SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in Dubai to launch Tesla in the United Arab Emirates at the World Government Summit Monday. The South African billionaire inventor was interviewed onstage and gave his opinion on aliens, artificial intelligence, universal basic income and the future of humanity. Below are some highlights.
Universal basic income will solve the economic problems caused by automation. However, the existential problems that come from a world with few workers will be harder to solve, Musk said.
"There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I want to be clear. These are not things I wish will happen; these are things I think probably will happen. And if my assessment is correct and they probably will happen, than we have to think about what are we going to do about it? I think some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary. The output of goods and services will be extremely high. With automation there will come abundance. Almost everything will get very cheap. I think we'll end up doing universal basic income. It's going to be necessary. The much harder challenge is, how are people going to have meaning? A lot of people derive their meaning from their employment. So if there's no need for your labor, what's your meaning? Do you feel useless? That's a much harder problem to deal with."Humans will need to meld their brains with digital intelligence. Humans can communicate by typing with their fingers at about 10 bits per second, while computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second," Musk said. The human brain will need to combine with technology to keep up.
"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.”