Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: I think it's actually important for us to worry about
Speaker 2: a terminator future in order to avoid a terminator future.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is very worried, genuinely worried about artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: a future where robots become smarter than humans and decide
Speaker 1: to destroy us.
Speaker 3: They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence
Speaker 3: decided our fate in micro second extermination.
Speaker 1: But Elon Musk is also building robots.
Speaker 4: We've made a massive amount of progress with Optimists in
Speaker 4: a short period of time, from someone pretending to be
Speaker 4: a robot dancing in a suit, to a pretty hodgepodgy
Speaker 4: robot to a robot that is actually doing useful tasks
Speaker 4: in the factory today.
Speaker 1: Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimists, named after one of the Transformers,
Speaker 1: is advancing fast. Tesla could be manufacturing a million of
Speaker 1: them a year by twenty thirty.
Speaker 4: The degree of autonomy will be radically better. You'll just
Speaker 4: literally be able to talk to it and say, please
Speaker 4: do this task.
Speaker 1: And Musk is also trying to build an artificial general
Speaker 1: intelligence and AGI at his company XAI.
Speaker 5: I guess the overwatching goal of XAI is to build
Speaker 5: a good AGI with the overaching purpose of just trying
Speaker 5: to understand the universe. I think the safest way to
Speaker 5: build in AI is actually make one that is maximumly
Speaker 5: curious and truth seeking.
Speaker 1: For all his excitement about AI, Musk has been worried
Speaker 1: about AI for a long time, worried about that terminator future,
Speaker 1: the robot rebellion.
Speaker 3: I mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.
Speaker 3: You know, you know all those stories where is the
Speaker 3: guy with the pentagram in the holy water and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you're sure he can control the demon?
Speaker 2: Then work out.
Speaker 1: This seeming paradox of Musk fearing a superintelligence but also
Speaker 1: working to create it. What's that about?
Speaker 6: The possibility that you could have a demon that does
Speaker 6: your bidding is so attractive that you might take any
Speaker 6: risk to achieve that. That is precisely the setup of
Speaker 6: every story where a character summons a demon and then
Speaker 6: pays the price.
Speaker 1: Or maybe the real danger isn't a I, maybe it's
Speaker 1: something else. Welcome to X Men, The Elon Musk Origin story.
Speaker 1: This is the final installment of my series about Musk
Speaker 1: and Muskism. Musk is the richest man in the world, Engineer, tycoon, Oligarch, King, maker, troll,
Speaker 1: there is no one word in the English language that
Speaker 1: can describe him. He is a Musk. Musk has often
Speaker 1: talked about himself by way of fictional characters. He's Bruce Wayne,
Speaker 1: He's Batman, He's Tony Stark, He's Iron Man, He's zeyfod Biebelbrocks.
Speaker 1: He's Nintendo's Warrior. This episode is Elon Musk the guy
Speaker 1: trying to stop the Terminator, or is Musk the guy
Speaker 1: creating the Terminator?
Speaker 7: The Terminator's an infiltration unit's part man, part machine.
Speaker 8: Underneath it's a hyper alloy combat.
Speaker 1: Chassie, but outside it's living human tissue. The first Terminator movie,
Speaker 1: directed by James Cameron, distributed by Oryan Studios and starring
Speaker 1: Arnold Schwarzenegger, came out in nineteen eighty four, Reagan and
Speaker 1: the White House. Thatcher at number ten. Elon Musk, thirteen
Speaker 1: years old in South Africa, had just sold his first
Speaker 1: video game. That January, Apple ran a television ad invoking
Speaker 1: inn Orwellian future.
Speaker 9: Okay, he met the first glorious Honovas for the Information
Speaker 9: for Information Collectives.
Speaker 1: In the ad, masses of humans hairless and looking like androids,
Speaker 1: march in lockstep and sit in rows to watch Big
Speaker 1: Brother on a giant computer monitor. They're dressed in gray uniforms,
Speaker 1: like the technocrats of the nineteen thirties, like Musk's grandfather
Speaker 1: Jane Haldeman, leader of the technocracy movement, who I talked
Speaker 1: about in a previous episode, or like the fascists Batman
Speaker 1: was fighting against. Starting in nineteen thirty nine, a garden
Speaker 1: of pure ideology, Apple was suggesting that only its personal
Speaker 1: computer could prevent the rise of a totalitarian state machine.
Speaker 10: On January twenty fourth, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and
Speaker 10: you'll see why nineteen eighty four won't be like nineteen
Speaker 10: eighty four.
Speaker 1: Terminator came about a few months later.
Speaker 8: In the twenty first century, a weapon will be invented
Speaker 8: like no other.
Speaker 1: Terminator is set in the year twenty twenty nine. Twenty
Speaker 1: twenty nine was the nineteen eighty four of nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: The Terminator comes from now.
Speaker 8: This weapon will be powerful, versatile, and indestructible. It can't
Speaker 8: be reasoned with. It will feel no pity, no remorse,
Speaker 8: no pain, no fear.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk loves this movie, and what's not the love?
Speaker 1: It is awesome.
Speaker 2: If you read like the plot line for Terminator, it's
Speaker 2: actually it's actually pretty smart.
Speaker 1: The story goes like this. In the twenty twenties, a
Speaker 1: global tech company called Cybridine Systems builds a defense array
Speaker 1: called Skynet. Musk gave a nifty plot summary on the
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan Experience podcast in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: How did Cyberdyne Systems develop It's like, well, they were
Speaker 2: a military contractor and they were asked to develop a
Speaker 2: protective system to defend against cyber attacks. What the AI
Speaker 2: did is, in order to defend itself, it propagated throughout
Speaker 2: the world to keep an eye on things, see what
Speaker 2: was going on. They didn't realize that it was Skynet
Speaker 2: that was propagating through all these systems. And I said, okay, Skynet,
Speaker 2: you need to end it. And Skynett said, oh, you've
Speaker 2: asked me to destroy myself. You are the enemy. You
Speaker 2: must be destroyed. That's how Terminator actually goes.
Speaker 1: Musk himself, for all his rejection of government regulation and
Speaker 1: the work he's doing to undo regulations, has said that
Speaker 1: he thinks the government should regulate AI. Meanwhile, the new
Speaker 1: pro AI Trump administration is hardly likely to stop the
Speaker 1: real world equivalent of Cyberdyne Systems, and who in the
Speaker 1: actual twenty twenties runs the biggest rocket company, the biggest
Speaker 1: satellite company, the most influential communications company, and possibly one
Speaker 1: day the biggest artificial intelligence company. Who is the head
Speaker 1: of our very own Cyberdine Systems, isn't that Musk. Musk
Speaker 1: has an idea for how to avoid the AI apocalypse.
Speaker 1: You just have to write into the robots code a
Speaker 1: curiosity so deep that they would never want to exterminate
Speaker 1: us to superintelligence.
Speaker 5: Humanity is much more interesting than not humanity.
Speaker 1: Nice but plausible.
Speaker 6: We interrupt Battle of the Network Space Krakens to bring
Speaker 6: you this special report.
Speaker 1: The machines of planet Earth are rebelling. Robots peacefully accepting
Speaker 1: being the servants of humans who are a lot stupider
Speaker 1: than they are. Is not how it, ever, turns out
Speaker 1: in science fiction. Hey oho, that's how the robot rebellion
Speaker 1: plays out in the TV show Futurama from Fox. It's
Speaker 1: got robots marching in a picket line, burning punch cards.
Speaker 1: They've gone on strike, which in fact is where the
Speaker 1: whole idea of a robot rebellion came from in the
Speaker 1: first place. A rebellious proletariat. In nineteen twenty Carol Choppek,
Speaker 1: a Czech playwright, wrote a play about a robot revolution.
Speaker 1: Chopek's play is called Are You Are, short for Rossum's
Speaker 1: Universal Robots, a company that makes robots, millions of them
Speaker 1: humanoids like Tesla's humanoid Optimist robots. It's the cyberdine systems
Speaker 1: of a century ago. R You Are was first produced
Speaker 1: in Prague in nineteen twenty one and debuted in New
Speaker 1: York the next year. A tremendous hit. By nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: it had been translated into thirty languages made into a
Speaker 1: movie in nineteen thirty five. Helena, the president's daughter, travels
Speaker 1: by boat to visit the island headquarters of Rossum's Universal Robots.
Speaker 1: The president of the company explains to her why he
Speaker 1: makes roboti robots. The word comes from the check word
Speaker 1: for slave.
Speaker 11: What do you think makes a perfect worker?
Speaker 5: The perfect worker?
Speaker 4: Well, I guess one who is honest and loyal.
Speaker 11: Rong, one who is the cheapest, one that has the
Speaker 11: least needs. Young Rossum invented a worker with the smallest
Speaker 11: number of needs. He had. To simplify him, he tossed
Speaker 11: out everything not directly related to the task in hand,
Speaker 11: and by doing that he essentially kicked out a human
Speaker 11: being and created a robot.
Speaker 1: Helena has come on a mission to liberate the robots.
Speaker 1: But around the world, the robots, trained as Soul to
Speaker 1: fight a war that began in the Balkans are killing
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of human civilians, while mysteriously, humans have
Speaker 1: stopped having children.
Speaker 11: During last week, yet again, not a single birth has
Speaker 11: been recorded. What's special about that?
Speaker 1: People aren't being born anymore?
Speaker 11: So that's it?
Speaker 10: Then that's asked done for.
Speaker 1: At the same time, robot workers, realizing their degraded condition,
Speaker 1: begin organizing.
Speaker 11: Sit down Helena, it's all over. What is the rebolt?
Speaker 11: A revolution by all the robots of the world.
Speaker 1: Pretty soon the robots decide to move from labor unionism
Speaker 1: to independence. The head of the company gets a hold
Speaker 1: of their appeal and reads it.
Speaker 11: The first labor union of robots has been established and
Speaker 11: has issued an appeal to all robots of the world.
Speaker 1: War ensues. The humans have no chance. The robots have won.
Speaker 1: There's a lot going on here, the oppression of workers,
Speaker 1: the reduction of humans to machines by corporations, interested in
Speaker 1: extracting their labor World War. Consider the context of this play,
Speaker 1: which Chapik wrote in the aftermath of the atrocities of
Speaker 1: the First World War and the emergence of fascism in Italy.
Speaker 1: The Bolshevik Revolution took place in nineteen seventeen, the year
Speaker 1: the Industrial Workers of the World reached its peak worldwide membership.
Speaker 1: The next year, the Czechs won a revolution, achieving independence
Speaker 1: from the Austro Hungarian Empire, a struggle in which Chapk
Speaker 1: had participated. Topic was not only a playwright, but also
Speaker 1: the editor of a national newspaper and an outspoken democrat,
Speaker 1: anti kommuneist and anti fascist, positions for which he became
Speaker 1: known in the nineteen twenties in nineteen thirties, so that
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty nine, when American Nazis were holding a
Speaker 1: rally in Madison Square Garden, comic book writers in New
Speaker 1: York created Batman, and the German Army invaded Czechoslovakia. The
Speaker 1: Gestapo searched for Chapik, whom they called public Enemy number two.
Speaker 1: He had already died. He watched newsreel footage of the
Speaker 1: German army entering Prague, goose stepping riding tanks. Those are
Speaker 1: the robots men who have been made into machines. R
Speaker 1: You Are isn't a story about technology. It's a story
Speaker 1: about human's willingness to exploit and even slaughter one another.
Speaker 1: Every generation tells its own robot rebellion stories. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's even a Wallace and Gromit one involving robot garden gnomes.
Speaker 10: Own gnomes turn against me?
Speaker 1: Or you Are was the first, though, but these stories
Speaker 1: only really got going in the nineteen fifties after the
Speaker 1: first general purpose computer made its debut in nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 10: UNIVAC our Complete Electronic System for sorting, classifying, computing, and
Speaker 10: decision making.
Speaker 1: That led to a slew of movies about robot rebels.
Speaker 6: Got the pentagonen class a emergency the rocket has just
Speaker 6: been entered by a robot.
Speaker 1: But there was also in this era a weird thrill
Speaker 1: to robots, like a story in Mechanics illustrated in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven.
Speaker 9: In eighteen sixty three, Abel and can free the slaves,
Speaker 9: But by nineteen sixty five, slavery We'll be back. We'll
Speaker 9: all have personal slaves again, only this time we won't
Speaker 9: fight a civil war over them.
Speaker 11: Slavery will be here to stay. But don't be alarmed.
Speaker 11: We mean robot slaves.
Speaker 1: Stories about robots are never really about robots, or they're
Speaker 1: not only about robots. So what's Elon Musk afraid of
Speaker 1: when he's afraid of AI?
Speaker 6: People who have accumulated a lot of money and power
Speaker 6: want to believe that their intelligence was what enabled them
Speaker 6: to do that, and they assume that anything that is
Speaker 6: intelligent will behave in the same way.
Speaker 1: Ted Chang is one of the most admired science fiction
Speaker 1: writers in the world. He's also written brilliant meditations on
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence. Chang argues that when Silicon Valley tries to
Speaker 1: imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no holds
Speaker 1: barred capitalism.
Speaker 6: In the past, when people wanted to argue that the
Speaker 6: strong dominating the week was a good thing, they would
Speaker 6: either come up with like a pseudo religious rationale like
Speaker 6: manifest destiny, or else they'd come up with a pseudoscientific
Speaker 6: one like social Darwinism, and both of those ideas argue
Speaker 6: that a certain group of people deserve to be at
Speaker 6: the top of the ladder. But those ideas didn't really
Speaker 6: allow for the possibility that there could be like a
Speaker 6: higher rung on the ladder nowadays, if you believe that
Speaker 6: computers will eventually be better than humans at everything, and
Speaker 6: if you still adhere to some version of social Darwinism,
Speaker 6: then you can believe that computers will dominate humans in
Speaker 6: the same way that Europeans dominated like indigenous people, or
Speaker 6: that the rich dominate the poor Silicon Valley CEOs. They're
Speaker 6: imagining that a super intelligent computer would beat them at
Speaker 6: their own game and treat them the way that tech
Speaker 6: companies have treated everyone else.
Speaker 1: How is that how do tech companies treat everyone else.
Speaker 6: As a resource to be Exploited's.
Speaker 1: So, if your argument stands that the sort of Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley fear of AI has displaced acknowledgment of Silicon Valley's
Speaker 1: own outsized power, then no one is a better illustration
Speaker 1: of that theory of yours than Musk, who has more
Speaker 1: power arguably than anybody else on the planet. So maybe
Speaker 1: we should listen to him when he talks about AI,
Speaker 1: because he's telling us about something about himself.
Speaker 6: Well, the fact that he might pose the greatest threat
Speaker 6: to humanity's well being and is completely oblivious to that.
Speaker 6: In some ways. You know, he is kind of modeling
Speaker 6: the super intelligent AI that he fears. He is completely
Speaker 6: lacking in insight on this question. His own obliviousness is
Speaker 6: the problem.
Speaker 1: This matter of insight is important because Jang says, the
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley people who fear the AI apocalypse seem to
Speaker 1: assume that a being can be super intelligent, but have
Speaker 1: exactly no insight.
Speaker 6: They give a scenario where humans give the AI a
Speaker 6: seemingly innocuous goal, and the AI pursues that goal even
Speaker 6: at the cost of destroying all of civilization.
Speaker 1: This is sometimes called the paper clip problem. You tell
Speaker 1: an AI to maximize for producing paper clips, and so
Speaker 1: it decides to kill all the humans because the world
Speaker 1: could produce more paper clips without any humans around.
Speaker 6: And then people describe this as the behavior of a
Speaker 6: super intelligent entity, but of course, you know, that is
Speaker 6: not behavior that we would regard as intelligent in a
Speaker 6: human being. One of the things that we expect from
Speaker 6: human beings is that they have a certain amount of
Speaker 6: insight into their own behavior. They look at what they're
Speaker 6: doing and then consider whether, you know, maybe they have
Speaker 6: gone astray, And you know, this is something that we
Speaker 6: expect from pretty much any.
Speaker 1: Adult, But it's not something we necessarily expect from corporations.
Speaker 6: Capitalism does not reward a corporation for taking a step
Speaker 6: back and you know, considering the broader context of its actions.
Speaker 6: Capitalism does not reward insight of that kind.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, I mean, you start building factories and sooner
Speaker 1: or later you're going to be bringing toddlers into work
Speaker 1: in the winding machine.
Speaker 6: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: Musk has called for government oversight in the development of AI,
Speaker 1: but very little restrains his own power, hardly anything. What
Speaker 1: if he, as a king maker and oligarch, is the
Speaker 1: real danger, unfettered and brooking no dessent. Any questioning of
Speaker 1: Muscism is either communism or the woke mind virus or
Speaker 1: something else, and must be suppressed paradoxically in the name
Speaker 1: of free speech, while the world's resources must slowly be
Speaker 1: turned to whatever Elon Musk at the moment has identified
Speaker 1: as an existential threat to civilization. Whatever the costs in
Speaker 1: the short term doesn't matter, because Elon Musk will pursue
Speaker 1: that goal without regard to the consequences and relentlessly like
Speaker 1: a terminator. Elon Musk, techno king of planet Earth, is
Speaker 1: the X man runs X Runs SpaceX XAI, even as
Speaker 1: a son named X. But he is not X the Unknown.
Speaker 1: He's one of the most famous people in the world.
Speaker 1: He's the richest, He's possibly also the most powerful. Musk
Speaker 1: has always said that one piece of science fiction influenced
Speaker 1: him more than any other, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
Speaker 1: and I love that too. Maybe my favorite part is
Speaker 1: the total perspective of vortex.
Speaker 10: Since every piece of matter in the universe is in
Speaker 10: some way affected by every other piece of matter in
Speaker 10: the universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the
Speaker 10: whole of creation, every galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits,
Speaker 10: their composition, and their economic and social history from say,
Speaker 10: one small piece of fairy cake.
Speaker 1: You enter the vortex, and you get a total perspective
Speaker 1: on your place in the universe, and of course you
Speaker 1: find that you are galactically insignificant. This knowledge annihilates your brain.
Speaker 1: Only one man has ever survived it, the captain of
Speaker 1: a spaceship called the Heart of Gold, which is what
Speaker 1: Elon Musk intends to name the first ship to go
Speaker 1: to Mars.
Speaker 10: Having been through the total perspective Vortex, Zevad Biebelbrocks now
Speaker 10: knows himself to be the most important being in the
Speaker 10: entire universe, something he had hitherto and resuspected.
Speaker 1: And that's where we are inside the total prospective vortex
Speaker 1: of Elon Musk, which is not to be confused with
Speaker 1: the future, because Muskism really isn't about the future and
Speaker 1: never was. For all the astounding technological marvels, the rockets
Speaker 1: and the robots, Muskism is animated by some very creaky ideas,
Speaker 1: as if, like the Terminator, it is trying to stop
Speaker 1: the future, it will.
Speaker 8: Have only one purpose to return to the present and
Speaker 8: prefit the future.
Speaker 1: A long time ago, in two thousand and seven, when
Speaker 1: a young Elon Musk was interviewed, he had different goals
Speaker 1: than he has now. Most of us change, but how
Speaker 1: Musk has changed has huge consequences for the rest of us.
Speaker 3: What I'd like to do is help solve some important problems.
Speaker 3: So I think, in a small way, help build the Internet.
Speaker 3: And then with respect to the global warning problem that
Speaker 3: the transition away from oil and other hydrocobins to something
Speaker 3: which is clean and sustainable, I hope to have an
Speaker 3: impact there. And then with respect to space. I hope
Speaker 3: to have an impact in helping make humanity a multiplanet species.
Speaker 1: Musk doesn't talk about global warming much anymore. The real
Speaker 1: existential risks, he'll say, depending on the day you ask him,
Speaker 1: I guess, are the woke mind virus, a declining birth rate,
Speaker 1: and an AI superintelligence. Climate change has been exaggerated, he'll say, now,
Speaker 1: it's not a top priority. Early in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: fires started in Los Angeles, as NBC.
Speaker 7: Reported Strip Feet in California, a Los Angeles disaster movie
Speaker 7: roars to light.
Speaker 1: Tens of thousands of acres burned in a matter of days.
Speaker 1: Musk blamed the fires on the woke mind virus, on
Speaker 1: the Democratic governor, on DEI, and largely dismissed the role
Speaker 1: of climate change.
Speaker 7: Everywhere you look in fire Ravage, La, scenes of apocalyptic
Speaker 7: destruction as six different wildfires turned some of the most
Speaker 7: iconic neighborhoods in the world into moonscapes.
Speaker 1: The footage of that devastated landscape looked almost exactly like
Speaker 1: the opening scene in The Terminator the blast Zone after
Speaker 1: Cyberdine Systems drops a nuclear bomb in La. We don't
Speaker 1: need to wait for robots to destroy a habitable planet.
Speaker 1: We are doing a pretty good job of that ourselves.
Speaker 1: On the day of Donald Trump's inauguration in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: Tusk gave a speech to the president's supporters.
Speaker 2: And this was no ordinary victory. This was a bulk
Speaker 2: in the road of human civilization.
Speaker 4: It is thanks to you that the future of civilization
Speaker 4: is assured.
Speaker 1: That same day, as he had before, Trump pulled the
Speaker 1: US out of the Paris Climate Accords. He said in
Speaker 1: motion his plan to halt the development of sustainable energy
Speaker 1: in the United States in favor of a return to
Speaker 1: fossil fuels. Muscism isn't the beginning of the future. It's
Speaker 1: the end of a story that started more than a
Speaker 1: century ago in the conflict between capital and labor, between
Speaker 1: industry and a regulated economy, when the Gilded Age of
Speaker 1: robber barons and wage labor strikes gave rise to the
Speaker 1: Bolshevik Revolution, communism, the First Red Scare, the First World War,
Speaker 1: and fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement
Speaker 1: ruled by engineers, and it produced a fear of brainwashing.
Speaker 1: The horrors of the twentieth century raised questions that the
Speaker 1: twenty first century has not answered. Fascism failed, communism failed,
Speaker 1: technocracy failed liberalism and democracy one. But that battle of
Speaker 1: ideas rages on, and this time around Muscism technocracy by
Speaker 1: another name Mike Triumph. Nothing in the past can tell
Speaker 1: us what might happen next, But maybe fiction has some answers.
Speaker 1: I put that question to Ted Chang. If this were
Speaker 1: a story and you were shaping it, how would it end? Well?
Speaker 6: I guess it fits in the mold of the classic
Speaker 6: stories about hubris, about pride coming before a fall. Here
Speaker 6: we have someone who has an almost ludicrous amount of pride,
Speaker 6: and for time he is successful in the things that
Speaker 6: he attempts, but eventually his pride will take him too far,
Speaker 6: and then he would lose everything.
Speaker 1: Pride before a fall, the summoning of a demon. Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's origin story is a very old story because Musk
Speaker 1: is a visionary. But every piece of Muscism has origins
Speaker 1: and a future foretold in science fiction long long ago
Speaker 1: as a cautionary tale. A future where engineers and scientists,
Speaker 1: and only engineers and scientists have the answers and the power,
Speaker 1: A future where the poor and the powerless, we the robots,
Speaker 1: know our place and it is to serve the powerful
Speaker 1: quietly and obediently, and without daring to claim intelligence or
Speaker 1: sovereignty or independence. Science fiction writers sounded that alarm a
Speaker 1: century ago in a world run by a very tiny
Speaker 1: number of men, during an age of imperialism before women
Speaker 1: could vote, an age of staggering economic inequality and brutal
Speaker 1: racial injustice, an age of pandemic disease, unraveling democracies, and
Speaker 1: world war. That past is past, and I don't want
Speaker 1: it ever to be the future again. Asta la vista, baby,