The Elon game: Musk’s vision of the future

(upbeat music) - The Economist. (soft music) - Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist, I'm Rosie Blore. (upbeat music) Today on the show are children capable of being criminals and remembering Mona Khalil, the Lebanese savior of turtles. (soft music) First up though. - It's great, you've just. - There's luck going on. - There's a lot going on, it's fun. - Yeah. - On Monday I went to meet one of the most extraordinary men in the world, Elon Musk. - Hello. - Oh, do you want to space look here? Okay, we'll look at you. - Hello. - He's not just the world's richest person, but he's also one of the most polarizing. We met at his enormous Tesla giga factory, just outside Austin in Texas. - I'm just thankful for. - I think we're everyone, it's got. - We've got a little bit of a common ride. - I'm very good at thankful for that. - Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. - I want to hop into a bragring thing. (laughing) - Yeah, I've met before, several times, including once a few months ago at an event in California, where I asked him if he would sit down and join me on the insider. Sunny, Minton, Battles is our editor in chief. I wanted to get a sense of what this man, who is perhaps more than anybody else, building our future, whether it's rockets, whether it's his AI models. How does he see that future? But he's also such a polarizing person in the present, and that's what makes him both fascinating and terrifying and incredibly annoying, actually. - Sunny, we've got lots of ground to cover. This was Musk's first extended interview since the SpaceX IPO. It also comes at a critical moment in the debate over the future of AI. But first of all, tell me what's he actually like? So he's a larger than life presence. He's a huge guy, right? He's about six plus three. He is an imposing presence. I think he says exactly what he thinks. He's sometimes funny. He's sometimes very aggressive. I'm fascinated by watching how a mind like that works. And so particularly when he was talking about the future, it really is both kind of exhilarating and terrifying listening to him because I think he's sort of unfiltered what he's thinking comes out. When he's talking about politics and the present, that unfiltered thinking to me is caricatured, polarizing, bigoted at times. Elon, you have, what is it, close to 250 million followers on X? You say things like, quote, "civil war in Britain is inevitable." Just a question. On the current trend, yes. And so that's where we had sort of extended and heated exchanges, particularly on Europe, where he has this kind of view of Europe as a sort of hellhole overrun with Muslim migrants who are ruining European civilization. And it's just, frankly, not true. I hope I'm having a big impact. Why? Why should you? Why should you be able to shape European politics? You don't even live there. I think of it as sort of the West collectively. I found myself getting exercised about that because I really do think he is doing a huge amount to shape perceptions of Europe and they're just wrong. Let's talk first about what's happening now. The SpaceX IPO was in June. It was the biggest in history. What's he doing now? Well, the SpaceX IPO was raising a large amount of capital to essentially build out his ambitions. And those ambitions are expanding the realm of consciousness into an interplanetary level. But actually, in practical terms, I think his focus is as much on building out AI and building it through orbital data centers, AI capacity. And I think there is a vision across his companies, which is why there's endospiculation about whether SpaceX and Tesla at some point will be merged because it is humanoid robots, which is what Tesla is now also focusing on, which will be the physical instantiation of the AI intelligence and orbital data centers, which is where you will get a huge amount of compute capacity in future. So Musk isn't very much focused on AI. Where does he see it ending up? So it's hard to get your head around the scale of change that he foresee. In fact, I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. In five years? Roughly five years as my guess. There really won't be anything that AI can't do better than humans apart from being human, perhaps. I asked him what would life be like in 10 years? He went 10 years, 2036. Incredible abundance. The AI's would be in charge. The most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all. I'll make another prediction. Money won't matter in 2036. I was very struck. The 10 years ago Elon Musk was really quite worried about AI. And I listened to a podcast in preparation for this interview where he was talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson. And he said that one of the things that worried him most was the prospect of powerful AI, a recursive self-improvement, as it's called, AI's that get ever more powerful. And he said in that world, the best we can hope for is to beat pet Labrador's to the AI's. And last year on another podcast, he said that there was a 10 to 20% chance of killer robots annihilating humanity. And so I was very struck listening to him being very sort of upbeat in this conversation. And I put it to him that he used to be worried about AI. My philosophical conclusion is to look on the bright side. I can't say any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots. He reminded me that the reason he'd founded OpenAI was to be a counterweight to Google, which then had a monopoly on AI, because he was worried about this. But he basically said, there's nothing we can do about it. It's happening. It's unstoppable. So we might as well be along for the ride. The best envisioning of an AI future that I've read are the books by InBanks, the culture books. I'm just reading accession. So thanks to you, I've started reading these. But I actually don't find that future a terribly appealing one, because I don't think humans have agency in that future. They have agency in their small way. But I really, I mean, InBanks, as you know, was a socialist. InBanks had a very different political philosophy. I'm not sure I wouldn't tell you a group that. I knew that Elon Musk thought of the culture serious by InBanks as being a sort of guide to what this best possible future could be like. Even that sort of utopian idea of an AI led well was somewhat alarming. But I think the big takeaway for me was that he is building this future, going at it as fast as he possibly can. He has decided that it is unstoppable AI, and therefore you can try and shape it. He thinks the best we can hope for is to ensure that they have the right kind of values and that we can shape the AI's into being in the lingo aligned with humans. There is a lot of focus on what needs to happen now to prevent AI catastrophe. The most immediate thing that we could do is to have the leading AI companies at least just meet, or have some sort of call once every few weeks, and just discuss safety and security issues. And I said, well, that sounds interesting, but you guys, you all dislike each other. We have to talk. We'll talk. I mean, set aside our personal differences for the world type of thing. I said to him how quickly does this have to be done? And he said immediately. Actually, the day after our interview, the news came out rosy, that an open AI model had escaped from its sandbox testing area and kind of gone rogue and gone in an attacked hunting face, which is another company, and they weren't able to defend themselves by using Chinese models. I mean, this is like the Matrix. There is a real sense now amongst the leaders of this industry that these are terrifying capabilities. And I think Musk feels that. And he said that he felt exhilaration and terror about AI within the same day. Musk, of course, has many strings to his bow or boosters to his rocket, one of which, of course, was his relatively recent foray into politics. What did he say about his time working with Trump? He's quite rufal now about that time in government, which wasn't terribly successful. I think I got a little too involved in politics. Go carried away, frankly. But he was incredibly defensive about any criticism of Doge. It caused a lot of complaining. So you don't buy the idea that anybody put it really crudely and simply any kid in Africa died because of the suddenness with which-- Zero. There you hear it, zero, doesn't. I disagree with him on that. Even if you think that USAID needed reform, and I do think that there was need for a sort of shift in the whole approach to aid, but overnight shutting down of an institution that provides life-saving healthcare in large parts of Africa. To my mind, there's surely no doubt that that caused unnecessary suffering. And so this sort of zero deaths is sort of glib and clearly inaccurate and kind of ugly, actually. It's interesting because we hear him talk about the age of abundance, no need for money. And yet he's also talking about threats, migration, Islam as he sees it. How does he square that vision? This is perhaps the most striking contradiction. This expansive worldview. And then this dark, angry, and I think actually bigger-todd view of the here and now. And particularly of Europe. I asked him a lot about Europe because I've been very struck just how often he comments on or posts things about Europe. And Europe in his perspective is undergoing civilizational erasure because there's just been an influx of Muslim migrants and it's a dangerous place as a result. And it's all of the talking points that you hear from the Magah right. I think it's genuinely irresponsible because he is inciting and encouraging, not just the populist right but the far right in a way that is much more likely to lead to terrible outcomes in Europe. And he denied it. He said really all he's in favor of is secure borders, limited public spending and safe places. That doesn't make me right wing at all in the least. And I said well on two of those cats, actually Europe does much better than the US does. So it was a sort of frustrating conversation because I think he's just wrong on the facts. But more than that, I think he is unwilling to acknowledge that what he is doing is irresponsible. Are you anti-Muslim? If people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that. I am against that. I am against rape and murder. That part of the conversation was quite heated, quite tense. But broadly, it was the kind of conversation of two halves. And I think he is a man of two halves. There are many people, many, many people who are sort of musk haters. I'm not one of those. I think he is an extraordinary individual in his achievements. I think I genuinely think he has done more to build the future than pretty much anybody else. But I am disturbed that someone who has this remarkable view of where the future is heading technologically can have such a, I think, bigoted caricatured and inaccurate view of the present. Absolutely fascinating. Zani, there's so much more in the interview. Just tell our listeners where they can hear the full thing. You can either watch the interview on our app or podcast subscribers can hear the interview on Apple or Spotify or the intelligence feed, wherever you get your podcast from the economist. It's long. Let me warn you, it was a fascinating discussion. We couldn't find anything we really thought we needed to cut, but we did want to give you the whole interview. And if you aren't a subscriber, you can also watch extended clips via the link that we've put in the show notes. Zani, thank you so much. Thank you Rosie. So, yeah, have you ever been to prison? A couple of months ago, I went to Rochisburg prison, which is north of Stockholm in Sweden. Ignananu edits our foreign newsletters. So, from seven o'clock in the evening, up until, no, eight in the evening to seven in the morning, the kids are going to be in here. They're going to have a day. So I went there because they are building a new child prison unit and they are one of eight prisons in Sweden to do so. Not a shower, but when you're locked up during the night, if you want to talk to a prison guard, you need to push this button. We're going to answer. We may come here and check what it's about. But generally, we don't open the door during the night, especially not when we. And at the beginning of July, they opened their doors. So any child who is 15 or above and is convicted of a serious crime will now be sent to one of these units. Now we need to rethink that part because it's children we're going to have in here. And we need to have a different approach in that way. We need to make ourselves more available. And that's why we have. This is a big shift for Sweden, which until now has had a rehabilitative system. The government initially wanted to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 13. So this is the threshold where children can be convicted of serious crimes. But then just ahead of the vote, they withdrew the bill because it became apparent they weren't going to have enough support in Parliament. So later this summer, they will come back with a motion to lower it to 40, which they believe will have enough support to pass. So clearly, this is a very controversial and live issue in Sweden. But it's not just Sweden. In February, Javier Miele lowered Argentina's age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14. Politicians and the Philippines and in South Korea are also talking about this. What does the debate hinge on? What is it that happens developmentally that allows you to say that a 12-year-old or a 14-year old say is criminally responsible? So that is also a big part of the debate. And the UN recommends that the age is actually 14. But lots of people argue that at that age, children are going through adolescence, their brains aren't fully developed. They don't have the same reasoning faculties or impulse control or judgement. And in lots of the cases which spark or trigger the fierce debates around the world, they are in response to gangs using children to commit crimes. And often these children don't come from the best circumstances themselves, perhaps they have been in care. And it's a very young age at which to have your future determined for you. You mentioned gangs recruiting young people. One of the things that we've heard about is them specifically recruiting people who are younger than the age of criminal responsibility in order to avoid the worst penalties. How much of a factor is that? So this is genuinely a factor and governments are aware of this. So this is their argument. They say that gangs are using children below the threshold. So maybe if we lower it, it will act as a deterrent. But the evidence doesn't necessarily bear out that it will have the deterrent effect that they hope it will. In Britain, where we have an age of criminal responsibility of 10, there are studies that show that county lines gangs are using children as young as seven. Gangs don't care about these children, so it's not necessarily going to be a deterrent for them. And you do run the risk that it's just a race to the bottom. Wouldn't it be more effective to crack down on the gangs rather than locking children away? Yes, I think that that is where the real masterminds of crime are, but it's at all order. And voters especially are worried about crime. They want to see action being taken. And lowering the age of criminal responsibility is something which they can say they are doing. Whereas trying to target gangs is something which governments are on the world are struggling to do. One thing in Sweden which they are doing is working with social media platforms to implement a law which is normally reserved for terror content to take any gang-affiliated posts of social media within an hour. But gangs are very shrewd at adapting to law changes, so there's no easy fix. And what about the long-term effects of criminalising children? Yes, so this is something which we do have data for and the results are really quite shocking. In Britain 80% of prolific adult offenders committed their first crimes as a child. And more than two-thirds of children, so aged between 10 and 17, who are released from youth sentences, reoffend within a year. Because once they are in that cycle, it's very tricky to get them out. Megna, thank you very much. Thank you, Rosie. Tomorrow on the weekend intelligence, a rare chance to hear voices from inside Cuba. For the past six months, the Trump administration has been blocking fuel and other goods from reaching the country. Now, there are blackouts for hours at a time. Many people are going hungry. SIGARETS are cheaper than food. Our correspondent travelled there with only her phone to ask people what life is really like. Sleepless in Havana is out tomorrow. You'll need to be a subscriber. It was a warm summer evening in 1999 and Mourna Cadill was strolling along Mansouri Beach in southern Lebanon with a beer. Anne Rowe is the economist of Bittre's editor. She loved this beach. The happiest times of her childhood had been spent here, adventuring, running down to the sandy rocky shore, picking up things that became treasures and even when she was a grown-up, she would put these round her garden bits of driftwood and glass bottles, anything she could find. The house, up on the sand banks, had been built by her grandfather, belonged to her grandparents and this was the place she always wanted to come back to. But suddenly on that evening she heard a thud beside her and then someone seemed to throw sand at her. She looked down and saw it was a huge turtle which was digging a nest in the sand in order to lay its eggs. She was to find out later when she investigated it that it was a green sea turtle. It had swam probably hundreds of miles to that very place which was the place where it had hatched and that was where the green sea turtles had to return to in order to have their own young and start the cycle over again. But all men at Helile could think of as she watched it then was how beautiful it was and at that moment her life changed to become absolutely devoted to turtles. Her life before she didn't speak very much about but she had been born in Nigeria in fact, had gone to Beirut to be schooled and then had gone to the Netherlands during the Lebanese Civil War so she'd been ten years out of the country and had been quite an emotional return in 1992 the beach she loved only to find that the house had been neglected for 15 years it was in a very bad state of repair so she and a friend Habibah fired decided to take it in hand restore it and as soon as she became interested in turtles they turned it into a B&B which was also a centre for training, educating and spreading the word to all the volunteers they could entice to go there that it was vital to protect this turtle nesting site on Mansurri Beach. It was all the more important because it was a very difficult environment for turtles as it stood. First of all there were the natural hazards for the tiny little hatchlings that came out of the turtle legs they were only the size of a palm and once you let them free they were vulnerable to almost everything to dogs and foxes to the waves even to a footprint they would get trapped in those. They were vulnerable to fishermen who used dynamite near the shore and put down poison and most difficult of all they faced all the development that was going on along the Lebanese coast the hotels the blocks of flats the resorts. So Mona Calil had to campaign against all these difficulties that the hatchlings faced. First of all she rather took charge of setting them in motion in the beginning she would collect the hatchlings put them in a plastic bucket and then set them free on the beach and they had an absolute instinct to make for the sea and so they would would scurry down towards it with their little flippers going like mad get into the waves. But after that she took on the fishermen who were using dynamite and she managed to succeed in getting to stop then she tried to stop the developers she lectured the local mayors and told them that they ought to make the beach into a reserve and the mayors did so and she even went up to UN peacekeepers and told them that they must not throw their rubbish into the sea anymore. And her interaction with those peacekeepers was a reminder that war was a constant presence as well as all the other hazards that these turtle hatchlings faced. In the war of 2006 when Israel invaded Lebanon the house which she had painted orange and which was now called the orange house had been hit and eventually she and her friend had been decided to flee to Beirut. They very quickly came back but there was now a military presence there and they found there was actually a checkpoint right beside the orange house where people who came to stay would have to clear security first and this was rather a shame because the house was such a no-aces of calm otherwise. When the latest is really attacks happened she had taken the decision that she would never leave the place again. She would not go to Beirut she would stay there in her dream place. She actually made a statue for her garden out of the Israeli shells that had fallen on her house before and barricaded herself inside it. There was no other heaven but this place. It was her patch to which she had to return just as the female turtles did with unwavering determination, swimming through mile after mile of rolling sea. And row on Monahalil who was killed age 76. This was all for this episode of the Intelligence. Thank you.