Musk's three major plans for 2022 have been exposed: electric pickups, brain-computer interfaces, and starships

On the evening of December 6, local time, Elon Musk appeared in the camera with a self-cut haircut, remotely interviewing the media on topics such as the current and future worlds and plans for 2022. In the dialogue, Elon Musk revealed that the three plans for 2022 are electric pickups, brain-computer interfaces and starships.

The following is Elon Musk's answers to the questions in the dialogue on the plan for 2022, how to advance the corresponding projects, and the progress that can be expected.

Three major plans for 2022

Musk: The first, electric pickup.

The electric pickup will be an incredible product and I think it's probably the best we've ever had. It has a lot of new technology, so it's hard to produce.

Our goal is to achieve mass production in 2023, and I will provide more detailed product updates on Tesla's earnings call early next year. I wish the progress could be faster, but this is the most likely timeline.

The second is the neuralink.

We have successfully run brain-computer interfaces on monkeys. We have done a lot of testing and have confirmed that it is very safe and that the brain-computer interface device can be safely removed.

People may have seen a demo we released earlier this year in which a monkey uses telepathy to play pong through a brain-computer interface in the brain. It's completely wireless, inductive charging, and the monkey looks perfectly normal but is playing video games through telepathy.

After approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), we hope to have the first human trials next year, which will be people with severe spinal cord injuries, such as quadriplegics. I should say that our standards for implanting devices are much higher than the requirements of the US Food and Drug Administration, just as Tesla's safety standards are much higher than the requirements of the US government.

Third, the Starship.

Starships are a very difficult project, the largest rocket ever built. It has twice the thrust and mass of Saturn V, the largest rocket to reach Earth's orbit.

The Starship is designed for completely fast reusability. If we succeed in this regard, it will be a far-reaching revolution in entering Earth orbit. Because there has never been a fully reusable Earth orbit launch vehicle in history, which is the holy grail of space technology.

This is the fundamental breakthrough necessary for humanity to become a space civilization, which is more draining of my energy than any other problem, and the degree of difficulty is even absurd.

The "perverted" difficulty of the starship project

Musk: We live on a planet with very strong gravity, on the planet with the highest density in the solar system, and our atmosphere is very thick. This results in a typical Earth-orbiting rocket that can only send about 2 percent of its lift-off mass into orbit, perhaps to 2.5 percent through the efforts of a group of smart people. As far as I know, no rocket has been able to send 4% of its lift-off mass into Earth orbit.

Now, in order for the rocket to be fully reusable, you have to invent a rocket that achieves about 4% of the lift-off mass (orbit) if not more, which has never happened, which means you have to implement an all-A+ efficient engine, an efficient structure.

You do need to scale because of scale efficiency, which is part of the reason starships are so huge. Because whether it is a small rocket or a large rocket, the weight of the rocket brain is basic.

For large rockets, avionics (weight ratio) are basically rounded to zero. Or rather, it doesn't matter about the quality of the vehicle. Then you need to make a very light heat shield so that both the booster and the rocket superior can be reused, which is perverted and difficult.

A lot of super smart people have tried it before, but none of them have succeeded. Most of the time, they can only give up halfway, but once we achieve completely fast reusability, it can reduce the cost of getting on orbit by a hundred times or more.

Imagine if you had to buy a new plane every time you flew, which would make flying extremely expensive; if you had to buy a new car every time you drove somewhere, it would be ridiculously expensive than refueling. So we have to do that to refuel the rocket, not to throw it away.

On The Falcon Nine, we succeeded in achieving the reuse of boosters, fairings and nose cones, but the rocket superiors did not.

I think we've achieved the most advanced reusability we've ever achieved, but we want to make the entire hull reusable, which makes a lot of sense, and like I said, it's the difference between humans as a single planetary species and a multi-planetary species.

The progress of Tesla robots and future expectations

Musk: With Tesla autopilotFSD, I think we're actually creating state-of-the-art practical artificial intelligence for navigating the real world. You can think of Tesla as the world's largest robotics company, or semi-intelligent robotics. The car is like a four-wheeled robot.

Well, we might introduce the same technology into a humanoid robot and make that robot useful. Basically, to have a humanoid robotoid, we need to develop some custom drives and sensors. Then using Tesla FSD or autopilot in humanoid robots, or AI in the usual sense for real-world navigation, I think that could be far-reaching. I don't know when we'll get it done, but we'll do it.

Over time, it has the potential to become a universal alternative to the human workforce. The basis of the economy is labour-power, and the capital apparatus is essentially distilled labour-power. I once chatted with a friend of mine and said, what goals should we optimize for? His account is that the average gross profit per employee.

So the fundamental constraint is labor, but there is not enough manpower. I think one of the biggest risks facing civilization is the low birth rate, the rapidly declining birth rate. However, many people (including smart people) think the world is too populated and think that population growth is out of control. But the reality is just the opposite, if people don't have more children, civilization will collapse.

Dictation: Musk, CEO of Tesla

Translation: Rubble Villager

Source: Rubble Villager

（ID：gh_9f4ee5c826a2）

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