Elon Musk

In a recent interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, the Economist’s Editor-in-Chief, Elon Musk was asked what the world will look like in ten years. He replied that it will be dominated by AI whose intelligence surpasses the sum of human intelligence — that “there really won’t be anything AI can’t do better than humans, except perhaps for the humans to be human.” The most likely outcome, he continued, is an “age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of,” a “quasi-infinite economy” in which “the magnitude of change is indescribable.” AI and robots, in his telling, will control the production of goods and services, generating more than any human could possibly consume. The only real task left for us, in this vision, is to ensure that AI has good values, cares about humanity, and is maximally truth-seeking and curious.