Lex Fridman – Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI

Elon Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Twitter and Boring Company. Elon Musk joins Lex Fridman for his third appearance on the podcast to explore the endless possibilities of our future including the necessities for sustainable life on another planet, the challenges of autopilot, how money is a database, and more.

There should be a government agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm it doesn’t represent a public safety risk”

There’s always a bit of trepidation when accepting cookies, it feels as though there’s a tiny chance it will open a portal to hell

Money and crypto

• Cryptocurrency is an interesting approach to reducing the error in the database that is called money
• The government effectively has editing privileges on the ‘money database’
• Printing more money creates errors in the database
• Money is information, not power
• If you’re stranded on a deserted island, all the money in the world will not keep you from starving.
• Money is a database for resource allocation

Challenges in developing autonomous driving technology

The perception problem is one of the biggest challenges faced. In order to fully recreate what humans do to drive, the entire road system needs to be designed to work with cameras and advanced neural nets in Silicon form.

This means that the software needs to be extremely advanced and sophisticated to solve complex control logic conundrums. There needs to be a recreation of what humans do to drive. Autonomous driving technology must solve more than just perceptual challenges. It is a much more complex problem that requires a lot of smart lines of code.

SpaceX

SpaceX will bring a human to Mars in best case 5 years, worst case 10 years.

The biggest challenges are in engineering and cost optimization to self-sustain life:

• Cost per ton to orbit
• Cost per ton to the surface of Mars (The going rate at $1 billion per ton, needs to be reduced by a factor of 1000 to create self-sustaining travel and life)

All about Tesla

• Tesla, Inc. is an American electric vehicle and clean energy company based in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in electric car manufacturing and, through its SolarCity subsidiary, solar panel manufacturing.
• Tesla’s cars are known for their performance, range, and luxury features. The company has also been praised for its commitment to sustainability and its use of advanced technology.
• Tesla is one of the most successful electric car companies in the world. The company’s cars have been praised by critics and consumers alike. Tesla is also one of the most valuable companies in the world.
• Tesla’s success has helped to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. The company’s cars have made electric vehicles more affordable, more accessible, and more desirable.

Rocket economics

• Rocket reusability is key to achieving this, this alone would reduce cost by a factor of 100
• We need to be a multi-planet species. Given a long enough period of time, the Earth is likely to experience some sort of calamity
• This could be caused by humans or an external event
• It’s important to think in probabilities, not certainties.

Benefit of War

• Wars sometimes act as a great cleansing function for society, there has never been a war-like event to reset the rules and regulations on technology
• Without a reset, rules and regulations pile up – there is no ‘garbage collection’
• Code accumulation without code removal makes progress very messy
• It should be easier to remove a law than to enact one, overcoming the inertia of regulation

Elon Musk and AI

• AI has the potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as climate change and poverty.
• AI could become so intelligent that it could pose a threat to humanity.
• It is important to develop AI safely and ethically.
• We need to make sure that AI is aligned with our values and goals.
• We also need to make sure that AI is not used for malicious purposes.

OpenAI was earlier a non-profit research company that was dedicated to ensuring that AI was used for good. Elon Musk was a cofounder.

I don’t care about altruism or pessimism, fuck that, we’re gonna get it done.

The self-driving problem

To solve the self-driving problem, you need to re-create the operational capacity of a human: optical senses and biological neural nets

Creating an accurate vector space is the hardest problem – identifying the relevant factors in your ever-changing environment

Example: Kids are getting off a bus, the human brain recognizes that they could be crossing in front of the bus even though you can’t see them.

This example describes object permanence, which is a difficult problem to solve.

The importance of clarity in deals and the future of cryptocurrency on Mars

Money should be viewed as a database for resource allocation across time and space. Crypto attempts to reduce the error in money caused by the government diluting the money supply and views money through the lens of information theory.

While Bitcoin may not be useful as a day-to-day currency due to transaction volume and latency issues, solutions like the lightning network and layer 2 technologies could improve its usefulness.

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