The Future According to Elon Musk
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space
Musk’s private space flight company, SpaceX, has had a number of historic successes. In the near future Musk hopes to continue these successes by continuing advances towards the reusability of the company’s flagship launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 rocket. This entails landing the rocket either on land or at sea, before refurbishing and refuelling it so that it can go to space once more. In the next few years, the company hopes to be launching and landing these rockets once every two weeks: an unprecedentedly frequent cadence comparable to early aspirations for the Space Shuttle. If SpaceX does achieve this launch frequency, it will be the most prolific launcher of rockets in history — exceeding NASA, Roscosmos, and the other private space companies.
Elon Musk has long had a fascination with Mars. The company that became SpaceX began with an idea for an inspirational, philanthropic, one-off mission to launch a plant, enclosed in a life support vessel, from a decommissioned Soviet ICBM to the surface of Mars. Since this, Musk’s plans for Mars and the likelihood of their success have grown greatly. The first step of SpaceX’s journey to Mars is the Red Dragon mission. In 2018, SpaceX intends to launch one of the company’s Dragon capsules (intended to carry people in to space in the next two to three years) to Mars. This mission will be unmanned, and all of the space which would be used for life support and crew on a manned mission will be replaced with fuel. The goal is a successful propulsive landing on the Red Planet, something which is notoriously difficult. In addition to the ‘because it’s there’ reasoning, SpaceX will also gain valuable knowledge about how their SuperDraco retro-propulsion engines function in the Martian atmosphere: essential to the company’s future plans to land people on Mars. This mission is really straining what is possible with the hardware, but seems technically possible.
In order to loft the Red Dragon to Mars, SpaceX will need a more powerful launch vehicle than they currently have. Later this year SpaceX hopes to test this vehicle, the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9s attached to one another. Imagine one Falcon 9 carrying a payload to orbit, but with a Falcon 9 strapped to either side to provide that extra kick which will allow heavier payloads to be delivered to orbit. SpaceX claim that the Falcon Heavy will be able to orbit weight equivalent to a Boeing 737 complete with passengers, luggage, and fuel. It will be the most powerful rocket in operation, and the second most powerful in history — rivalled only by the Saturn V rocket which sent men to the moon.
The ultimate goal for Musk is to put people on Mars. What we know so far is that he plans to send some dozens of people on a large craft which he calls the ‘Mars Colonial Transporter’, or MCT, as early as 2024 with these pioneers arriving at Mars in 2025. Musk will reveal more about this plan later this year at the International Astronautical Conference in late September. It is important to note, however, that despite his affection for Mars, Musk doesn’t plan to abandon the Earth — on the contrary, he thinks that ‘it’s really nice here’, and that rather than abandoning the Earth for Mars we should become a bi-planetary species. Musk also offered his ideas on the governance of a future Mars colony: he suggests a direct — rather than a representative — democracy in which it is easier to repeal a law than to make one, and in which all laws necessarily have a sunset provision. He believes that these measures will make the government less prone to corruption and the gridlock which affects our lowly earth democracies. Musk also suggested future entrepreneurial opportunities on Mars, ranging from the creation of the first interplanetary iron ore refinery or the first pizza joint to things that don’t even exist on earth. In describing his long term plans, Musk used the term ‘Earth based revenue’ to refer to his current enterprises. Arguably all revenue in the history of civilisation has been Earth-based, but Musk is looking to a future where this is not the case.
transportation
Elon Musk also has big plans for his innovative electric car company, Tesla Motors. Following the recent announcement of a relatively affordable, mass market car — the Model 3 — Elon revealed that he hopes that the company will have produced half a million cars by 2018, and will be producing one million annually by 2020. To facilitate this, Tesla is currently building what Musk calls the ‘Gigafactory’ — a battery factory which will be the largest building of any kind anywhere in the world when it is finished later this year. Musk doesn’t foresee too much competition from Google or Apple (which he believes is also working on a car), and believes that there’s enough room in the electric vehicle market for all of them.
Musk believes that we are less than two years away from the existence of a car with complete autonomy and which is safer than a human driver. He referred to autonomous driving, the ability of a vehicle to safely move between destinations without human input, as essentially ‘a solved problem’. The area which still needs work is between 30 and 40 MPH in urban areas: slower and its easy to use other cars for reference, faster is probably on a highway with easy guides for the car to drive itself. Musk does acknowledge that his two-year timeframe is just for the existence of a working article, and believes that it will take regulators and manufacturers about a year to catch up, but even then we should be seeing autonomous vehicles as soon as 2019. ‘It’s gonna be odd to have a car without autonomy in the future’, he concluded. Tesla will have an event at the end of this year to discuss its future with autonomous cars, and the Model 3 is just over a month from ‘pencils down’ in the design stage and the beginning of production. As for whether the Model 3 will be autonomous, Musk gave a cryptic answer: after a long pause, he said that Tesla are going to do ‘the obvious thing’.
Finally, Musk discussed the Hyperloop: a transport pod which is propelled at incredibly high speeds by a linear induction motor through a near vacuum. This idea was actually presented by Musk at an earlier Code Conference, although this year’s Musk laments his younger self’s naïve excitement. As with many of his technologies, Musk open-sourced this idea, and he is encouraging others to develop upon it. He says that he is too busy with SpaceX and Tesla to take on a third, but has said that if the third parties fail to make progress he would consider getting involved. No timeframe is presented by Musk for this, but he is confident that it will happen in the near future.
artificial intelligence
The single greatest threat to humanity in the near future, in Musk’s estimation, is artificial intelligence, or AI. The singularity is the moment at which an intelligent entity becomes capable of runaway self improvement until it is orders of magnitude more intelligent than a person, and Musk believes that it is coming faster than we are prepared for. It is essential that this entity, for instance a self aware computer which becomes super intelligent, is benevolent, otherwise humanity is at risk of suffering any number of terrible fates. Musk refers to potential futures where the AI is to people as people are to their pets, or where it becomes a despot, or that it could be the tool of a human despot. The solution which Musk proposes to the potential of negative AI futures is the democratisation of AI. If the power is widely spread, he believes that it would be harder for it to be used malevolently — analogous to the balance of power in the international system. Musk is the patron of a non-profit organisation called OpenAI which is doing AI research with the hope that they can benefit the whole of humanity, as opposed to the other researching groups which need a return on their investment. A number of companies are heavily invested in the future of AI, but when asked which he is worried about, he gave another cryptic answer: ‘there is only one’. He appears to be referring to Google, which has already made huge advances in AI.
To prevent humans from being left behind by a superintelligent AI, Musk put forth a hypothetical brain-computer interface called a ‘neural lace’. He describes how the brain currently operates on two basic levels, limbic and cortical, but with a neural lace he suggested that a third level, augmented intelligence, could be integrated into the brain. Physically, this would mean a mesh of electronics which injected through the jugular and integrates with the brain tissue, creating a cyborg like those from science fiction. Musk believes, however, that we are all already cyborgs: we use technology to do things which even the president couldn’t do 20 years ago, such as worldwide video calling, researching near infinite information, putting messages out to millions of people. The reason that we are poor cyborgs is an input/output (IO) constraint. Currently, to express ourselves digitally we have to use our fingers to push keys or our thumbs to tap glass, and this is slow and complex. If the brain could interface with the digital world without this constraint, people could become superintelligent.
Here is the full video of Musk’s interview:
