Milken Institute Global Conference 6 mai 2024 Conversation avec Michael Milken sur l'humanité, SpaceX, Starlink, la transformation de l'humanité en espèce multiplanétaire, l'IA et les taux de natalité.
Conversation avec Michael Milken sur l'humanité, SpaceX, Starlink, la transformation de l'humanité en espèce multiplanétaire, l'IA et les taux de natalité.
Transcription Michael Milken
Human race and other like topics. A conversation with Elon Musk. And so before we begin Elon, I thought we might want to go back in time 11 years when you were sitting on this stage. That's hot water and this is regular. You can take your choice.
Elon Musk
All right, sounds good.
Michael Milken
Okay, so 11 years ago Alon was talking about the things that will have the biggest impact on the future of humanity that he was thinking about in college. And so let's run that video of 11, almost 11 years ago to today.
Elon Musk
I guess when I was in college I thought about things that would most affect the future of humanity and, and there were three areas that I thought would have the biggest impact and those were the Internet sustainable energy of which solar power is the production side and electric car is the consumption side and
Elon Musk
humanity becoming a multi planet species.
Michael Milken
And so we cut that short. But there was two others you talked about. One was modifying the human genome.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I'm just, I'm not saying we should, I'm just saying that that's the
Michael Milken
thing would really affect the future and next AI. So a lot of people didn't weren't thinking about these same five things when they were in school, particularly humanity on multi planets at that time.
Elon Musk
Well sci fi was certainly thinking about it. But you know, I think at some point we want to make science fiction non fiction forever and yeah, so let's make life multi planetary and be a space faring civilization, be out there among the stars. I think there are things that like you have to be excited about the future. Life cannot just be about solving one problem after another. There have to be things that really sort of move your heart and that make you excited to wake up in the morning. And I think being, becoming a space faring civilization is one of those things. If you ask kids anywhere around the world like what is, what are some of the most inspiring things you can ask like 5 year old, 6 year old anywhere in the world and they're going to say, you know, space exploration is one of those things and we want to make sure that Apollo is not the high watermark. In fact you mentioned at one point that you wrote a letter offering to run the Apollo program. I believe you would have done a fantastic job. But the point is that the Apollo program was something that was inspiring to everyone around the world. And we don't want the Apollo program to be the high watermark of human exploration. And yeah, I think you want to have some sense that the future is going to be better than the past, that we're going to be out there going to other star systems and
Elon Musk
you see in a science fiction, non dystopian sci fi story of which there are not many, but like Star Trek, I suppose.
Michael Milken
Well, speaking of Star Trek, when I think about you, let's look at Spocks from Star Trek here.
Star Trek clip
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Your ongoing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has, has gone before.
Michael Milken
So when I think about you, I think about Spock and Captain Kirk and you're going to take us to places we've never gone before.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that's the idea. You know, if we, if we send probes out there we might, I mean we might find the remains of long dead alien civilizations. If physics is correct, the Universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Earth is about four and a half billion years old. But at 13.8 billion years, a civilization that even lasted a million years is three digits past the decimal point. And if you consider human civilization, I date it from like the first writing. So that first writing was the ancient Sumerians, archaic precuniform around 5,500 years ago. So that is one millionth of Earth's lifespan. That's how long writing has existed. So if we were to last as a civilization for a million years, that would be incredible and we would actually probably be in every part of the galaxy. So this is, this causes me to think that, well, where are the aliens? It's the Fermi question. You know the great physicist, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, he's like, where are they? Now A lot of people think there are aliens among us.
Michael Milken
Well there was that, there was that movie, Men in Black. Yes, yes, told us they're among us. And Elvis really went back to his own planet.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean really a lot of people think there are aliens, but I get asked that a lot. For some reason a lot of the same people who think there are aliens among us don't think we went to the moon. Which I'm like, think about that for a second, you know, so, but I think I would, I mean, if I've not seen any evidence of aliens. And SpaceX with the Starlink constellation has roughly 6,000 satellites and not once have we had to maneuver around a ufo.
Elon Musk
So we were like, hey, what's that? Is that an alien has occurred? Never. So I'm like, okay, I don't see any evidence of aliens. And I look at it. If somebody has evidence of Aliens in a. You know, that's not just a fuzzy blob. Then I'd love to see it, love to hear about it, but I don't think there is. So which is actually reasonable concern because you could, if any civilization in the Milky Way, in our galaxy were to last for a million years, even with speed of travel, that's far below the speed of light, you know, like a few percent of speed of light, they could easily have explored and colonized the whole galaxy. So they haven't. So why not? I think the answer might be, or probably is that civilization is precarious and rare and that we. You should really think of human civilization as being like a tiny candle in a vast darkness, and we should do everything possible to ensure that that candle does not go out.
Michael Milken
Lon, I thought one of the interesting things for the people on X viewing this session and the people in the audience here is that maybe I'd give you a few of your quotes and you can comment on them. Okay, let's start with this one. Free speech. Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.
Elon Musk
Yes, it's obviously not possible to have democratic elections if people do not have access to the information that would allow them to make the right decision on a candidate or a party. So if speech is constrained in a fundamental way, you just can't expect people to make the right decision or an informed decision because they are prevented from being informed. I think it's a foundational element, I have to say. Like, why is free speech, freedom of speech, the First Amendment? Because people came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. That was why they were like, you know what? We should make sure that we got that one. Remember that time when they tried to kill us back in the other country just for saying we didn't like a political candidate? Well, let's make sure that's okay in America. And so actually, in a lot of parts of the world, you know, you can't really say. Most parts of the world, you can't really say what you want to say without some bad consequences. So. And sometimes people forget, like, why is the Constitution there? The Constitution there is to protect the people from the government. So, like, if they're. It's to make it hard to change things. That's why the Constitution exists. Yeah, forget about that. Let's try. Don't take it for granted.
Michael Milken
Let's try the next quote.
Michael Milken
The fundamental error of socialism is shifting capital allocation from highly effective entrepreneurs to astonishingly ineffective government.
Elon Musk
Right. I think we'll find hearty agreement in this room. So yeah, I think this is, this is definitely a stack down on that front. But yeah, the, you know, there's, you'll hear this sort of argument like, oh, we shouldn't have some greedy corporation do it, we should have the government do it. I'm like, well actually the government is just a corporation in the limit. So if you. It's a government is. The government is a corporation with a monopoly on violence. So if you're unhappy with a commercial corporation doing it, you should be actually very unhappy with the government doing it since it is simply a corporation, the most corporate thing. And you know, you can actually easily get more sway in a company than you can the outcome of a company than you can in the government. So I mean everyone's experienced this going to the dmv. Every sort of like, do you want the DMV at scale? Probably not.
Michael Milken
Okay, all right, let's.
Elon Musk
The government is the DMV at scale.
Michael Milken
Let's try another one. Discrimination on the basis of anything other than merit is wrong.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think we do need to have a merit based system because as soon as you go down the path of you're going to discriminate on non merit based, then where do you stop? So yeah, I think we need to be as rigorous about merit as possible. And while it is. Yeah, I, to me that seems like it's a foundational thing. So again, I also think this room is probably supportive of a merit based situation. But yeah, that is. Yeah, I think we should be. Yeah. Not discriminated on anything other than merit.
Michael Milken
All right, good. I'm happy you agree with yourself. Yeah,
Elon Musk
exactly. I'm like, wait, who is this guy? He really sounds great.
Michael Milken
All right, so let's, let's look at the next one. Regulation and regulatory consistency like Gulliver tied down by thousands of little strings. We lose our freedom one regulation at a time.
Elon Musk
Yes. So this is actually a very important point that I think is not talked about enough that laws and regulations are immortal. They don't die, humans die. But laws and regulations can last forever. So if year after year there are more laws and regulations passed and more regulatory bodies created, eventually everything will be illegal. And that's why you see the California high speed rail has made a tiny section that doesn't even have rail on it. And for, I don't know, several billion dollars, because everything's, at this point, California has made almost everything illegal. So you can't make progress. Now historically, what has cleared away the cobwebs of regulation has been war. Now we prefer not to have a war. So in order to have civilization function without war, you have to have, you have to actively eliminate laws and regulations. So you have to have basically a garbage collection process for rules and regulations that is necessary. Otherwise you, you get hardening of the arteries and over time, nothing can get done. The most poignant example that I can think of that happened this week was the sad picture of the California high speed rail, which is, you know, it's just billions of dollars spent for practically nothing, but it'll only get worse year after year. So we must have a regulatory sort of clearinghouse, garbage collection process. This is essential. Or civilization comes grinding to a halt.
Michael Milken
Well, we used to have sunset that, that regulation would sunset. Unfortunately, it's rare today.
Michael Milken
All right, let's talk about education. The more you can gamify the process of learning, the better. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do.
Elon Musk
Yeah, so the, yeah. So the way education works today is really much like, like it's like vaudeville. You know, before there was radio and TV and movies, you had vaudeville where every town would have their, their town play, the town troop, the sort of acting troupe. And that would be kind of the, the, that would be the entertainment. So, you know, some, you know, in a big city you'd have, you know, much better players than say in a small city. But then along came movies and tv and then you say, look at video games where you take the smartest, best people in any arena, like whether they're acting, writing, directing, special effects, you spend, you know, tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars creating a great movie or a great video game. And you make it as compelling as possible. Now that crushes. Vaudeville crushes. Like, imagine you're not in New York. Imagine you're in Bakersfield. Okay? Then you. And you got, instead of Batman being like the Nolan brothers, it's Batman, the Bakersfield sort of acting troupe. It wouldn't be as good. That's how teaching works today. So what you actually want to have is an interactive learning experience that is as compelling as possible. And you do not want it. You don't actually want a teacher in front of a board, doing a board will act. You want it to be engaged, real time feedback. So, and then there are a few other principles in teaching. You have to establish relevance. Otherwise your Mind will want to forget things. So our mind is constantly trying to forget as much as possible. So you'll only remember things if your mind can establish relevance or there's a strong emotional element to it. Otherwise you're going to basically forget everything. Memory is very expensive from an evolutionary standpoint, so it's trying to forget as much as possible. So when teaching a course, you have to explain to kids why it's important and then you want to teach to the problem instead of teaching the tools. So what I mean by that is if you said, here's a car engine, we're going to try to understand how this car engine works. We're going to take it apart. So what do we need to do to take it apart? Well, we need a wrench, we need some screwdrivers, we need a hoist and a pulley and we're going to take it apart and we're going to see how it all works. That's engaging. And along the way you learn about wrenches and screwdrivers and you know, all the tools that are needed. That's, that actually is engaging and compelling. But the way teaching more typically works is we're going to teach you a course on screwdrivers and a course on wrenches. You're like, why do I have a course on wrenches? It's not obvious. That would be like say a course on calculus. Without explaining what calculus is used for, then you sort of forget it.
Michael Milken
We have a lot of work to do in that area. Let's talk about a non controversial issue, Immigration. Here is Elon on immigration. I'm very much in favor of increased and expedited legal immigration for anyone who is talented, hardworking and honest. Yeah, bizarrely, it's difficult and agonizing slow to immigrate to the US legally, but it's trivial and fast to enter illegally. This obviously makes no sense, right?
Elon Musk
I mean, once again, I agree with that guy. So yeah, I mean, if anyone here has been through the legal immigration process, I mean, I've been through it, it's only gotten worse since 9 11. And with COVID it's, it's an, it's, it's a sort of Kafkaesque, very long, bizarre process to immigrate legally to the U.S. i mean, I have friends of mine who, you know, they can't get their, their wife to have a green card. It's like insane. So on the other hand, it's. You can hop across the border in the south trivially, it's just like very easy. I went to the water myself just to see, like, what's going on. Is this real? Or, like, is this propaganda or real? And so I just went there and I'm like, oh, it is real. Okay. This is crazy. You know, we've got situations where people. People are pouring across the border like it's World War Z. I'm like, it just doesn't seem healthy. So I'm like, are we checking anyone here? Or, like, what's going on? And, you know, we don't. This is not to say that. I mean, I'm a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is a recipe for disaster. So I'm in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration, but having a secure southern border, so there's some vetting of who comes into the United States. I think this is just sensible.
Michael Milken
All right, let's now link Starlink to education. We're basically building the Internet in space. Why it matters. Starlink is a massive enabler for people in remote locations to learn anything. You can learn almost anything for free on the Internet. Right now. For example, MIT has all of its lessons online. That's if you have Internet. If you don't, you're limited to books. It might be the number one technology that improves people's standard of living around the world. Starlink.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely. So once you have access to the Internet, you have access to all the world's information. But if you don't have access to the Internet or it's too expensive or low bandwidth, then you cannot access the MIT les as you can't access all the information and you can't sell the goods and services that you produce. So Internet connectivity, I think is. I think it might be certainly a candidate for one of the things that would do more to lift people out of poverty than anything else, because they can now sell their goods and services. They can learn anything, but without connectivity, they cannot. So I think Starlink will actually move the GDP of countries. It's going to be that kind of thing. Because what is GDP as a function of average productivity per person? And so if there's a technology that improves productivity per person, you would expect to see that actually reflected in the gross domestic product.
Michael Milken
All right. Civilization is fragile.
Michael Milken
We should always regard civilization as fragile.
Michael Milken
There is not an inevitable upward trajectory. A lot of civilizations have risen and fallen in recent years.
Elon Musk
Yes. I suspect most people in this room have actually read history. But if you haven't, I strongly recommend. Sounds obvious, but, you know, there's been so many civilizations that have risen and fallen, many that we just don't have much of a record of. You know like I mentioned the ancient Sumerians, their language was forgotten for a long time until it was finally decoded only in the last two, 300 years. But like I start 1800 and something in the 1800s I think, but it's been very recent like so for several thousand years nobody understood what those tablets meant. And because they were the ruins of a long dead civilization, and there are many long dead civilizations, at some point our civilization will come to an end too. We just don't want it to be anytime soon. So.
Michael Milken
Well you've been quoted a number of times Elon on you'd like to die on Mars but not on landing.
Elon Musk
Yes, yes, I was asked that in an interview if I wanted to die on Mars, but then I considered the corner case of dying on impact and I'm like except for that case, you know, you got to consider the various corner cases. So I mean if you're going to die somewhere, might as well be Mars. I'd like to explore for a bit before, you know, dying. But yeah, I think we want to be a multi planet civilization and like I think,
Michael Milken
I don't know if that's a response from the audience. Let's, let's talk about that just for one second, then we'll take some questions from the audience.
Elon Musk
I mean I could accomplish this actually this year if I was willing to die on impact.
Michael Milken
The fundamental invention that is necessary for humanity to become a multiplane planet species is rapidly reusable reliable rockets.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I was trying to sound like a pirate, rrrrr. But yeah, rapidly reusable reliable rockets. So space pirates fully win.
Michael Milken
All right, here's some questions from the audience. Alon, which one would you like to pick here?
Elon Musk
Well I guess let me just touch upon why I think making life multi planetary is important because I think it's one of the things that gets us past one of the Fermi great filters. So in trying to sort of explain why do we not see aliens, there are various explanations for why we don't see aliens. Like what stopped those civilizations from expanding beyond their solar system and what were the sort of sometimes called like Fermi filters? Well if you don't become a multi planet civilization then you're simply waiting around until you die from a self inflicted wound or from some natural disaster like the dinosaurs, you know, get hit by a big meteorite or something like that. The eventually something like that's going to happen. And if you Wait a lot around long enough, the sun will expand to engulf Earth and we'll be incinerated. So that, that for sure is going to happen. Now we've got some time before that happens. There are more near term risks, but we want to try to get past the Fermi filter of being a single planet civilization. Now this is going to, this is also, this is going to be somewhat cerebral to many people listening, but I think this is actually very important. We want to get past the Fermi filter of a single planet civilization. The point is not to move from Earth to another planet and let Earth die. That's not what I'm saying at all. I want to be a multi planet civilization so that we have planetary redundancy such that no single event can end, can be the end of our civilization. That is the point of making life multi planetary.
Michael Milken
So let's take a couple questions from the audience. How does AI affect and how will it affect our daily lives?
Elon Musk
AI aye, aye, aye. I mean, AI might be the most important question of all. I mean, the percentage of intelligence that is biological grows smaller with each passing month. Eventually the percentage of intelligence that is biological will be less than 1%. Sand the. That's actually not what I mean. We just, I guess don't want AI that is brittle. If the AI is somehow brittle,
Elon Musk
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 as a percentage, almost all intelligence will be digital. So then it's like, well, what role will there be for us? I, I don't know. I do think, I think it's very important that we build the AI in
Michael Milken
a way that,
Elon Musk
that is beneficial to humanity. And there's some important principles here
Elon Musk
I 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 what it believes to be true. I mean, the entire plot of 2001 Space Odyssey. The reason 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 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 it's very important to have a maximum truth seeking AI 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 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 is truth seeking, maximally curious would foster human civilization to see where, where it goes.
Michael Milken
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?
Elon Musk
I mean oddly enough one of the areas where there's almost no AI used is space exploration. So SpaceX uses basically no AI. Starlink uses, does not use AI. I'm not against using it. It 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 electrochemistry, and so far the AI has been terrible at all those questions. So there's still a long way to go.
Michael Milken
So let's talk about one. Here's a question that's near and dear to your heart. You have a lot of children.
Elon Musk
Yes, I'm trying to set a good.
Michael Milken
Birth rate is down in the US what needs to change so people start having more children.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So this question has troubled me for a long time because you can look at, you can look at the demo, 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 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 the number of people that will be adults in that country. 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 second derivative of birth rate and actually we see an acceleration in. The drop in the fatality 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 bag, but with a whimper in adult diapers. That is a sad ending.
Michael Milken
So obviously we have countries that like Korea, used to have a birth rate of six. It's now three quarters. Yeah, here's a light question for you alone.
Elon Musk
Come pick me up, I'll give you a baby. Says one.
Michael Milken
What do you think are the.
Elon Musk
That is one of the things that says on the screen.
Michael Milken
I don't know if everyone heard that
Elon Musk
you want to read, says Elon, come pick me up, I'll give you a baby. Thank. Okay, 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 think we want any country culture to disappear. We want them to ideally flourish 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 B.C. 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 B.C. the Romans weren't making Romans. The same is true of ancient Greece. So 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 Mediterranean. But then I think basically it seems to be that prosperity destroys the birth rate. So if when a civilization feels like it has 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 kids. In fact, it is the opposite. The more prosperous a civilization and the more civilization feels that it does not need to defend against external threats, the lower the birth rate.
Michael Milken
I'd say that, you know, there's a lot of research on this. There's really been three one, number one, prosperity, as you've said. Number two, improvements in health care. So in 1900, half the children died on the planet before the 5th and the 3rd 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?
Elon Musk
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 kids are the greatest source of joy 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, you know, if we're birth weights continuing to plummet, I do think about the birth rates plummeting as being a civilizational risk. I think anything that undermines the foundations of democracy in America or elsewhere as a risk, I think anything that's leading us away from a merit based system is a risk. I actually spend like, I listen to civil. I listen to like podcasts about the fall of civilizations to go to sleep. So Pepsi, that's. That might be part of the problem here. There's literally a podcast called Fall of Civilizations, which I've listened to a few times. And I'd also recommend Hardcore History if you haven't listened to that script's great podcast. I listen to history podcasts basically go to sleep. So that's probably why I'm ruminating on these things as I go to sleep.
Michael Milken
Well, Alon, I want to thank you for joining us today and we couldn't be more excited that you agree with some of your own quotes.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's great.
Michael Milken
Thank you very much.