🌊 The Elon Interview That Everyone Should Read

Before Elon was profiting from AI, he issued one of the starkest warnings he could

Back in 2017, then-New Mexico Governor Brian Sandoval interviewed Elon Musk at the National Governors Association summer meeting.

It was a very different world: Elon was a Democrat who didn’t rank among the ten richest people in the world. He seemed calm and sober. His biggest company, Tesla, was only worth $50B. Jeffrey Epstein was alive. Trump was battling Russiagate. “AI” was a buzzword widely believed to be more science fiction than reality.

In his conversation with Governor Sandoval, Musk started out optimistic: By 2037, he predicted, “there will not be a steering wheel….It will be like having a horse.” Solar power would soon replace fossil fuels, with all of the country’s energy needs potentially stored in a one-mile-by-one-mile battery.

But then the tone switched.

“Somebody asked me to ask you this,” Sandoval said. Smiling, he said, “Are robots going to take all our jobs, everybody’s jobs, in the future? How much do you see artificial intelligence coming into the workplace?”

Elon replied:

Well first of all, on the artificial intelligence front, I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it. I keep sounding the alarm bell.

Until people see, like, robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal. And, I think we should all be really concerned about AI.

AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation, instead of reactive.

By the time we are reactive with AI regulation it is too late.

And normally the way regulations are set up is: A whole bunch of bad things happen, there is a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry.

There is a bunch of opposition from companies who don’t like being told what to do by regulators – and it takes forever.

That, in the past, has been, bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.

AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs, or bad food were not. They were harmful to a set of individuals within society, but they were not harmful to society as a whole.

AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don’t think people fully appreciate that.

It is not fun being regulated, it is not – it can be pretty irksome. But in the car business we get regulated by the Department of Transportation, the EPA, and a couple of others. There are such agencies in every country. In space we get regulated by FAA. And, if you asked the average person if they want to get rid of the FAA, just like take a chance on manufacturers not cutting corners in the aircraft because profits were down that quarter. Hell no, that sounds terrible.

I think even people who are extremely libertarian and free market think we should probably have somebody keeping an eye on the airplane companies making sure they build a good aircraft. And cars and everything. There is a role for regulators, but I am against over regulation for sure.

I think we’ve got to get on that with AI pronto. And there will certainly be a lot of job disruption.

Because what will happen is: Robots will do everything better than us. I’m included. All of us.

I’m not sure exactly what to do about this.

The crowd laughed, but Elon stayed serious and kept talking.