Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #252

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Elon Musk talks about SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI. Musk: SpaceX launch of human beings to orbit on May 30th, 2020, was seen by many as the first step in a new era of human space exploration.

The Crew Dragon Demo-2 was the first flight with humans onboard. ‘Im not a religious person, but I nonetheless got on my knees and prayed for that mission,’ says astronaut. ‘We obviously could not let them down in any way,’ he says of NASA.

It was the highest obit that in like, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years or something, the only one that was higher was the one shuttle, sorry, a Hubble servicing mission. It was pretty wild. I think as a species, we want to be continuing to do better and reach higher ground.

Elon: ‘I think the next big thing we've gotta have like a serious black moon base, and then get people to Mars’ ‘Im actually the chief engineer of SpaceX, so I've signed off on pretty much all the design decisions’ ‘If there's something that goes wrong with that vehicle, its fundamentally my fault’.

If you could solve one engineering problem perfectly, which one would it be? — [Elon] On Starship? — On, sorry, on Starship.

The Raptor is a full flow staged combustion engine, and it’s operating at a very high TAVR pressure. The engine has not gotten anything to orbit yet, but it’s the first engine that’s actually better than the Russian RD engines.

The rocket engine is very complex. There are a lot of components involved. We had to invent several alloys that don’t exist in order to make this engine work. It’s a materials problem, and in a stage combustion there are many feedback loops in the system.

There’s a reason no one’s made this before. And the reason we’re doing a stage commotion full flow is because it has the highest theoretical possible efficiency. So in order to make a fully reasonable rocket, which, that’s really the holy grail of orbital rocketry, you have to have, everything’s gotta be the best.

Elon Musk says there's a chance he can make a reusable rocket. He says he's not sure how long it will take, but the team is working night and day to make it happen. ‘Many smart people have tried to do this before, and they've not succeeded,’ he says.

First principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really. It’s really just saying, let’s boil something down to the most fundamental principles, the things that we are most confident are true. And then you cross check your conclusion against the axiomatic truth.

In rocketry, we try to figure out why a part or product is expensive. Is it because of something fundamentally foolish that we’re doing? Or is it because our volume is too low? And so then you say, okay, well what if our volume was a million units a year? Is it still expensive?

The cost of materials, things like that, or is that too much? Yeah. Exactly. . — [Lex].

A good example of thinking about things in the limit is if you take any product, any machine or whatever, like take a rocket or whatever. And that sets the asymptotic limit for how low the cost of the vehicle can be, unless you change the materials. And then when you do that, I call it like maybe the magic one number or something like that.

If you are really good at manufacturing, you can basically make anything for a cost that asymptotically approaches the raw material value of the constituents, plus any intellectual property that you need to license. — But it’s hard. It’s not like that’s a very hard thing to do, but it is possible for anything.

It’s good to think of things in both directions, so like what can we build with the tools that we have, but also what is the perfect, the theoretical perfect product look like? That’s gonna be a moving target, ’cause as you learn more the definition of that perfect product will change. But people very rarely think about it that way.

When do you think SpaceX will land a human being on Mars? Best case is about five years, worst case 10 years. There is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city. And then above that, we cannot afford to do it.

Elon Musk: civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. Theres a 1% chance per century of a civilization-ending event. We should act quickly while the window is open, he says, just in case it closes. ‘I think most likely the future will be good,’ he says.

We need the spaceships back, like the ones that go to Mars, we need them back, so you can hop on if you want. We should basically think of this, being a multi-planet species, just like taking out insurance for life itself. — They will choose to stay there for the rest of their lives.

If you can’t get there, nothing else matters. We can’t just not have the spaceships come back, those things are expensive. We need them back. I’d like to come back and journal their trip. — I mean, do you think about the terraforming aspect, actually building, are you’re so focused right now on the spaceship part that’s so critical to get to Mars? — Yeah, yeah.

Elon: ‘Im not sure this will really happen in my lifetime, but I hope to see it at least have a lot of momentum’ ‘Mars is not super hospitable. It's the least inhospitable planet, but it's definitely a fixer upper of a planet’ ‘There might be some great planets out there, but they're hopeless’.

We currently do not know of any means of going faster than the speed of light. If you can make space itself move, that would be warping space. The amount of energy required to warp space is so gigantic, it boggles the mind. Right now, the Falcon 9 is the only reusable rocket out there. The holy grail is a fully and rapidly reasonable orbital system.

The cost per ton to orbit could be cut by a factor of a hundred. Starship in theory could do a cost per launch of like a million, maybe $2 million or something like that.

Shivon: ‘I would suggest having a direct democracy, like people vote directly on things’ ‘It would be a new frontier and an opportunity to rethink the whole nature of government’ ‘Just brilliant engineering’.

Elon Musk says he accepts all your damn cookies. It’s annoying. He says it’s one example of implementation of a good idea done really horribly.

There is like, I think fundamental problem that we’re, because we’ve not really had a major, like a world war or something like that in a while. And obviously we would like to not have world wars. There’s not been a cleansing function for rules and regulations. If society does not have a war, and there’s no cleansing function or garbage collection for rules and regulations, then rules and Regulations will accumulate every year.

Elon: It would be interesting if the laws themselves kinda had a built in thing where they kinda die after a while, unless somebody explicitly publicly defends them. So that’s sort of, it’s not like somebody has to kill them. They kinda die themselves.

I think it should be easier to remove a law than to add one, because of the, just to overcome the inertia of laws. And so it just gets to become basically archaic bloatware after a while. So, I don’t know, maybe Mars you’d have like any given law must have a sunset, and require active voting to keep it up.

Elon Musk: Mars will need to have a different currency because you can’t synchronize due to speed of light, or not easily. SpaceX may consider literally putting a Dogecoin on the moon. The future of Mars should be up to the martians, he says. Musk: I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what money actually is on a practical day-to-day basis.

Right now the money system is really a bunch of heterogeneous mainframes running a old COBOL. The federal reserve is like probably even older than what the banks have. And so the government effectively has editing privileges on the money database. And they use those editing privileges to make more money whenever they want. So I think money should really be viewed through the lens of information theory.

Money is information, and it does not have power in and of itself. Applying the physics tools of thinking about things in the limit is helpful. If you’re stranded on a desert island with no food, all the Bitcoin in the world will not stop you from starving. There is a fundamental issue with Bitcoin, in its current form in that it’s, the transaction volume is very limited.

Dogecoin has a much higher transaction volume capability than Bitcoin. The costs of doing a transaction, the Dogecoin fee is very low. And there’s some value to having a linear increase in the amount of currency that is generated.

Some people suggest that you might be Satoshi Nakamoto. Do you think it’s a feature or a bug that he’s anonymous, or she, or they?.

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?’ (both laughing) — [Lex] Im gonna clip that out instead.

Elon: Tesla autopilot has been through an incredible journey over the past six years, or perhaps even longer in the minds of, in your mind, and many involved. ‘The whole journey was incredible to me to watch’.

What I maybe care and love about most is the stuff that Andrej Karpathy’s leading with, the dataset selection, the whole data engine process. The way that’s in the real world, that network is tested, validated, all the different test sets, versus the image net model of computer vision. What’s in academia is like real world artificial intelligence. — Andrej’s awesome and obviously plays an important role.

The Tesla Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. It’s like some of the smartest people in the world. To solve self-driving you have to solve. That’s the only way, I don’t think there’s any other way.

Tesla is developing a self-driving car that can drive itself. The car has to be able to see and react to the world around it. Autonomous driving is a complex problem that requires a lot of software.

Having an accurate vector space is very difficult. Your brain is doing an incredible amount of processing and giving you an image that is a very cleaned up image. Human memory is perhaps the weakest thing about the brain.

You can sort of look inside your brain, or at least I can like when you drive down the road, and try to think about what your brain is actually doing. It’s like, you’ll see a car, because you don’t have cameras. Your brain is trying to get to a vector space that is the smallest possible vector space.

When’s the last time you looked right and left, and rearward, or even diagonally forward to actually refresh your vector space? So you’re glancing around and what your mind is doing is trying to distill the relevant vectors, basically objects with a position and motion, and then editing that down to the least amount that’s necessary.

Computer vision is a really hard problem — at the time of relevance. You have to have memory. You need to remember that there were kids there and you need to have some forward prediction of what their position will be. — Yeah, we’re doin’ it.

There’s a cost to remembering things for a long time. You could run out of memory to try to remember too much for too long. And then you also need things that are remembered over time. — And I just think the data engine side of that, so getting the data to learn all of the concepts that you’re saying now, is an incredible process.

We’ve re-architected the neural nets in the cars so many times, it’s crazy. We started off with simple neural nets that were basically image recognition on a single frame from a single camera. And then trying to knit those together, with C.

Tesla is working to improve the efficiency of compute and how we use the trip accelerators. One of our neural nets is like, compute wise, like 99% dot products.

We’re moving towards no post-processing of the image through the image signal processor. We’re moving just raw photon counts. The image that the computer sees is actually much more than what you’d see if you represent it on a camera. We also save 13 milliseconds on latency.

Jitter is more of a challenge than latency, ’cause latency is, you can anticipate and predict, but if you’ve got a stackup of things going from the camera to the computer, through then a series of other computers, and finally to an actuator on the car, then you can have quite a variable latency. And that makes it hard to anticipate exactly how you should turn the car or accelerate.

The cars will maneuver with super human ability and reaction time, much faster than a human. Over time, the autopilot, full self-driving will be capable of maneuvers that are far more than what like James Bond could do in like the best movie, type of thing.

The rate of disengagements has been dropping rapidly. The probability of an accident on FSD is less than that of the average human. It’s not gonna be equivalent, it’s gonna be much better. 11 would be a single stack for all, one stack to rule them all.

Over time there’s less and less conventional software, more and more neural net. One of the big changes will be, right now the neural nets will deliver a giant bag of points to the C++, or C and C++ code.

The neural net is outputting much, much less data, it’s outputting proper vectors to the C, C++ control code, as opposed to, sort of, constructing the vectors in C. And just all of the networks in the car need to move to Surround Video, there’s still some Legacy Networks that are not Surround video. All of the training needs to move from post-process images to raw photon counts.

Elon: Infusion of all the sensors, so reducing the complexity of having to deal with these. Same with humans. — Well, I guess we got ears too, okay.

Elon: ‘The ideas are the easy thing, and the implementation is the hard thing’ ‘There's a lot of like hardcore engineering that's gotta get done at the hardware and software level’ ‘Everything is going on with data engine, whatever its called, the whole process is just a work of art’.

Lex: So you’ve presented Tesla Bot as primarily useful in the factory. Do you see as part of this problem that Tesla Bot has to solve is interacting with humans and potentially having a place like in the home. — Sure. — Not just, not replacing labor, but also like, I don’t know, being a friend or an assistant.

Elon: I think work will become optional. There’s a lot of jobs that, if people weren’t paid to do it, they wouldn’t do it. And then there’s like dangerous work, and basically if it’s dangerous, boring, has like potential for repetitive stress injury, that kind of thing.

Elon Musk: ‘I haven't really thought about it that far into the future, but I guess that there may be something like that’ ‘Tesla, I think, has the most advanced real-world AI for interacting with the real world,’ he says.

Elon: We’re kind of like solving the navigate the real world with neural nets problem for cars, which are kinda like robots with four wheels. So it’s like kind of a natural extension of that is to put it in a robot with arms and legs. That’s actually very difficult and a lotta hardcore soft work is required for that.

‘It could develop a personality over time that is unique. And that personality could evolve to be, match the owner or the, I guess the owner’.

Lex: I think that’s a huge opportunity. I think the flaws being a feature is really nice. You could be quite terrible at being a robot for quite a while in the general home environment. And that’s kind of adorable.

Elon Musk is working on a robot that could be used in the home. The robot would be connected to Tesla’s autopilot system. He says the robot would have flaws and imperfections like R2-D2 did.

Germany had amazing designs, but couldn’t make them because they couldn’t get the raw materials. They had a real problem with the oil and fuel, basically, the fuel quality was extremely variable. The U.S. had kick-ass fuel, that was very consistent, that allowed the British and the Americans to design aircraft engines that were super high-performance.

‘I find history fascinating. There's just a lot of incredible things that have been done, good and bad’ ‘I would have to say, there aren't very many books that I just had to stop reading, cause it was just too dark’.

‘There's a lot of lessons there to me, in particular that it feels like humans, all of us have that zeal, Solzhenitsyn line, that the line between good and evil runs to the heart in every man’.

‘It is too easy, based on that story to do evil, onto each other, onto your family onto others,’ he says. ‘So, to me, looking at history is almost like an example of, look, you have some charismatic leader that convinces you of things’.

Elon: Life was really tough for most of history. It’s not like now somehow different from history, that can happen again. And so it’s like our responsibility to do good.

Elon: ‘Some of the greatest rockets, some of the space exploration has been done in the Soviet, in the former Soviet Union’ ‘I look forward to a time when those countries, with China, are working together’.

Lex: The Olympics would be boring if everyone just crossed the finishing line at the same time. Governments are slow and the only thing slower than one government is a collection of governments.

Raptor was originally going to be a hydrogen engine, but hydrogen has a lot of challenges. I was inspired by the Russian work on the test ends, with Methalux engines. I think we could, you could actually get a much lower cost, an optimizing cost per ton to orbit, cost per to Mars.

Elon: I’m in favor of nuclear power in a place that is not subject to extreme natural disasters. I don’t think we should be shutting down nuclear power stations. I think people, there’s like a lot of fear of radiation.

‘The impact of these events is greatly exaggerated. It's human nature,’ he says. ‘I actually flew to Fukushima. And, actually, I donated a solar power system for a water treatment plant’.

Elon says radiation is one of the words that could be used as a tool to fear monger by certain people. ‘I think people just don't understand. Photons are being emitted by all objects all the time,’ he says.

Elon Musk sent a video message to his dog, Laika, after she was launched into space. He also sent a picture of his husband with his eyes closed and a bottle of vodka. He said: ‘This is kinda personal for me’.

The world is producing far more food than it can really consume. Food is extremely cheap these days. In the U.S. among low income families, obesity is actually now the problem. It’s not that nobody’s hungry anywhere, it’s just, this is not a simple matter of adding money and solving it.

Elon: How are we gonna pass moral judgment on these things? If one is gonna judge, say the Russia Empire, you gotta judge what everyone was doing at the time, and how were the British relative to everyone? And I think that the British would actually get a relatively good grade.

Elon: ‘There is no one competing with Brezhnev’ ‘Those are like epic eyebrows. Sure. Sure’ ‘This is what my life has become. Am I just explaining memes at this point? (all laughing) ‘Yeah, yeah. Look what I invented. That's the best thing since rip up bread’.

Lex: ‘Im a meme, like a scribe, that runs around with the kings and just writes down memes’ ‘When was the cheeseburger invented? That's an epic invention’ ‘Food innovation doesn't get enough love’ ‘Fries are, I mean, they're the devil, but fries are awesome’.

Elon says he might have enough material to do stand up. He's friends with comedian Joe Rogan. His favorite ‘Rick and Morty’ concept is the butter robot. He says hed like to open for Rogan in a stand-up comedy set. ‘It's so difficult. You're so fragile up there,’ he says.

‘Rick and Morty’ certainly explores a lot of interesting concepts. It's certainly possible to have too much sentience, in a device. You don't want to have your toaster be a super genius toaster, cause all it can make is toast. It seems like it might be very easy to engineer just a depressed robot.

‘It's very hard to be useful. Are you contributing more than you consume? Try to have a positive net contribution to society,’ he says. ‘A lot of the time people who, a lot of times the people you want as leaders are the people who don't want to be leaders’.

If you’re living a useful life, that is a good life, a life worth having lived. I encourage people to read a lot of books, just read, basically try to ingest as much information as you can.

As a kid I read through the encyclopedia. And, there was all sorts of things I didn’t even know existed, well lots, obviously. I put a lotta stock and certainly have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an honest day’s work to do useful things.

Elon: Some people have a zero sum mindset. If the pie is fixed, then the only way to have more pie is to take someone else’s pie. I think there’s a fair number of people in finance that do have a bit of a zero-sum mindset. One of the reasons Rogan inspires me is he celebrates others a lot.

Elon: What is the role of love in the human condition broadly, and more specific to you? How has love, romantic love or otherwise, made you a better person, a better human being? Better engineer? — Now you’re asking really perplexing questions. It’s hard to give a. I mean, there are many books, poems, and songs written about what is love.

‘I love humanity. And so I wish to see it prosper and do great things and be happy, and if I did not love humanity, I would not care about these things’ ‘On the whole, the human history, all of the people whose ever lived, all the people alive now, It's pretty, were okay’.

Elon Musk: ‘Good questions are, its hard to come up with good questions’ ‘I would like to know that we are on a path to understanding the nature of the universe and the meaning of life’ ‘When something is important enough, you do it, even if the odds are not in your favor’ ‘If we expand the scope and scale of humanity, and consciousness in general, which includes silicon consciousness, then that seems like a fundamentally good thing’.

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