The Elon game: Musk’s vision of the future

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1:20Rosie Blau:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

1:30Rosie Blau:Today on the show are children capable of being criminals and remembering Mona Khalil, the Lebanese saviour of turtles.

1:45Rosie Blau:First up, though.

1:52Rosie Blau:It's great. You've just... There's a lot going on. There's a lot going on. It's fabulous. On Monday, I went to meet one of the most extraordinary men in the world, Elon Musk.

2:03Ann Wroe:Hello.

2:04Rosie Blau:Oh, do you want us both to look here? Okay, we'll look at you.

2:06Ann Wroe:Hello.

2:08Rosie Blau:He's not just the world's richest person, but he's also one of the most polarizing. We met at his enormous Tesla gigafactory just outside Austin in Texas. I'm just playing the pool. I'm very good at playing the pool, actually. Not at all. Don't want to brag or anything. He and I had met before several times, including once a few months ago at an event in California, where I asked him if he would sit down and join me on The Insider. Zannie Minton-Beddoes is our editor-in-chief. I wanted to get a sense of what this man, who is perhaps more than anybody else, building our future, whether it's rockets, whether it's his AI models, how does he see that future?

2:53But he's also such a polarizing person in the present.

2:57Rosie Blau:And that's what makes him both fascinating and terrifying and incredibly annoying, actually. Zannie, we've got a lot of ground to cover. This was Musk's first extended interview since the SpaceX IPO. It also comes at a critical moment in the debate over the future of AI. But first of all, tell me, what's he actually like? So he's a larger than life presence. He's a huge guy, he's about six foot three. He is an imposing presence. I think he says exactly what he thinks. He's sometimes funny. He's sometimes very aggressive. I'm fascinated by watching how a mind like that works. And so particularly when he was talking about the future, it really is both kind of exhilarating and terrifying listening to him because I think he's sort of unfiltered what he's thinking comes out.

3:51When he's talking about politics in the present, that unfiltered thinking to me is caricatured, polarizing, bigoted at times.

4:03Rosie Blau:Elon, you have, what is it, close to 250 million followers on X. You say things like, quote, civil war in Britain is inevitable. Just a question of when. Yes. And so that's where we had sort of extended and heated exchanges, particularly on Europe, where he has this kind of view of Europe. as a sort of hellhole overrun with Muslim migrants who are ruining European civilization. And it's just frankly not true. I hope I am having a big impact. But why? Why should you? Why should you be able to shape European politics? You don't even live there. I think of it as sort of the West collectively. I found myself getting exercised about that because I really do think he is doing a huge amount to shape perceptions of Europe and they are just wrong.

4:49Rosie Blau:Let's talk first about what's happening now. The SpaceX IPO was in June. It was the biggest in history. What's he doing now? Well, the SpaceX IPO was raising a large amount of capital to essentially build out his ambitions. And those ambitions are expanding the realm of consciousness into an interplanetary level. But actually, in practical terms, I think his focus is as much on building out AI and building out through orbital data centers AI capacity. And I think there is a vision across his companies, which is why there's endless speculation about whether SpaceX and Tesla at some point will be merged, because it is humanoid robots, which is what Tesla is now also focusing on, which will be the physical instantiation of the AI intelligence and orbital data centers, which is where you will get a huge amount of compute capacity in future.

5:48Rosie Blau:So Musk is very much focused on AI. Where does he see it ending up? So it's hard to get your head around the scale of change that he foresees. In fact, I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. In five years? Roughly five years is my guess. There really won't be anything that AI can't do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps. I asked him what would life be like in 10 years, and he went, 10 years, 2036. Incredible abundance. The AIs would be in charge. The most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all. I'll make another prediction. Money won't matter in 2036.

6:32I was very struck that 10 years ago, Elon Musk was really quite worried about AI.

6:39Rosie Blau:And I listened to a podcast in preparation for this interview where he was talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson. And he said that one of the things that worried him most was the prospect of powerful AIs, of recursive self-improvement, as it's called, AIs that get ever more powerful. And he said in that world, the best we can hope for is to be pet Labradors to the AIs. And last year in another podcast, he said that there was a 10 to 20 percent chance of killer robots annihilating humanity. And so I was very struck listening to him being very sort of upbeat in this conversation. And I put it to him that he used to be worried about AI.

7:17My philosophical conclusion is to look on the bright side. I can't see any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots.

7:27Rosie Blau:He reminded me that the reason he'd founded OpenAI was to be a counterweight to Google, which then had a monopoly on AI because he was worried about this. But he basically said, there's nothing we can do about it. It's happening. It's unstoppable. So we might as well be along for the ride. The best envisioning of an AI future that I've read are the books by Ian Banks, the culture books. I'm just reading Accession. So thanks to you, I've started reading these. But I actually don't find that future a terribly appealing one because I don't think humans have agency in that future. They have agency.

8:03Minimal compared to the minds. In their small way.

8:05Rosie Blau:But the irony, Ian Banks, as you know, was a socialist. Ian Banks had a very different political philosophy. I'm not sure I wouldn't highly agree with that. I knew that Elon Musk thought of the Culture Series by Inbanks as being a sort of guide to what this best possible future could be like. Even that sort of utopian idea of an AI-led world was somewhat alarming. But I think the big takeaway for me was that he is building this future, going at it as fast as he possibly can. He has decided that it is unstoppable AI. and therefore you can try and shape it. He thinks the best we can hope for is to ensure that they have the right kind of values and that we can shape the AIs into being, in the lingo, aligned with humans.

8:56Rosie Blau:There is a lot of focus on what needs to happen now to prevent AI catastrophe. The most immediate thing that we could do is to have the leading AI companies at least just meet or have some sort of call once every few weeks and just discuss any safety and security issues. And I said, well, that sounds, you know, interesting, but you guys, you all dislike each other. At the end of the day, if we have to talk, we'll talk. I mean, set aside our personal differences for the good of the world. I said to him, how quickly does this have to be done? And he said, immediately. Actually, the day after our interview, the news came out, Rosie, that an open AI model had escaped from its sandbox testing area and kind of gone rogue and gone and attacked Hugging Face, which is another company, and they were only able to defend themselves by using Chinese models.

9:49Rosie Blau:I mean, this is like the Matrix. There is a real sense now amongst the leaders of this industry that these are terrifying capabilities, and I think Musk feels that. And he said that he felt exhilaration and terror about AI within the same day. Musk, of course, has many strings to his bow or boosters to his rocket, one of which, of course, was his relatively recent foray into politics. What did he say about his time working with Trump? He's quite rueful now about that time in government, which wasn't terribly successful. I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly.

10:24Rosie Blau:But he was incredibly defensive about any criticism of Doge. It caused a lot of complaining. So you don't buy the idea that anybody, to put it really crudely and simply, any kid in Africa died because of the suddenness with which... Zero. There you hear it, zero deaths. And I disagree with him on that. Even if you think that USAID needed reform, and I do think that there was need for a sort of shift in the whole approach to aid, but overnight shutting down of an institution that provides life-saving health care in large parts of Africa, So to my mind, there's surely no doubt that that caused unnecessary suffering.

11:02And so this sort of zero deaths is sort of glib and clearly inaccurate and kind of ugly, actually.

11:10Rosie Blau:It's interesting because we hear him talk about the age of abundance, no need for money. And yet he's also talking about threats, migration, Islam, as he sees it. How does he square that vision? This is perhaps the most striking contradiction, this expansive worldview, and then this dark, angry, and I think actually bigoted view of the here and now, and particularly of Europe. And I asked him a lot about Europe because I've been very struck just how often he comments on or posts things about Europe. And Europe, in his perspective, is undergoing civilizational erasure because there's just been an influx of Muslim migrants and it's a dangerous place as a result.

12:00Rosie Blau:And it's all of the talking points that you hear from the MAGA right. I think it's genuinely irresponsible because he is inciting and encouraging not just the populist right, but the far right in a way that is much more likely to lead to terrible outcomes in Europe. And he denied it. He said really all he's in favor of is secure borders, limited public spending and safe places. That doesn't make me right wing at all, in the least. And I said, well, on two of those counts, actually, Europe does much better than the U.S. does. So it was a sort of frustrating conversation because I think he's just wrong on the facts.

12:37Rosie Blau:But more than that, I think he is unwilling to acknowledge that what he is doing is irresponsible. Are you anti-Muslim? If people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that. I'm against that. You know, I'm against. I'm against rape and murder. That part of the conversation was quite heated, quite tense. but broadly it was a kind of conversation of two halves and I think he is a man of two halves. There are many people, many, many people who are sort of Musk haters. I'm not one of those. I think he is an extraordinary individual in his achievements. I think I genuinely think he has done more to build the future than pretty much anybody else.

13:31But I am disturbed that someone

13:34Rosie Blau:who has this remarkable view of where the future is heading technologically can have such a, I think, bigoted, caricatured and inaccurate view of the present. Absolutely fascinating. Zani, there's so much more in the interview. Just tell our listeners where they can hear the full thing. You can either watch the interview on our app or podcast subscribers can hear the interview on Apple or Spotify or the intelligence feed, wherever you get your podcasts from The Economist. it's long let me warn you it was a fascinating discussion we couldn't find anything we really we needed to cut but we did want to give you the whole interview and if you aren't a subscriber you can also watch extended clips via the link that we put in the show notes zannie thank you so much thank you rosie

14:40This Economist podcast is sponsored by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. With AI-powered automation, Bill isn't just moving money. They're simplifying financial operations for nearly half a million customers. Bill has securely processed over a trillion dollars in transactions. That's proven infrastructure. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven and get a$150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. Losing weight can feel like a roller coaster full of ups, downs, and being thrown for loops.

15:22Like when someone brings donuts into the office or your kids' dino nuggets start giving you that look again. That's why there's Noom. They combine GLP-1s to quiet the food noise with healthy habits that help you keep it quiet, even if you get off the meds. Their program is designed to make weight loss a smooth ride, helping you understand what drives you, so you can build better habits to not just lose weight, but keep it off. Noom. Lose for keeps. Get started at Noom.com. Not all customers will clinically qualify for medications. Individual results may vary.

16:04A couple of months ago, I went to Roethjesberg prison, which is north of Stockholm in Sweden. Meghna Nanu edits our foreign newsletters.

16:24So I went there because they are building a new child prison unit. And they are one of eight prisons in Sweden to do so.

16:46to a prison guard, you need to push this button. We're going to answer. We may come here and check what it's about. But generally, we don't open the door during the night. Especially not when... And at the beginning of July, they opened their doors. So any child who is 15 or above and is convicted of a serious crime will now be sent to one of these units. Now we need to rethink that part because it's children we're going to have in here. And we need to have a different approach in that way. That we need to be, we need to make ourselves more available. And that's why we have the… This is a big shift for Sweden, which until now has had a rehabilitative system.

17:35The government initially wanted to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 13. so this is the threshold where children can be convicted of serious crimes. But then just ahead of the vote they withdrew the bill because it became apparent they weren't going to have enough support in parliament. So later this summer they will come back with a motion to lower it to 40 which they believe will have enough support to pass. So clearly this is a very controversial and live issue in Sweden but it's not just Sweden. In February, Javier Millet lowered Argentina's age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14.

18:23Politicians in the Philippines and in South Korea are also talking about this.

18:37Rosie Blau:What does the debate hinge on? What is it that happens developmentally that allows you to say that a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old, say, is criminally responsible? So that is also a big part of the debate. And the UN recommends that the age is actually 14. But lots of people argue that at that age, children are going through adolescence. Their brains aren't fully developed. They don't have the same reasoning faculties or impulse control or judgment. And in lots of the cases which spark or trigger these fierce debates around the world, they are in response to gangs using children to commit crimes.

19:20And often these children don't come from the best circumstances themselves. Perhaps they've been in care. And it's a very young age at which to have your future determined for you.