Elon Musk : How to Build the Future

today we have Elon Musk Eon thank you for joining us thanks having right so we want to spend the time today talking about your view of the future and what people should work on so to start off could you tell us you famously said when you were younger there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on um if you were 22 today what would the five problems that you would think about working on B well first of all is it I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society I think that's a good thing like it doesn't have to change the world like you know if you make something that has high value to people and frankly even if it's something if it's like just a little game or you know the some improvement in photo-sharing or something if it if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people that's I mean I think that's that's fine like stuff doesn't need to be change the world just to be good but you know in terms of things that I think are most likely to affect the the future of humanity I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity so it's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way but that is something that if you if you could look into a crucible and enter the future you would like you would like that outcome because it is something that could go could go wrong and as we've talked about many times and so we really need to make sure it goes right that's that's I think AI working on ai and making sure it's great future that's that's the most important thing I think right now the most pressing item sec then obviously I think Institute with with genetics if you can actually solve genetic diseases if you can promote dementia or Alzheimer's or something like that that was genetic reprogramming that would be wonderful so I think this genetics it might be the sort of second most important item I think having a high bandwidth interface to the brain like we're currently bandwidth-limited we have a digital tertiary self in the form of our email capabilities like computers phones applications we're effectively superhuman but we're extremely bad with constraint in that interface between the cortex and your sort of that the tertiary digital form of yourself and helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be I think very important for the future as well so one of the I think most common questions I hear young people and bishops young people ask is I want to be the next to go musk how do I do that um obviously the next Elon Musk will work on very different things then than you did but what have you done or what did you do when you were younger that you think sort of set you up to have a big impact well I think this well I should say that I do not expect to be involved in all these things so the the the five things that I thought about the time in college still quite a long time ago 25 years ago you know being you know making life multiplanetary selling accelerating the transition to sustainable energy the the Internet broadly speaking and then genetics and AI I think I didn't expect to be involved in in all of those things I actually at the time in college I sort of thought helping with electrification a bit of cars which was how we start out and that's a that's actually what I worked on as an intern was advanced ultra capacitors with to see thick there would be a breakthrough relative to batteries for energy storage and in cars and then when I came out to go to Stanford that's what I was going to be doing my grad studies on is it was working on her best at energy storage technologies for electric cars and I put that on hold to start an Internet company in 95 because that that does seem to be like a time for particular technologies when there at a steep point in the inflection code and and I didn't want to you know do a PhD at Stanford and then and what sure will happen and then and I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed I can get you can get a you know doctrine on many things that ultimately are not do not have a practical bearing on the world and I wanted to you know just I really was just trying to be useful that's the optimization it's like what do what can I do that would actually be useful do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs um mostly not so what what is the best some yes but mostly not how should someone figure out how they can be most useful whatever this thing is that you're trying to create what would what would be the utility Delta compared to the current state-of-the-art times how many people it would affect so that's why I think having something that has that that has a mix makes a big difference but effects a sort of small to moderate number of people is great as is something that makes even a small difference but but affects a vast number of people like the area yeah on you know under the yeah exactly the area under the curve is would actually be roughly similar for those two things so it's actually really about yeah just trying to be useful and matter when you're trying to estimate probability of success so you say something will be really useful good area under the curve I guess to use the example of SpaceX mmm-hmm when you made the NGO decision that you were actually going to do that this was kind of a very crazy thing at the time very crazy there shortly yeah I'm not shy about saying that but I kind of agree I agreed with them that it was quite crazy crazy if if the objective was to achieve the best risk adjusted return sliding our company is insane but that was not that was not my objective why I I'd totally come to the conclusion that if something didn't happen to improve ROC technology would be stuck on earth forever and and the big aerospace companies had just had no interest in radical innovation all they wanted to do is try to make their old technology slightly better every year and in fact sometimes we would actually get worse and particularly in Rockets is pretty bad like the in 69 we were able to go to the moon with a Saturn 5 and then the space shuttle could only take people to low-earth orbit and then the Space Shuttle retired and that trend is basically trends to zero it feels I think technology just automatically gets better over year but I actually doesn't it only gets better if smart people work work like crazy to make it better that's how any technology actually gets better and by itself technology if people don't work and it actually will decline you can look at the history of civilizations many civilizations and look at say ancient Egypt were they able to pull these incredible pyramids and then they basically forgot how to hold permit and and then even hieroglyphics they forgot how to read hydrocal hieroglyphics so we look at Rome and how they will to look to build these incredible roadways and aqueducts and indoor plumbing and they forgot how to do all of those things and there are many such examples in history so I I think choice bear in mind that you know entropy is not on your side yeah one thing I really like about you is you are unusually fearless and willing to go in the face of other people telling you something that's crazy and I know a lot of pretty crazy people you still stand out where does that come from or how do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea where do you get the internal strength to do that well first of all I'd say I actually think I feel feel fair quite strongly so it's not as though I just have the absence of fear I've I feel it quite strongly but there are times when something is important enough you believe in it enough that you do it in spite of the fear so speaking of important things like people shouldn't think I I I should if you think well I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn't do it it's normal to be to feel fair like you'd have to definitely something mentally wrong you should feel fair so you just feel it and let the importance of it drive you to do it anyway yeah you know actually something that can be helpful as fatalism some degree if you just think it's just accept the probabilities then that diminishes fear so my starting SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose lose everything but that maybe would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward even if we died maybe some other company could pick up the baton and move and keep moving it forward so that were still do some good yeah same with Tesla I thought your odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low what do you think the odds of the Mars colony are at this point today well um oddly enough I actually think they're pretty good so like when can I go okay at this point I am certain there is a way I'm certain that success is one of the possible outcomes for establishing a self-sustaining moss colony in fact growing lost colony I'm certain that that is possible whereas until maybe a few years ago I was not sure that success was even one of the possible outcomes it's a meaningful number of people going to Mars I think this is potentially something that can be accomplished in about 10 years maybe sooner I mean maybe 9 years I need to make sure that SpaceX doesn't die between now and then and that I don't die or if I do die that someone takes over who will continue that you shouldn't go on the first launch yeah exactly like the first launch will be a robotic anyway so I want to go except for that internet latency yeah they were at latency to be pretty significant I Mars is roughly 12 light minutes from the Sun and Earth is 8 light minutes so closest approach Mazdas 4 light minutes away that furthest approaches 20 a little more because you have to you can't sort of talk directly through the Sun speaking of really important problems um AI so you have been outspoken about AI um could you talk about what you think the positive future for AI looks like and how we get there okay I mean I do want to emphasize that um this is not really something that I advocate or this is not prescriptive this is simply pretty hopefully predictive as you look so I'm Sayla well like this is something that I want to occur instead of so this I mean I think that probably is the best of the available alternatives the best of the available alternatives that I can come up with and maybe somebody else can come up with a better approach or better outcome is that we achieve democratization of AI technology meaning that no one company or small set of individuals has control over advanced AI technology like that that's very dangerous it could also get stolen by somebody bad you know like some evil dictator or country could send their intelligence agency to go steal it and gain control it just becomes a very unstable situation I think if you've got any any incredibly powerful AI you just don't know who's who's going to control that so it's not as I think that the risk is that the AI would develop a will of its own right off the bat I think it's more that's the consumers that some someone may use it in a way that is bad or and even if they weren't going to use in a way that's bad but somebody could take it from them and use it in a way that's bad that that I think is quite a big danger so I think we must have democratization of AI technology make it widely available and that's you know the reason that obviously you mean the rest the team you know created open AI was to help with the democracy our a AI technology so it doesn't get concentrated in the hands of a few and but then that of course that needs to be combined with solving the high bandwidth interface to the cortex humans are so slow humans are so slow yes exactly but you know we already have a situation in our brain where we've got the cortex and limbic system and the limbic system is kind of a mess that's the primitive brain it's kind of like the your instincts and whatnot and then the cortex is thinking of a part of the brain those two seem to work together quite well occasionally your cortex and limbic system may disagree but they attending it works pretty generally works pretty well and it's like rare to find someone who I've not found someone who wishes to either get rid of the cortex or get rid of the Olympic system very true yeah it's that's unusual so so I think if we can effectively merge with AI by improving that the neural link between your cortex and the your digital extension yourself which already likes that already exists just has a bandwidth issue and then then effectively you become an AI human symbiote and and if that then is widespread with anyone who wants it can have it then we solve a control problem as well we don't have to worry about some sort of evil dictator AI because kind of we are the AI collectively that seems like the best outcome I can think of so you've seen other companies in the early days that start small and get really successful um hope I don't regret asking this on camera but how do you think open AI is going as a six month old company I taste you go pretty well I think we've got a really talented group what opening eye and yeah really really talented team and they're working hard open a is structured as see a 501c3 nonprofit but you know many nonprofits do not have a sense of urgency it's fine they don't have to have a sense of urgency but opening ideas is I think people really believe in the mission I think it's important and it's about minimizing the risk of existential harm in the future and so I think it's going well I'm pretty impressed with what people are doing in the talent level and obviously we're always looking for great people to join we call a mission list of 40 people knots yes well well alright just a few more questions before we we wrap up how do you spend your days now like what what do you allocate most of your time to my time is mostly split what's between SpaceX and Tesla and of course I I try to spend it's a part of every week at opening I so I spend most I spend basically half a day at opening I most weeks and then and then I have some open enough that happens during the week but other than that it's really traceable interlaced like so Tesla like what is your time look like there yeah so it's a good question um I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on business II things but actually almost almost all my time like 80% of it is spent on engineering design in engineering and design so it's developing next generation product at that's 80% of it you probably remember this a very long time ago many many years you took me on a tour of SpaceX and the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it I don't think many people get that about you yeah I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something it just fine like business is fine but um a guy it really it's you know it was like it SpaceX Gwynne Shotwell was chief operating officer she kind of manages legal finance sales and kind of general business activity and then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving that the Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft and developing the most colonial architecture I mean that Tesla it's working on the model 3 and yes I'm in the design studio to agree up happening a week dealing with its aesthetics and and look and feel things and then most of our week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory because the biggest epiphany I've had thus this year is that what really matters is that is the machine that builds the machine the factory and this that is at least towards my to eat harder than the vehicle itself it's amazing to watch the robots go here and these cars just happen yeah now this actually is has a relatively low level of automation compared to what the gigafactory will have and what model 3 will have what's the speed on the line of these cars actually average the line is incredibly slow it's probably about a both X and s it's maybe a 5 you know 5 centimeters per second and what can you go this is very slow or what would you like to get to I'm confident we can get to to at least 1 meter per second so 20-fold increase that would be very fast yeah um at least I mean I think quite a 1 meter per second just put that in perspective is a slow walk or a good medium speed walk a fast walk could be 1 and 1/2 meters per second and and then the fastest humans can run over 10 meters per second so if we're only doing point zero five meters per second that's very slow current current flow speed and and at 1 meter per second you can still walk faster than the production line

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,421,441

Rating: 4.9336486 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, elon musk, tesla

Id: tnBQmEqBCY0

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/TheBrazilianKD]

Man the background is so cool..

[u/oliversl]

Thanks for the link! In the video description there is this link: Elon at Y combinator

[u/Hamspankin]

Best interview in a long long time.

[u/LoveandFreedom]

Only Sam Altman gets to interview him from now on.

[u/JBStroodle]

Elon is getting a little portly. C'mon buddy.

[u/Theyallknowme]

He said, "I know some pretty crazy people and you still stand out". Ha! Love it :)

[u/spacegurl07]

And its on SoundCloud, too. :)

[u/rreighe2]

That was an abrupt ending...

[u/YugoReventlov]

So, about that production line speed. Is he planning on having Model 3 production lines as fast as 1m/sec - which as he says is a 20-fold increase compared to Model S/X production lines?