Author | Bi Andi
Source | Alphabet list
In the end, Musk's biggest fear is the end of human civilization.
To describe Musk, who is more than half a hundred years old as a positive boy, there is no sense of violation.
In Station B, a 33-second Clip of Musk's interview, played more than 100,000 times, is titled "How to Stay Optimistic", the sentence "I'd rather be wrongly optimistic than correctly pessimistic", which has the potential to become a mobile phone wallpaper.
However, this may only be a wish of Musk, an expectation, the truth is that if pessimism is correct, Musk will not only chew carefully, but also unswervingly spread to all mankind, and even tweet to share with everyone.
The New Year has just passed 20 days and nights, and after the "recession", Musk has issued another warning through his happy hometown , Twitter : there will be no overpopulation, but there will be insufficient, not even enough humanity to give to Mars.
Musk's warning has become a routine play that has been staged many times a year.
This has even become a treasure trove of foreign video bloggers, searching for related keywords in YouTube, you can see a number of Musk's warning highlights, or the interpretation of a warning. The highest video views exceeded 7 million, and there were more than 10 videos over 1 million.
"Musk issued a final warning", "Musk: It's too late", "Musk: I have warned you"... If you're too happy today, just looking at these headlines is enough to cure depression.
An optimistic pessimist has both qualities. Optimism is left to the world, and it is done, pessimism is the background, in the end, everything is empty, "the meaning of life lies in the process."
This time the warning was not a tweet, but a string. He not only cited reports such as "a record low U.S. birth rate in 2020" and "prediction of a sharp decline in the global birth rate", but also revived the United Nations's "world population outlook" forecast, saying that its judgment that the future will be "overpopulated" is nonsense.
Musk sent several tweets on the same day to discuss the population. The fear of a "population collapse" has been on Musk's mind for years.
Back in 2017, Musk tweeted: "The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few people seem to pay attention to or care." ”
By 2019, the United Nations released the World Population Outlook report, estimating that the earth's population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050, and warns that in the next 30 years, 2 billion new people will occupy the earth's living space, and by the end of this century, the global population is expected to reach 11 billion people.
Musk tweeted again to disagree, citing Norwegian scholar Jrgen Randers, who, in his 2012 book 2052: Global Projections for the Next Four Decades, said the global population would begin to decline around 2040.
"The real problem is not 'overpopulation,' but ageing and population decline."
Also in 2019, at the Artificial Intelligence Conference, Musk sat side by side with Jack Ma and discussed the seriousness of the population problem: "People often say that they immigrated to Mars, but... Where do people come from? Mars also needs people to live, and now there is no one, only a group of machines. ”
In this forty-minute dialogue, concerns about population issues were a rare consensus between the two men.
In the two years since the pandemic, Musk seems to have become more anxious and has spoken more frequently about population issues.
Just this past December, at the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, Musk called on everyone to have more children, the population is not enough, and civilization will collapse.
"I think one of the biggest risks facing civilization is the low birth rate and its continued rapid decline. A lot of people – including smart people – feel that there are too many people in this world, that population growth is out of control, and [the truth] is the complete opposite. If people don't have more children, civilization will collapse. ”
After saying this, he also added: "Remember my words." ”
In the case of Musk himself, this is the "right pessimism" in his perspective, and he is sparing no effort to tell everyone his judgment.
And at the same time, in terms of behavior, he is as active as ever.
Musk defines Tesla as a "robotics company," and when he talks about the future, he falls on the replacement of labor — because, in the not-so-distant future he sees, labor is not enough.
A more personal "practice" is that Musk has conceived six lives with two wives, and Musk has called himself a role model more than once in recent years.
Population collapse is a huge threat to human civilization, and people should have more children (like him), as he reiterated in another podcast interview in December.
It seems that the video cover of the YouTube blogger is not sensational, and sometimes musk's warning is really a hundred thousand fiery tones.
On the issue of population, Musk's warning did not attract too many opposite voices, which is actually a special case. More often, Musk will attract opponents who are fighting each other.
In that conversation between Ma Yun and Musk, except for the population issue, the two people have almost no consensus. The core of this is the different attitudes towards artificial intelligence.
At that time, the media called it "the optimist of artificial intelligence and the pessimist confrontation", and in the B station, the video title of this dialogue was named "Wind Qingyang Dialogue Iron Man".
Ma Yun's optimism is indeed obvious, he distinguishes wisdom from intelligence, and believes that artificial intelligence is smart but does not have human wisdom: "Many people are worried about artificial intelligence, and they need to have more confidence in themselves. ”
In fact, a few months before that dialogue, Ma Yun also expressed optimism about artificial intelligence in the dialogue of Nobel Prize winners: "Today, many people hate artificial intelligence, but in the future, without artificial intelligence, the whole society will not be able to operate." ”
Musk, on the other hand, is as cautious about AI as ever. Not only does he think that artificial intelligence will far surpass humans, but it is precisely because of human self-confidence that his fears of "out of control" in the future add to the haze.
Since 2014, Musk has been constantly raising concerns about artificial intelligence, even calling artificial intelligence something more dangerous than nuclear weapons. As with the demographic issue, Musk stressed that "take my word for granted."
This view has not changed for many years, in addition to the confrontation with Ma Yun, Musk and Zuckerberg have also had mutual hatred.
In a 2017 live broadcast, Zuckerberg was asked what he thought of Musk's AI threat theory, and replied sharply that the opponents of AI and the advocates of the end are too negative and irresponsible. Musk tweeted that Zuckerberg has limited knowledge of this field.
In addition to the uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence will threaten mankind, in Musk's eyes, there are many ways for artificial intelligence to "demonize".
For example, the competition for artificial intelligence will likely lead to the third world war, which is a warning issued by Musk in 2017, he called on regulators to guide the technological development of artificial intelligence.
The confrontation between the two camps continues, and it is still uncertain whether conspiracy theorists have ulterior motives or short-sighted people who are blindly optimistic.
But Musk obviously will not let his worries just stay in the heart, nor will he hope for the outside, for the threat of artificial intelligence, Musk's most positive response is the brain-computer interface business.
The "neural connection" Neuralink company he founded can improve the human brain's ability by implanting chips, so that the human brain is expected to communicate with artificial intelligence on an equal footing - lest one day in the future, artificial intelligence and human communication is completely playing the piano.
Look closely at several of Musk's undertakings, each of which has a certain sense of crisis behind it. Neuralink is the readiness to communicate with AI, and Tesla robots (and their own children) are responding to population collapse.
SpaceX's space cause, dedicated to what humans eventually call multi-planetary species, is behind fears of human extinction.
Musk also tweeted the other day: "The expansion of the sun may lead to the extinction of all species on Earth, including humans." This fate can only be avoided by multi-planetariizing life. ”
Bezos, who also takes the "space colonization" route, is much more optimistic in comparison. In Bezos's vision, space colonies would be built very close to Earth, where the Earth would be protected and people born in space could go back and visit it, just like visiting a park.
This vision is naturally meaningless to Musk, and since the driving force behind space colonization is the fear of species extinction caused by the expansion of the sun, then colonies close to Earth will inevitably be burned to death.
Closing your eyes and imagining two futures, Musk's multi-planetary colonization is somewhat tragic, while Bezos sketches a picture of paradise.
Similarly, behind Tesla's and Sun City's new energy businesses, there are concerns about the energy crisis.
A year before Tesla bought Sun City, Musk warned in a radio show: "The biggest problem we need to solve this century is sustainable energy production and consumption." ”
In Musk's eyes, humanity relies on this dwindling resource, which is "crazy." Since it is harmful to the environment and will be used up sooner or later, why don't humans turn the bow of the ship early, and why do they go forward while lamenting on a dead road?
Interestingly, looking at Musk's warnings, all of them mention "human civilization." In the end, Musk's biggest fear is the end of human civilization.
Workaholics seem to have done a lot of things across borders, but they are really just fighting for the continuation of human civilization — at least that's how Musk's story is told.
This story is still quite convincing so far, Musk's logical self-consistency, the relationship between human civilization and his current career, and also consistent with his own life.
At the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, Musk, while talking about concerns about a declining population, said he didn't want to live forever.
His reasoning was very strange: if it were not for the inherent death, it is really possible that there is not the motivation and pressure to do so many things. In other words, the finiteness of life makes life more meaningful.
Of course, you stand on the bridge and look at the scenery, and the people watching the scenery are watching you upstairs. When Musk, who was standing on the bridge, waved his hands and shouted danger, some people looked at Musk and felt that the person himself was a danger.
Last December, European Space Agency Director-General Joseph Aschbach had urged continental leaders to stop fueling Elon Musk's ambitions to dominate the new space economy. He warned that the lack of coordinated action meant Musk was "making the rules himself."
The positive boy who wanted to soothe his anxiety ended up being someone else's concern.
Resources:
China Finance: "Jack Musk Staged a "Two-Horse Dialogue": The Optimist and the Pessimist of Artificial Intelligence Clashed
Tiger Sniff: Bezos's "Wandering Earth" is a Pillar
Tea Horse Planet Vision: "Original United Nations predicts population growth in the next 30 years, Elon Musk contradicts: population will face collapse"
New Energy Vision: "Musk's Real Ambition Lies in Energy"
Play: "Musk's Tesla is ready to acquire Sun City, solve Earth's energy problems before going to Mars"
BI Chinese Station: Musk: The Biggest Problem to Be Solved in This Century is the Energy Crisis