Lex FridmanThe following is a conversation with Elon Musk, part two. The second time we spoke on the podcast, with parallels, if not in quality then at least in spirit, to objectively speaking the greatest sequel of all time, Godfather Part Two. As many people know, Elon Musk is a leader of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company. Well, maybe less known is that he's a world-class engineer and designer, constantly emphasizing first-principles thinking and taking on big engineering problems that many before him considered impossible.
Lex FridmanAs scientists and engineers, most of us don't question the way things are done. We simply follow the momentum of the crowd. But revolutionary ideas that change the world on the small and large scales happen when you return to the fundamentals and ask, is there a better way? This conversation focuses on the incredible engineering and innovation done in brain-computer interfaces and Neuralink.
Lex FridmanThis work promises to help treat neurobiological diseases, to help us further understand the connection between the individual neuron and the high-level function of the human brain, and finally to one day expand the capacity of the brain through two-way communication with computational devices, the internet, and artificial intelligence systems.
Lex FridmanThis is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, Lex Fridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now, as an anonymous YouTube commenter referred to our previous conversation as the quote "historical first video of two robots conversing without supervision," here's the second time, the second conversation, with Elon Musk.
Lex FridmanLet's start with an easy question about consciousness. In your view, is consciousness something that's unique to humans, or is it something that permeates all matter, almost like a fundamental force of physics?
Elon MuskI don't think consciousness permeates all matter.
Lex FridmanThere's a philosophical, how would you tell that's true? That's a good point.
Elon MuskI believe in the scientific method, don't blow your mind or anything, but the scientific method is like, if you can't test the hypothesis, then you cannot reach a meaningful conclusion that it is true.
Lex FridmanDo you think understanding consciousness is within the reach of science, of the scientific method?
Elon MuskWe can dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness. You know, I'd be hard-pressed to say that we understand anything with complete accuracy, but can we dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness? I believe the answer is yes.
Lex FridmanDoes an AI system, in your view, have to have consciousness in order to achieve human-level or superhuman-level intelligence? Does it need to have some of these human qualities, consciousness, maybe a body, maybe a fear of mortality, a capacity to love, those kinds of silly human things?
Elon MuskIt's different. You know, there's the scientific method, which I very much believe in, where something is true to the degree that it is testably so, and otherwise you're really just talking about preferences or full-on untestable beliefs, that kind of thing. So it ends up being somewhat of a semantic question, where we're conflating a lot of things with the word intelligence.
Elon MuskIf we parse them out and say, you know, are we headed towards a future where an AI will be able to out-think us in every way, then the answer is unequivocally yes.
Lex FridmanIn order for an AI system that needs to out-think us in every way, it also needs to have a capacity to have consciousness, self-awareness?
Elon MuskIt will be self-aware, yes. That's different from consciousness. I mean, in terms of, what does consciousness feel like? It feels like consciousness is in a different dimension, but this could just be an illusion. You know, if you damage your brain in some way physically, you damage your consciousness, which implies that consciousness is a physical phenomenon.
Elon MuskIn my view, the thing that I think is really quite likely is that digital intelligence will be able to out-think us in every way, and it will soon be able to simulate what we consider consciousness, to a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference. And from the aspect of the scientific method, it might as well be consciousness if we can simulate it perfectly. If you can't tell the difference.
Elon MuskThis is sort of the Turing test, but think of a more advanced version of the Turing test. If you're talking to a digital superintelligence and can't tell if that is a computer or a human, let's say just having a conversation over a phone or a video conference or something, where you think you're talking, it looks like a person, makes all of the right inflections and movements and all the small subtleties that constitute a human, and talks like a human, makes mistakes like you're hearing, and you literally just can't tell. Is this, are you really conversing with a person or an AI? It might as well be human.
Lex FridmanSo on a darker topic, you've expressed serious concern about existential threats of AI. It's perhaps one of the greatest challenges our civilization faces. But since I would say we're kind of an optimistic descendant of apes, perhaps we can find several paths of escaping the harm of AI. So if I can give you three options, maybe you can comment on which do you think is the most promising. So one is scaling up efforts on AI safety and beneficial AI research, in hope of finding an algorithmic or maybe a policy solution. Two is becoming a multi-planetary species as quickly as possible. And three is merging with AI and riding the wave of that increasing intelligence as it continuously improves. What do you think is most promising, most interesting as a civilization that we should invest in?
Elon MuskI think there's a lot of investment going on in AI, whereas there's a lack of investment in AI safety. And there should be, in my view, an agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm that it does not represent a public safety risk. Just as there is a regulatory authority for, like, the FAA, the four-corner automotive safety, there's the FAA for aircraft safety, which generally comes to the conclusion that it is important to have a government referee, or a referee that is serving the public interest in ensuring that things are safe when there's a potential danger to the public.
Elon MuskI would argue that AI is unequivocally something that has the potential to be dangerous to the public, and therefore should have a regulatory agency, just as other things that are dangerous to the public have a regulatory agency. But let me tell you the problem with this, which is that the government moves very slowly, and the rate of, the usual way a regulatory agency comes into being is that something terrible happens, there's a huge public outcry, and years after that there's a regulatory agency or rule put in place.
Elon MuskIt takes something like seatbelts. It was known for a decade or more that seatbelts would have a massive impact on safety and save so many lives and serious injuries, and the car industry fought the requirement to put seatbelts in tooth and nail.
Lex FridmanThat's crazy.
Elon MuskYeah, and hundreds of thousands of people probably died because of that, and they said people wouldn't buy cars if they had seatbelts, which is just obviously absurd. You know, or look at the tobacco industry and how long they fought anything about smoking. That's part of why I helped make that movie, Thank You for Smoking. You can sort of see just how pernicious it can be when you have these companies that effectively achieve regulatory capture of government.
Elon MuskThe people in the AGI community refer to the advent of digital superintelligence as a singularity. That is not to say that it is good or bad, but that it is very difficult to predict what will happen after that point, and that there's some probability it will be bad, some probability it will be good. We want to affect that probability and have it be more good than bad.
Lex FridmanWell, let me on the merger with AI question and the incredible work that's being done in Neuralink. There's a lot of fascinating innovation here across different disciplines going on, so the flexible wires, the robotic sewing machine that responds to brain movement, everything around ensuring safety, and so on. So we currently understand very little about the human brain. Do you also hope that the work at Neuralink will help us understand more about our human mind, about the brain?
Elon MuskYeah, the work at Neuralink will definitely shed a lot of insight into how the brain, the mind, works. Right now, just the data we have regarding how the brain works is very limited. We've got fMRI, which is kind of like putting a stethoscope on the outside of a factory wall and then putting it all over the factory wall, and you can sort of hear the sounds but you don't know what the machines are doing really.
Elon MuskIt's hard, you can infer a few things, but it's a very poor brushstroke. In order to really know what's going on in the brain, you really need to have high-precision sensors, and then you want to have stimulus and response. Like, if you trigger a neuron, how do you feel, what do you see, how does it change your perception of the world?
Lex FridmanYou're speaking to physically just getting close to the brain, being able to measure signals on the brain, will give us sort of open the door and inside the factory.
Elon MuskYes, being able to have high-precision sensors that tell you what individual neurons are doing, and then being able to trigger a neuron and see what the response is in the brain. So you can see the consequences of, if you fire this neuron, what happens, how do you feel, what is changed?
Elon MuskIt'll be really profound to have this in people, because people can articulate their change. Like, if there's a change in mood, or if they can tell you if they can see better or hear better, or be able to form sentences better or worse, or their memories are jogged, that kind of thing.
Lex FridmanSo on the human side there's this incredible general malleability, plasticity of the human brain. The human brain adapts, adjusts, and so on.
Elon MuskIt's not that plastic, to be totally frank. So there's a firm structure, but nevertheless there's some plasticity.
Lex FridmanAnd the open question is, so if I could ask a broad question, is how much that plasticity can be utilized. Sort of on the human side there's some plasticity in the human brain, and on the machine side we have neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, it's able to adjust and figure out signals. So there's a mysterious language that we don't perfectly understand that's within the human brain, and then we're trying to understand that language to communicate both directions.
Lex FridmanSo the brain is adjusting a little bit, we don't know how much, and the machine is adjusting. Where do you see as they try to sort of reach together, almost like with an alien species, try to find a protocol, communication protocol that works? Where do you see the biggest benefit arriving from, on the machine side or the human side? Do you see both of them working together?
Elon MuskI think the machine side is far more malleable than the biological side, by a huge amount. So it'll be the machine that adapts to the brain. That's the only thing that's possible. The brain can't adapt that well to the machine. You can't have neurons start to regard an electrode as another neuron, because a neuron is, you know, it's just like the pulse, and so something else is pulsing. So there is that elasticity in the interface, which we believe is something that can happen, but the vast majority of malleability will have to be on the machine side.
Lex FridmanBut it's interesting, when you look at that synaptic plasticity at the interface, there might be like an emergent plasticity, because it's a whole nother, it's not like in the brain, it's a whole nother extension of the brain. You know, we might have to redefine what it means to be malleable for the brain. So maybe the brain is able to adjust to external interfaces.
Elon MuskThere will be some adjustment to the brain, because there's going to be something reading and stimulating the brain, and so it will adjust to that thing. But the vast majority of the adjustment will be on the machine side. This just has to be that, otherwise it will not work.
Elon MuskUltimately, we currently operate on two layers. We have sort of a limbic, like primitive brain layer, which is where all of our kind of impulses are coming from. It's sort of like we've got a monkey brain with a computer stuck on it. That's the human brain. And a lot of our impulses and everything are driven by the monkey brain, and the computer, the cortex, is constantly trying to make the monkey brain happy. It's not the cortex that's steering the monkey, it's the monkey brain steering the cortex.
Elon MuskThe cortex is the part that tells the story of the whole thing, so we convince ourselves it's more interesting than just the monkey brain. The cortex is what we'll call human intelligence. It's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures. Other creatures do not have, really they don't have the computer, or they have a very weak computer relative to humans.
Elon MuskBut it sort of seems like, surely the really smart thing should control the dumb thing, but actually I don't think it works this way. The monkey brain is steering the show.
Lex FridmanSo do you think some of the same kind of machine learning methods, whether that's natural language processing applications, are going to be applied for the communication between the machine and the brain, to learn how to do certain things, like movement of the body, how to process visual stimuli, and so on? Do you see the value of using machine learning to understand the language of the two-way communication with the brain?
Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. I mean, we're a neural net, and AI is basically, you know, that. So it's like, the digital neural net will interface with the biological neural net, and hopefully bring us along for the ride.
Elon MuskBut the vast majority of our intelligence will be digital. There's no, like, so things like, the difference in intelligence between your cortex and limbic system is gigantic. Your limbic system really has no comprehension of what the hell the cortex is doing. It's just literally hungry, you know, or tired, or angry, or sexy, or something, and then it communicates that impulse to the cortex and tells the cortex to go satisfy that.
Elon MuskThen a great deal of, like a massive amount of thinking, like truly this stupendous amount of thinking, has gone into sex without purpose, without provocation, without procreation, which is actually quite a silly action in the absence of procreation. It's a bit silly. The one, why are you doing it? That's because it makes the limbic system happy, that's why, but it's pretty absurd, really.
Lex FridmanWell, the whole of existence is pretty absurd, in some kind of sense.
Elon MuskYeah, but I mean, this, a lot of computation has gone into how can I do more of that, with procreation not even being a factor.
Lex FridmanThis is, I think, a very important area of research, an agency that should receive a lot of funding. (Laughter)
Elon MuskEspecially after this decision. If I propose the formation of a new agency, oh boy. (Laughter)
Lex FridmanWhat is the most exciting, or some of the most exciting things that you see in the future impact of Neuralink, both on the engineering side and the societal broad impact?
Elon MuskSo Neuralink, I think, at first will solve a lot of brain-related diseases. So anything from like autism, schizophrenia, memory loss. Like, everyone experiences memory loss at certain points in age. Parents can't remember their kids' names and that kind of thing. So there's a mountain of good that Neuralink can do in solving critical damage to the brain or the spinal cord. There's a lot that can be done to improve quality of life of individuals, and those will be the steps along the way.
Elon MuskAnd then ultimately it's intended to address the existential risk associated with digital superintelligence. Like, we will not be able to be smarter than a digital supercomputer, so therefore, if you cannot beat them, join them. And at least we won't have that option.
Lex FridmanSo you have hope that Neuralink will be able to be a kind of connection to allow us to merge, to ride the wave of the improving AI systems?
Elon MuskI think the chance is above zero percent. It's nonzero. There's a chance.
Lex FridmanThat's, so I've seen Dumb and Dumber.
Elon MuskYes, so I'm saying there's a chance. He's saying one in a billion, or one in a million, whatever it was, the Dumb and Dumber, you know. It went from maybe one in a million to improving, maybe it'll be one in a thousand, and then one in a hundred, then one in ten, depends on the rate of improvement of Neuralink and how fast we're able to make progress.
Lex FridmanWell, I've talked to a few folks here, quite brilliant engineers, so I'm excited.
Elon MuskYeah, I think it's fundamentally good, you know. Giving somebody back full motor control after they've had a spinal cord injury, restoring brain functionality after a stroke, solving debilitating genetically-oriented brain diseases, these are all incredibly great, I think. And in order to do these, you have to be able to interface with the neurons at a detailed level. You have to be able to read neurons, write neurons, read and write neurons, and then effectively you can create a circuit, replace what's broken with silicon, and actually fill in the missing functionality.
Elon MuskAnd then over time we can develop a tertiary layer. So if like the limbic system is a primary layer, then the cortex is like the second layer. And I said, you know, the cortex is vastly more intelligent than the limbic system, but people generally like the fact that they have a limbic system and a cortex. I haven't met anyone who wants to delete either one of them. They're like, I'd be keeping both, that's cool. The limbic system is kind of fun.
Lex FridmanTells us what the fun is.
Elon MuskAbsolutely. And then people generally don't lose the cortex either, right? They like having the cortex and the limbic system. And then there's a tertiary layer, which will be digital superintelligence. And I think there's room for optimism, given that the cortex is very intelligent and the limbic system is not, and yet they work together well. Perhaps they can be a tertiary layer where digital superintelligence lies, and that will be vastly more intelligent than the cortex, but still coexist peacefully and in a benign manner with the cortex and limbic system.
Lex FridmanThat's a super exciting future, both on the low-level engineering that I saw is being done here, and the actual possibility in the next few decades.
Elon MuskIt's important that Neuralink solve this problem sooner rather than later, because the point at which we have digital superintelligence, that's when we pass the singularity, and things become just very uncertain. It doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad or good, but at the point at which we pass the singularity, things become extremely unstable. So we want to have a human-brain interface before the singularity, or at least not long after it, to minimize existential risk for humanity and consciousness as we know it.
Lex FridmanBut there's a lot of fascinating actual engineering, low-level problems here at Neuralink that, yeah, quite exciting. What are the problems that we face in Neuralink?
Elon MuskMaterial science, electrical engineering, software, mechanical engineering, microfabrication. It's a bunch of engineering disciplines, essentially, that's where it comes down to. You have to have a tiny electrode, so small it doesn't hurt neurons, but it's got to last for as long as a person, so it's got to last for decades. And then you've got to take that signal, you've got to process that signal locally at low power. So we need a lot of chip design engineers, because we're going to do signal processing, and do so in a very power-efficient way, so that we don't heat your brain up, because the brain is very heat-sensitive.
Elon MuskAnd then we're going to take those signals and do something with them, and then we'd better stimulate the brain back too. So you have bidirectional communication. So you've got material science, software, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chip design, microfabrication. Those are the things we need to work on. We need good material science, so that we can have tiny electrodes that last a long time.
Elon MuskAnd that's the tough thing with the science problems, a tough one, because you're trying to read and stimulate electrically in an electrically active area. Your brain is very electrically active and electrochemically active. So how do you have a coating on the electrode that doesn't dissolve over time and is safe in the brain? This is a very hard problem. And then, how do you collect those signals in a way that is most efficient, because you really just have very tiny amounts of power to process those signals?
Elon MuskAnd then we need to automate the whole thing, so it's like LASIK. You know, if this is done by neurosurgeons, there's no way it can scale to large numbers of people, and it needs to scale to large numbers of people, because I think ultimately we want the future to be determined by a large number of humans.
Lex FridmanDo you think that this has a chance to revolutionize surgery, period? So neurosurgery and otherwise?
Elon MuskYeah, for sure. It's got to be like LASIK. Like, if LASIK had to be hand-done, not done by hand by a person, that wouldn't be great. You know, it's done by a robot, and the ophthalmologist just kind of needs to make sure your head's in the right position, and then they just press the button and go. It's like smart summon.
Lex FridmanAnd soon Auto Park takes on the full beautiful mess of parking lots and the human, human nonverbal communication. I think it has actually the potential to have a profound impact in changing how our civilization looks at AI and robotics, because this is the first time human beings, people that don't own a Tesla, have never seen it, don't hear about a Tesla, get to watch hundreds of thousands of cars without a driver. Do you see it this way, almost like an education tool for the world about AI? Do you feel the burden of that, the excitement of that, or do you just think it's a smart parking feature?
Elon MuskI do think you are getting at something important, which is most people have never really seen a robot. And what is a car that is autonomous? It's a four-wheeled robot. It communicates a certain sort of message with everything, from safety to the possibility of what AI could bring, its current limitations, its current challenges, what's possible.
Lex FridmanDo you feel the burden of that, almost like a communicator, educator to the world about AI?
Elon MuskWe were just really trying to make people's lives easier with autonomy, but now that you mention it, I think it will be an eye-opener to people about robotics, because they have really never, most people have never seen a robot. And there are hundreds of thousands of Teslas. It won't be long before there's a million of them that have autonomous capability and drive without a person in it.
Elon MuskAnd you can see the kind of evolution of the car's personality and thinking with each iteration of autopilot. You can see it's uncertain about this, or it gets it, but now it's more certain, now it's moving in a slightly different way. Like, I can tell immediately if a car is on Tesla autopilot, because of just little nuances of movement. It just moves in a slightly different way.
Elon MuskTeslas, for example, on the highway are far more precise about being in the center of the lane than a person. If you drive down the highway and look at where the human-driven cars are within their lane, they're like bumper cars, moving all over the place. The car on autopilot, dead center.
Lex FridmanYes, of the incredible work that's going into that, in your neural network, it's learning fast. Autonomy is still very, very hard. We don't actually know how hard it is, fully. Of course, you look at most problems you tackle, this one included, with an exponential lens, but even with an exponential improvement, things can take longer than expected sometimes. So where does Tesla currently stand on its quest for full autonomy? What's your sense, when can we see successful deployment of full autonomy?
Elon MuskWell, on the highway already, the probability of an intervention is extremely low. So for highway autonomy with the latest release especially, the probability of needing to intervene is really quite low. In fact, I'd say for stop-and-go traffic, it's as far, it's much safer than a person right now. The probability of an injury or an impact is much, much lower for autopilot than a person.
Elon MuskAnd it can navigate, change lanes, take highway interchanges. And then we're coming at it from the other direction, which is low-speed full autonomy. And in a way this is like, it's like how does a person learn to drive? You learn to drive in a parking lot, you know. The first time you learn to drive, probably wasn't jumping on Lombard Street in San Francisco, that'd be crazy. You're driving in the parking lot, get things right at low speed.
Elon MuskAnd then the missing piece that we're working on is traffic lights and stop streets. Stop streets, obviously, are also relatively easy, because you kind of know where the stop street is, it's basically geocoded, and then you use visualization to see where the line is and stop at the line, to augment the GPS. So actually, this is probably complex traffic lights and very windy roads are the two things that need to get solved.
Lex FridmanWhat's harder, perception or control for these problems? So being able to perfectly perceive everything, or figuring out a plan once you perceive everything, how to interact with all the agents in the environment? In your sense, from a learning perspective, is perception or action harder?
Elon MuskThe giant, beautiful, multi-task learning neural network. The hardest thing is having an accurate representation of the physical objects in vector space. So you take the visual input, primarily visual input, some sonar and radar, and then creating an accurate vector space representation of the objects around you. Once you have an accurate vector space representation, then the planner and control is relatively easier.
Elon MuskIt is relatively easy. Basically, once you have an accurate vector representation, then you're kind of like a video game, like cars in like Grand Theft Auto or something. Like, they work pretty well, they drive down the road, they don't crash, pretty much, unless you crash into them. That's because they've got an accurate vector space representation of where the cars are, and then they're rendering that as the output.
Lex FridmanYou have a sense, high-level, that Tesla's on track on being able to achieve full autonomy? So on the highway?
Elon MuskYeah, yeah, absolutely.
Lex FridmanAnd still no driver state, no driver sensing?
Elon MuskWe have driver sensing with torque on the wheel.
Lex FridmanThat's right, yeah. By the way, just a quick comment on karaoke. Most people think it's fun, but I also think it's a driving feature. I've been saying for a long time, singing in a car is really good for attention management and vigilance management.
Elon MuskTesla karaoke, again, it's great. It's one of the most fun features of the car.
Lex FridmanDo you think of a connection between fun and safety sometimes?
Elon MuskYeah, they're both at the same time, that's great.
Lex FridmanI just met with Ann Druyan, wife of Carl Sagan, who directed Cosmos. I'm generally a big fan of Carl Sagan, he's super cool, and they had a great way of bringing things, all of consciousness, all of civilization, everything we've ever known and done, is on this tiny blue dot.
Elon MuskPeople get too trapped in these squabbles amongst humans and don't think of the big picture. They take civilization and its continuing existence for granted. They shouldn't do that. Look at the history of civilizations: they rise and they fall. And now civilization is all globalized, and so we're, civilization, I think, now rises and falls together. There's no geographic isolation. This is a big risk. Things don't always go up. That's an important lesson of history.
Lex FridmanIn 1990, at the request of Carl Sagan, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is a spacecraft that's reaching out farther than anything human-made into space, turned around to take a picture of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. And as you're talking about the pale blue dot, that picture, Earth takes up less than a single pixel in that image, appearing as a tiny blue dot, a pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan called it. So he spoke about this dot of ours in 1994, and if you could humor me, I was wondering if in the last two minutes you could read the words that he wrote, described in this buildup.
Elon MuskSure, yes. Finally, the universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old, Earth-like four and a half billion years old. You know, another half billion years or so, the Sun will expand and probably evaporate the oceans and make life impossible on Earth, which means that if it had taken consciousness ten percent longer to evolve, it would never have evolved at all. Its attempts and longer.
Elon MuskAnd I wonder how many dead one-planet civilizations are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet, and ultimately extinguished themselves, or were destroyed by external factors. Probably a few. It's only just possible to try to travel to Mars, just barely. If G was 10% more, it wouldn't work, really.
Elon MuskIf it was 10% lower, it would be easy. You could go single-stage from the surface of the Earth. There's Mars, it's 37% the gravity. You could do a giant blue stick. You know.
Elon MuskChanneling Carl Sagan. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Elon MuskOur planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. This is not true. This is false. Mars. And I think Carl Sagan would agree with that. He couldn't even imagine it at that time.
Lex FridmanSo thank you for making the world dream, and thank you for talking today. I really appreciate it.
Elon MuskThank you.