From May 31 to June 2, Code Conference 2016 is held in Ranchos-Palos-Verdes, California. The annual conference is dedicated to the impact of technology on our lives and brings together the largest representatives of the IT industry. This year's conference speakers include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, Ford Motor President Mark Fields and many others, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO, entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk. During a conversation with reporters, Musk spoke about his plans and how he sees the future of humanity in connection with technology. Slon Magazine has selected some of his brightest thoughts.
Colonization of Mars is closer than it seems
The head of SpaceX said his company plans to send a human mission to the Red Planet as early as 2024. In 2017, SpaceX will commission the Dragon Version 2 spacecraft, which will carry a crew of seven. Since 2018, Dragon V2 will be sent to Mars every 26 months. At the same time, he noticed that he did not see the need for a complete relocation to other planets: “Why should we leave the Earth? It's so good here. Musk also added that in the next 4-5 years he plans to fly into space, but so far only into orbit.
Tesla's main competitor in self-driving cars is not Google at all
“Google has shown its potential in the development of autonomous vehicles well, but it is still not an automobile company. I wouldn't call her my competitor,”Musk said. A much more real rival in this matter, in his opinion, is Apple, but it is possible that this company will launch its production of self-driving cars too late (according to Musk's forecast - no earlier than 2020) to become a serious threat to Tesla.
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Artificial intelligence will not be able to enslave people
Musk admitted that he was very concerned about the topic of artificial intelligence. “My brother and I agreed to forbid talking about this when we relax in the jacuzzi,” he joked. At the same time, Musk himself is the founder of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, and believes that this needs to be done. He does not believe that the rise of this industry can become fatal for humanity: “If artificial intelligence develops so much that it will be available to each of us, then we will all manage our own virtual agents. And then, if someone decides to do something terrible, all the others, united, will be able to suppress this intruder. " Therefore, in his opinion, people need to make every effort to develop themselves on a level with robots, otherwise "we will be so much lower in intelligence that we will become pets." A way out for peopleaccording to Musk, the introduction of digital technologies into the human body will become.
All people are robots
Musk believes that access to computers and mobile applications on smartphones already gives us "superpower" - with their help people can answer any questions, talk to anyone via video link from anywhere in the world. “We are already cyborgs. We all have a digital twin, a partial online version of the identity in emails and social media,”Musk said. Musk sees the best scenario for people in creating special computers that will be located in the “digital layer” next to the cerebral cortex and work in symbiosis with humans.
We are the characters in the video game
“Forty years ago we had 'Pong' - two rectangles and a point. These were the games. Now, forty years later, we have realistic 3D simulators with millions of people around the world sitting at the same time,”says Musk. In his opinion, even if technologies develop a thousand times slower than now, their transition to a new quality is inevitable, even after 10 thousand years, which is not so much on the scale of the Universe.
“We definitely strive to make games indistinguishable from reality. They can be played on any console and computer, of which there will most likely be billions, and the chance that our reality is the main one may also be one in billions. Musk believes that humanity has only two options: either we will create a virtual world in the future, or we are already characters in someone's simulation. He is sure that civilization, developing, cannot but create such a reality; this progress can only be stopped by the death of civilization from some kind of global cataclysm. Therefore, it will probably be even better for us if it turns out that what we take for reality is already a simulator created by another race or people of the future. Our descendants, Musk explains,will be able to create simulators of the life of other civilizations (including their ancestors). And if they can endow them with consciousness, then now we may well be just the heroes of one of these virtual realities.
The full video of the conversation with Elon Musk at Code Conference 2016 is available on the Recode website.
Anastasia Zyryanova
