Thread by @athrvakhrbde

Elon Musk on Clubhouse

Complete conversation in text

Live Thread

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Question: You've frequently talked about expanding the scope of consciousness and life.

What does that mean for you and why it matters?

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Elon: When I think, what's the meaning of life, why are we here, what's the point, is it all meaningless. I get quite depressed.

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And then, the thing that kind of broke me out of it was reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where he essentially pointed out that the universe is the answer. And really the hard part is figuring out what questions to ask about the answer.

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The answer is easy easy part.
The hard part.
First to gain a better understanding of what the task but I was wondering about, what if we have to increase the scope and scale.

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So, the longer the broader in scope larger scale is as the question is why we answer the fundamental question.
And I think it's a great filter that we faced with what we've become a multitasking.

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Suppose about their galaxy and others, that there are a whole bunch of dead one planet civilizations that prospered prospered for a while they might have prospered familiars years.

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Gradually civilization will collapse for reasons, external or internal, and that was that all civilizations go through, go through an arc, where they, they go up and technology players have declined before this has happened in history was made civilizations the past.

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There was the great perfect Giza. But then, people forgot how to build pyramids. After a retired associate Givens famous book but the decline and fall of the Roman Empire,

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& how they had advanced technology in terms of roads aqua ducts planning and so forth.
painters various Babylonians always thinks that they hold on to a similar arc, which suggests that was like the we'll go through.

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I believe is resilient to recovery because of globalization for the first time in the history it is possible to extend life beyond us and make life multiplanetary. And this window of opportunity for a long time.

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I hope it is, or it may be for short time, it would be wise for us to see it for the first time.
I'm optimist not a pessimist but you have to say like the sun shines chance to tell you over for short time, and take advantage of this brief window where we can transfer

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like a flight multi planetary and and humanity is essential to ancient life in this process. I think we almost have an obligation to ensure that creatures of Earth continued. Even if there was clarity on earth which could be manmade or it could be a natural calamity as

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fuel for the fossil record, there were many many mass extinctions.

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Question: That makes sense and I think we've talked about this before. I think one other question I have is you know, when we get there, you know, we have to set up the whole society we have to set up civilization
in your mind and you know everything from,

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what does it mean to have internet connection in Mars, all the way to like government rules and laws and everything you need satellite link everywhere.

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Elon: What should happen is that we give people the equipment necessary to establish a self sustaining civilization.

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The key threshold of when we would pass the great filter or this great filter is Mars sufficiently self sustaining such that if the ships stop coming from Earth for any reason, it could be something massive, civilization on earth could end with a bang

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And if the ships stop coming from Mars, does Mars die out or not, and will it be missing the key ingredients, like the equivalents of vitamin C, and it eventually die out.

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So, it's kind of getting the city on Mars to pass that that critical threshold where it is self sustaining. And are we able to do that before some calamity or a gradual decline of civilization occurs that prevents this from growing

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Which come first the self sustaining city on Mars, or World War III

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Question: What would you consider success, like let's say they get through the first five years, first 10 years. What do you think is possible to build on Mars, 10 years in, 20 years in, 30 years in after first arrival?

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It'll start with very tiny, tiny little outpost, and by the way it's going to be very dangerous
It will be dangerous, hard work.
It's going to be you're out there on the frontier,
far more ways to die there than on Earth

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It will be fun to have had a great adventure. But it will not be a luxurious thing that is for sure about for quite some time to go.
We gotta build propellant plant. We'll need to get the food production going

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Create the necessities, creating the iron ore refinery we all have the fundamentals of industry in order to make Mars as a self sustaining planet.
Over time like this, take a while but you could terraform the planet and make it Earth like mostly by just warming it up.

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Question: Do you think this sort of vector of civilizational work will unfold differently with the consequences of how difficult it's going to be to get it done?

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Elon: Probably we'll

*silence*

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The fact that you can only go to Mars every two years and that is a six month journey. I think we can over time. Get that potentially as low as one month. But still, you can't go to Mars when Earth is on the other side of the Sun

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That time gap would mean that there'd be a new group of people arriving roughly every 2 years.

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As far as we can tell, we're the only life consciousness which is a delicate little candle in the dark is only here on Earth. I mean, it might be able to place, other places as arguments that is likely to be other places, but honestly we have been no sign of it.

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And I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't know about it, and I am. I've seen nothing to indicate that there was any association whatsoever. I want to first jump to that in a second. But the basics are such evidence.

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Question: In the last year, there have been multiple UFO sightings, there was a mysterious object that passed by our solar system. How do you think we should think about Aliens?

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I've seen not single piece of conclusive evidence. So, it doesn't mean there aren't aliens, I just literally think I've seen nothing explained by other means to where the probable explanation by other means is much more likely than this alien technology

The resolution of the picture it needs to be at least like 7Eleven ATM good. That's the loch ness monster bullshit. At least like iPhone 6 level

Question: What would be your response when your kids are 18-22 and they say there's a city forming on Mars and we want to go

Elon: For the small landing on Mars, I'd be okay with that.

So far, none of them say they want to go so they change their minds but currently they're chomping at the bit to go to Mars.

Question: You tweeted "Who controls the memes controls the universe", what do you mean by it?

Elon: It actually comes from "who controls the spice controls the universe". Danger spice. There's a little bit of truth in that like, like a picture says 1000 words and maybe meme says 10,000.

Question: What is Neuralink, why should we care and what is possible with it?

AI is improving dramatically. Looks at GPT-1 versus GPT-2, versus GPT-3 and just how radically that's improved. Look at DeepMind, I mean I think I've run out of games to win at basically.

Tesla actually has it be one of the strongest AI team focused on real world usability. So just really solving visual possession and control with AI

Even in a benign scenario for AI, where we say like, like just really wants to be super nice to us and make us happy, because how do we stay relevant and still have meeting, and at least go along for the ride. In terms of avoiding the bad side I have to do with a couple...

...collective human well to the outcome of artificial intelligence, and what's developed in that way. I think I'll probably do a better scenario that we're unable to get to that outcome.

This getting kind of esoteric. So people are already a cyborg. You already have digital layer. Your limbic system which is your primitive drives and desires and responses.

And then you've got your cortex, which is like long term planning and thinking closer to the tertiary layer, which is digital and you already have that in the form of your phones and computers and all your applications.

So, as we get smart enough, it's just like trying to talk to a tree, you know, trees do sorta talk, but don't talk so slow that you will notice. So, so we need to improve the bandwidth.

And with the direct neural interface. We can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude. I'd say probably at least 1000, or maybe 10,000, or more.

Taking complex structures compressing them down into words which is, which most again at very low bit rate, & then having someone else receive those was decompress them. & then, and then send words back to you. So a huge amount about brain power spent in compression decompression

And we could be, instead of turning it on deeper concepts. And so, if you had Neuralink in your brain, you could do conceptual telepathy, where you have a complex series, a complex series of concepts and you just transfer them directly uncompressed to the other person.

This would massively improve the quality of communication and speed of it. So, under other sort of pretty wild things that could be done like you could probably save state in the brain.

And so if that if you were to die you could your state could be returned. If you didn't have another human body or a robot body, getting like really sci-fi stuff here

It's like Altered Carbon, you can be a person, robot, anything.

You will be exactly the same. So you will feel a little lost in transfer but it's also arguably true that when you wake up in the morning, you're not exactly the same as yesterday, or you have a month ago is not the same as you are today.

A bunch of brain cells have died and memories and memories have faded so much strengthen their new memories. So, as long as like you wouldn't be. You could be something analogous to a video game like a safe game situation where you are able to resume, upload your last stage

So that's the long term stuff in the short term, people with brain injuries or spinal injuries and make them for whatever loss of capacity, somebody with an implanted chip.

So the first thing that we're going after is a wireless kind of chip that would enable someone who's a part of our surgical project to control computer mass or for the phone, or really any device, just by thinking. And this obviously would be a massive enabler.

Make life, way, way easier for them. They have been sort of permanent versions of this device one time with with like a wire sticking out of your head. It doesn't work all the time and you can't take it along with you.

So just having, basically, the person with a fixture in your skull with tiny wires that go to your brain. It's like a Fitbit for your brain

And because we already got like a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull, with the tiny wires, who can play video games using his mind. And you can't even see where the neural implant was put.

When the USDA proposal came through and inspected our facilities. Our monkey facilities, she said it was like the nicest monkey facilities, she's ever seen in her entire career, just really went the extra mile for the monkeys.

The early applications will really just be for people who kind of serious brain injury, like where it's like the value of the implant is just enormous, because the early implants will come with some non trivial risk.

And so it's got to be like okay it's because the good far outweigh the bad and then that would be accounted for. So the initial surgeries disclosure of risks and everything.

And one of the things we're, we're really paying close attention to is the ability to remove the implant, so it's not like it doesn't want it or it's not working, we can take it out and then we re implant another one.

So we've tested implantation removal and re implantation. And it works great.

Question: What's the best way to educate a 5 y.o.?

Elon: My kids were mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit. Most of their education was done online. With education you wanna make as interesting and exciting as possible.

If kids can play super engaging video games, there can be super engaging education as well

We're going to explain why we're teaching you this and why it is relevant. We evolved to forget things that are irrelevant or have low relevance probability, and make sense like otherwise people would remember all sorts of nonsense things that aren't important for our future.

So less and less relevance is established, clearly, then people will have a hard time remembering advice nature because it appears to be irrelevant. It might be relevant but it's not explained to them they won't know.

And then there's, if you want to have some sort of problem solving engaging narrative, it's a far better to say okay we're gonna teach you how engine works by taking apart an engine, and then putting it back together.

And then, let's find out what tools are needed for in order to take attention apart put it back together it's like okay when you screwdrivers wrenches and allen keys and we need a winch, and a bunch of other things.

And then you understand the relevance and it's much more interesting problem. This is much better than having seen a course on wrenches and a course on screwdrivers.

Established relevance matters and there's a story to it, how to turn that bolt using the wrench, how to make this engine better, how do we take a gasoline engine to higher RPM. What steps would you need to take to get higher torque

It becomes obvious why Maxwell's equations become necessary in that situation.

Questions: What advice do you have for parents for their kid to become a polymath?

Why doesn't the world have more Elon Musks?

So I mean, for me, these things, things I've done have been because I felt a strong compulsion to do. So. It's not like nobody's pushing me to do it. But they're just like, I felt strong compulsion to do them. I mean, I wouldn't say it.

You know, there were pretty long sections of my life that have been very painful and difficult, and I'm not sure people would want to do that. If somebody wants to be me, or do the things that I've done that, I would say, most probably, you're mistaken.

You do not want to do that. You'd have to have some kind of like, rage demon in your skull that you just got to get it done.

When people asked me, what encouraging words do you have for entrepreneurs who want to do a startup? My response is, if you need encouraging words, don't do a startup.

Quote, my friend, "doing a startup is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. For a long time"

Question: This is something you joked about, but I'm kind of curious to get your maybe serious answer to this, which is all things, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.

You famously just change your Twitter bio to just the Bitcoin logo and the word Bitcoin this week. What do you think of cryptocurrency? What do you think of Bitcoin? What do you think of other cryptocurrencies? I'd love to get your take on the entire thing

Elon: . Well yeah, I gotta watch what I say here, cause this, some of these things can really move them, move the market.

First of all, I should say many friends of mine have tried to get me involved in Bitcoin for a long time.

My friend actually had Bitcoin cake, a cake that had a big Bitcoin symbol on it.

And he fed me a slice of the cake in 2013. So, clearly I should have at least bought some Bitcoins eight years ago.

Jesus talk about being late to the party.

I was a little slow on the uptake there. My apologies. But I think about a fair bit, but I do at this point Bitcoin is a good thing.

I am a supporter of Bitcoin you and like I said, I'm late to the party, but I'm a supporter of Bitcoin.

And I think Bitcoin is really on the verge of getting a broad acceptance by conventional finance people.

I don't have a strong opinion on other cryptocurrencies.

Occasionally I make jokes about Dogecoin. But, they are really just meant to be jokes. Even Dogecoin was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrency, obviously. But fate loves irony.

The most ironic outcome is most likely, or as I say, the most entertaining outcome is often the most likely and arguably the most irritating outcome.

The most ironic outcome would be that doge coin becomes the currency of earth in the future.

Question: Where do you see the future for Tesla and especially battery technology and self-driving?