Opinion
With his vast wealth and influence spanning industries from electric vehicles to rockets to artificial intelligence, Elon Musk has emerged as a central figure in shaping humanity’s future. Amid this rapid technological change, should visionaries like Musk be our best hope – or our greatest concern?
Musk’s Expanding Reach
Musk’s impact reaches far beyond his business ventures. He has recently taken to politics (or some for of it), backing Donald Trump’s presidential bid and denouncing European leaders on X, formerly Twitter. “Escaping from his high-tech domain of electric vehicles and rockets, Musk has bulldozed his way into the political arena,” writes one commentator, who compares Musk to a Bond villain.
Yet Elon Musk’s true importance is in his role in world-altering technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). He predicts that AI will soon render most jobs obsolete, noting “There will come a point where no job is needed…AI will do everything.” When Musk launched xAI, an AI company, he timed the announcement so the date (7/12/23) added up to 42 – the answer to “life, the universe and everything” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So yes, he’s a nerd, and no, we’re not shocked.
Read More: Elon Musk Predicts Brain Chips Will Be in ‘Hundreds of Millions’ of People Within 20 Years
The AI Reckoning
As AI’s capabilities grow exponentially, even its creators express apprehension to where it may be headed. Mustafa Suleyman, founder of AI pioneer DeepMind, warns “we’re headed towards the emergence of something that we are all struggling to describe… we cannot control what we don’t understand.”
Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence “godfather” and Nobel laureate, once expressed regret over his life’s work. He recently raised his estimate of the odds that AI could wipe out humanity in the next 30 years from 10% to 20%. Many experts have called for a development pause until safety measures are in place.
Neuralink’s Promise and Peril
Elon Musk is also behind Neuralink, a brain-computer interface that aims to combat paralysis and “unlock human potential.” Its N1 implant, thinner than a human hair, would allow users to control devices via 1024 microscopic electrodes in the brain. While enormously promising for treating disabilities, the concept raises unsettling questions around privacy, security, and the concept of transhumanism – if pursued to its fullest capacity.
Humanity’s Existential Gamble
The now-shuttered Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford (FHI) dedicated itself to studying existential risks facing our species, particularly from AI. In his 2023 book The Precipice, FHI fellow Toby Ord argued that “safeguarding humanity’s future is among the most important moral issues of our time.”
FHI, in which Elon Musk was a founding member, focused on exotic, under-explored threats like weaponized pathogens, molecular nanotechnology, and of course artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems equaling or surpassing human cognition. An unfriendly AGI, in their analysis, could pose a catastrophic or even extinction-level danger to humanity.
To the Stars
Musk’s SpaceX continues to transform space travel with reusable rockets like the Falcon Heavy, capable of generating thrust equal to 18 Boeing 747s. Meanwhile, its Starshield program aims to create a secured satellite network for government and military use.
In the long run, Elon Musk sees off-world colonies as essential to preserving humanity. “We must make life multiplanetary to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen,” he said in a U.S. Senate hearing. For Musk, even the cosmos is just another industry to disrupt.
Prophet or Pariah?
As Musk continue to sit at the helm of major powers steering our future, his influence over the human story seems poised to grow. In a world where “nobody knows what the jobs market will look like in 2050,” are we prepared to place such far-reaching power in the hands of a volatile mega-billionaire with a penchant for controversy?
Only time will tell whether Musk and his plans will prove to be humanity’s saviors or its undoing. In grappling with that question, we must urgently reckon with the challenges and opportunities ahead – and the reality that, as FHI put it, “safeguarding humanity’s future is among the most important moral issues of our time.” The stakes for our species have never been higher.