Founder of SpaceX, co-founder of Tesla, and just an overall genius, Elon Musk has been at the forefront of some of the world’s most revolutionary ideas in the past few years.
And as the inventor looks towards the future of our world, he has some unique ideas of how it will look. Here are some of his craziest predictions.
Musk has predicted in ten years, half of the new vehicles in the United States will be electric.
Going beyond just vehicles in the United States, Musk wholeheartedly believes that all forms of transportation will eventually become electric. He said this in July of this year:
“There’s no question in my mind what so ever that all transport, with the ironic exception of rockets, will go fully electric. Everything. Planes, trains, automobiles, all ships. But it’s a question of what that timeframe is.”
Musk believes that tunnels will be a huge part of the future of ground transportation. He is already aiming to build a large network of underground tunnels that would have electric tracks to move cars. The tracks would be able to reach speeds up to 125 miles per hour.
Musk believes that cars will be fully autonomous in 20 years and that steering wheels will be obsolete:
“I think that all cars will go fully autonomous in long-term. I think it will be quite unusual to see cars that don’t have full autonomy. Any cars that are being made that don’t have full autonomy will have negative value. It will be like owning a horse. You will only be owning it for sentimental reasons.”
Because of the eventual autonomous nature of cars and other machinery, Musk thinks that millions of jobs will no longer be available to humans. He believes that automation will result in “fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.”
“There’s a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation. I’m not sure what else one would do. That’s what I think would happen.”
This is something Musk said in November of last year and he reiterated it this July, saying, “I think we’ll end up doing universal basic income. I think it’s going to be necessary.”
Musk’s SpaceX program is aiming to get to fly to Mars starting in 2024, and he believes we will colonize the red planet by 2025 and “make it a nice place to live.”
Musk believes that artificial intelligence is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He said this earlier this year:
“In my opinion, it is the biggest risk that we face as a civilization, is artificial intelligence.”
Vladimir Putin recently said that whatever country becomes the leader in artificial intelligence will become “the ruler of the world.”
Musk then tweeted this in response to Putin’s comments, saying that he believes that the competition for AI supremacy will precipitate World War III:
“China, Russia, soon all countries w strong computer science. Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3 imo.”
Musk insinuated at the National Governors Association in July that robots could manipulate problems that could have drastic effects.
“There are robots that can learn to walk from nothing within hours, like way faster than any biological being. The thing that is most dangerous is…a kind of deep intelligence in the network. And you say what harm could a deep intelligence in the network do? Well, it could start a war by doing fake news and spoofing email accounts and fake press releases and just by manipulating information. The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Musk said in February at the World Government Summit in Dubai that essentially humans and robots will need to symbiotically merge if humans want to survive.
“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output. Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.”
(h/t Business Insider)
