone bankrupt it was really on the verge of bankruptcy for quite a while um I don't mean to suggest complacency at this point but uh you know it does require much less work to operate Tesla Now versus say in the 2017 to 2019 time frame and it's not a mortal risk of survives it's achieved economies of scale that make it you know not uh on the Ragged edge of survival um and then the SpaceX also has the strong team and is able to make a lot of progress um even if I spent less

time there um it does help if I spend time there but uh you know it keeps making progress even if I don't um Twitter is still somewhat of a startup in reverse and so there's a lot of work required here to get Twitter to a sort of a stable position um and uh like I said to really build the engine of engineering of software engineering at a Twitter and have it um you know really have it likes to do a great product roadmap and and the people in place to implement that product roadmap and so it is not my intention to work um like crazy you know I mean I think I still I I got comfortable with a mere 80 hour work week would be fine all right is what I would aspire to thank you we are running out of time I have one last question I have to ask you sure three

UFO B shot one over Alaska Lake Huron and Canada alien no alien I don't think it's aliens no okay um I mean I do find the whole question of of aliens um a very interesting one uh you know what is typically called the Fermi Paradox which is that if the universe is really as old as it as a science seems to think it is and as and the the where are the aliens um have really been around for 13.

8 billion years if so where should there be aliens all over the place um why do the crazy thing is I've seen no evidence of of alien technology or any alien life whatsoever um and I think I I think I know um you know SpaceX we do a lot I mean I think I know I don't think anyone knows more about space you know than than me or at least the space technology um so but I think it's actually a troubling thing if there are no aliens as well which is that all uh that what what that actually could mean then is that uh sort of civilization and Consciousness is like a tiny candle in a vast darkness and and a very vulnerable tiny candle that could easily get blown out um and I think we should therefore take great care with what may very well be this tiny handle in

a vast darkness and make sure that it does not go out and that we extend the light of Consciousness beyond Earth and do everything we can to ensure that uh the light of Consciousness does not go out Elon we run out of time thank you very much and hopefully to see you next year with us here in the Emirates with your family sounds good and thanks so much thanks again for having me thank you thank you we'll see you bye-bye