Elon Musk: Neuralink, AI, Autopilot, and the Pale Blue Dot | Lex Fridman Podcast #49
the following is a conversation with Elon Musk part two the second time we spoke in the podcast with parallels if not in quality then an outfit to the objectively speaking great a sequel of all-time Godfather Part two as many people know Elon Musk is a leader of Tesla SpaceX your link and the boring company well maybe less known is that he's a world-class engineer and designer constantly emphasizing first principles thinking in taking on big engineering problems that many before him will consider impossible as scientists and engineers most of us don't question the way things are done we simply follow the momentum of the crowd of revolutionary ideas that change the world on the small and large scales happen when you return to the fundamentals and ask is there a better way this conversation focuses on the incredible engineering and innovation done in brain computer interfaces and neural link this work promises to help treat neurobiological diseases to help us further understand the connection between the individual neuron to the high-level function of the human brain and finally to one day expand the capacity of the brain through two-way communication with computational devices the internet and artificial intelligence systems this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube apple podcasts Spotify supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman spelled Fri D ma M and now as an anonymous youtube commenter refer to our previous conversation as the quote historical first video of two robots conversing without supervision here's the second time the second conversation with Elon Musk let's start with an easy question about consciousness in your view is consciousness something that's unique to humans there's is something that permeates all matter almost like a fundamental force of physics I don't think consciousness permeates all matter pants I just believe that yeah there's a philosophical how would you tell that's true that's a good point I believe in scientific message don't blow your mind anything but the scientific method it's like you can't test the hypothesis then you cannot reach meaningful conclusion that it is true do you think consciousness understanding consciousness is within the reach of science of the scientific method we can dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness you know hard pressed to say that we understand anything with complete accuracy but can we dramatically improve ours that any consciousness I believe the answer is yes this Nai system in your view I have to have consciousness in order to achieve human-level or superhuman level intelligence does it need to have some of these human qualities that consciousness may be a body may be a fear of mortality capacity love those kinds of silly human things it's different you know there's this the scientific method which I very much believe in where something is true to the degree that it is test ibly so and and otherwise you're really just talking about you know preferences or full-on untestable beliefs or that you know that kind of thing so ends up being somewhat of a semantic question where we were conflating a lot of things with the word intelligence if we parse them out and say you know all we headed towards the future where an AI will be able to out think us in every way then the answer is unequivocally yes in order for an AI system that needs to out think us in every way it also needs to have a capacity to have consciousness self-awareness and Anjali will be self-aware yes that's different from consciousness I need to be in terms words that what consciousness feels like it feels like consciousness is in a different dimension but this is this could be just an illusion you know if you damnit damage your brain in some way physically you get you you damage your consciousness which implies that consciousness is a physical phenomenon and in my view the thing is that that I think are really quite quite likely is that digital intelligence will be able to out think us in every way and it will soon be able to simulate what we consider consciousness so to agree that you would not be able to tell the difference and from the from the aspect of the scientific method it's it might as well be consciousness if we can simulate it perfectly if you can't tell the difference and this is sort of the Turing test but think of a more sort of advanced version of the Turing test if you if you're if you're talking to a digital super intelligence and can't tell if that is a computer or a human like let's say just having conversation of a phone or a video conference or something where you're you you think you're talking look looks like person makes all of the right inflections and movements and and all the small subtleties that constitute a human and talks like human makes mistakes like you're hearing like look at that and you literally just can't tell is this are you really conversing with a person or or an AI might as well wear as well be human so on a darker topic you've expressed serious concern about existential threats of AI it's perhaps one of the greatest challenges our civilization faces but since I would say we're kind of an optimistic descendants of apes perhaps we can find several paths of escaping the harm of AI so if I can give you three options maybe can comment which do you think is the most promising so one is scaling up efforts on AI safety and beneficial I research and in hope of finding an algorithmic or maybe a policy solution to is becoming a multiplanetary species as quickly as possible and three is merging with AI and and riding the wave of that increasing intelligence as it continuously improves what do you think is most promising most interesting as a civilization that we should invest in I think that's this a lot that responder investment going on nai whereas a lack of investment is in AI safety and there should be in my view a cup an agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm that it is does not represent a public safety risk just as there is a regulatory authority for this like the Food and Drug Administration is that's the four corner automotive safety there's the FA for aircraft safety which generally comes a conclusion that it is important to have a government referee or a referee that is serving the public interest in ensuring that things are safe when when there's a potential danger to the public I would argue that AI is unequivocally something that has potential to be dangerous to the public and therefore should have a regulatory agency just as other things that are dangerous to the public have a regulatory agency but let me tell you problems with this is that the government was very slowly and the rate of the usually way a regulatory agency comes into being is that something terrible happens there's a huge public outcry and years after that there's a regulatory agency or rule put in place takes something like like seatbelts it was known for on a decade or more that seatbelts would have a massive impact on safety and and save so many lives in serious injuries and the car industry fought the requirements put seatbelts in tooth and nail that's crazy yeah and and honor hundreds of thousands of people probably died because of that and they said people wouldn't buy cars if their seatbelts just obviously absurd you know or look at the back tobacco industry and how long they fought any thing about smoking that's part of why I helped make that movie thank you for smoking you can sort of see just how pernicious it can be when you have these companies that effectively achieve regulatory capture of government the bad people in the AG community refer to the advent of digital superintelligence as a singularity that that is not to say that it is good or bad but it that it is very difficult to predict what will happen after that point and and that there's some probability it will be bad some probably will be it will be good or if they want you to affect that probability and have it be more good than bad well let me on the merger with AI question and the incredible work that's being done in your link there's a lot of fascinating innovation here across different disciplines going on so the flexible wires the robotic sewing machine that responds to brain movement everything around ensuring safety and so on so we currently understand very little about the human brain do you also hope that the work at neural link will help us understand more about our about the human mind about the brain yeah the work in your like will definitely shut a lot of insight into how the brain the mind works right now just the data we have regarding the how the brain works is very limited we've collect fMRI which is that that's kind of like putting us you know a stethoscope on the outside of a factory wall and then putting it like all over the factory wall and you can sort of hear the sounds but you don't know what machines are doing really yeah it's hard you can infer a few things but it's very poor brushstroke in order to really know what's going on in the brain you really need you have to have high precision sensors and then you want to have stimulus and response like if you trigger a new one what how do you feel what do you see how does it change your perception of the world you're speaking to physically just getting close to the brain being able to measure signals on the brain yeah will give us sort of open the door and inside the factory yes being able to have high precision sensors that tell you what individual neurons are doing and then being able to trigger a neuron and see what the responses in the brain so you can see the consequences of if you fire this neuron what happens how do you feel what is change it'll be really profound to have this in people because people can articulate their change like if there's a change in mood or if they've you know if they can tell you if they can see better or hear better or be able to form sentences better or worse or you know their memories are jogged or that kinda kind of thing so on the human side there's this incredible general malleability plasticity of the human brain the human brain adapts adjusts and so on so it's not that plastic to be totally Frank so there's a firm structure but there nevertheless there's some plasticity and the open question is so if I could ask a broad question is how much that plasticity can be utilized sort of on the human side there's some plasticity in human brain and on the machine side we have neural networks machine learning artificial intelligence it's able to adjust and figure out signals so there's a mysterious language that we don't perfectly understand that's within the human brain and then we're trying to understand that language to communicate both directions so the brain is adjusting a little bit we don't know how much and the machine is adjusting where do you see as they try to sort of reach together almost like with an alien species try to find a protocol communication protocol that works where do you see the biggest the the biggest benefit arriving from on the machine side or the human side do you see both of them working together I think the machine side is far more malleable and the biological side well huge around so it'll be the machine that adapts to the brain that's the only thing that's possible the brain can adapt that well to to the machine you can't have neurons start to regard an electrode as a nook another neuron because you're not just dislike the pulse and so something else is pulsing see so this there is that there is that that elasticity in the inner which we believe is something that can happen but the vast majority of malleability will have to be on the machine side but it's interesting when you look at that synaptic plasticity at the interface ID there might be like an emergent plasticity because it's a whole nother it's not like in the brain it's a whole nother extension of the brain you know we might have to redefine what it means to be malleable for the brain so maybe the brain is able to adjust to external interfaces there will be some adjustment to the brain because there's gonna be something reading and simulating the the brain and so it will adjust to to that thing but but well if the vast majority the adjustment will be on the machine side this is just if this is just it has to be that otherwise it will not work ultimately like we don't currently operate on two layers we have sort of lamech you like prime primitive brain layer which is where all of our kind of impulses or coming from it's sort of like we've got we've got like a monkey brain with a computer stuck on it that's that's the human brain and a lot of our impulses and everything are driven by the monkey brain and the computer of the cortex is constantly trying to make the Montek monkey brain happy it's not the cortex that's steering the monkey right it's the monkey brain steering the cortex you know so the cortex is the part that tells the story of the whole thing so we convince ourselves it's more interesting than just the monkey brain the cortex just like what we'll call like human intelligence you know it's like that's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures like other creatures do not have either we're really they don't they don't have the computer or they have a very weak computer relative to humans but but it's just it's like it sort of seems like surely the really smart thing should control the dumb thing but actually don't think it rolls this one thing so do you think some of the same kind of machine learning methods whether that's natural language processing applications are going to be applied for the communication between the Machine and the brain in to learn how to do certain things like movement of the body how to process visual stimuli and so on do you see the value of using machine learning to understand the language of the two-way communication with the brain yeah absolutely maybe we're a neural net and that you know AI is basically known that so it's like digital neural net will interface with biological neural net and hopefully bring us along for the ride yeah but the vast majority of aren't of our intelligence will be digital there's no like so like things like the the difference in intelligence between your the cortex and limbic system is gigantic your living system really has no comprehension of what the hell the cortex is doing it's just literally hungry you know or tired or angry or sexy or something you know it's an ad just and then it that communicates that's that impulse to the cortex and Tails the cortex to go satisfy that then a great deal of like a massive amount of thinking like truly this stupendous amount of thinking has gone into sex without purpose without provocation without procreation which which is actually quite a silly action in the absence of procreation it's a bit silly the one why you doing it that's because it makes the limbic system happy that's why that's why but it's pretty absurd really well the whole of existence is pretty absurd in some kind of sense yeah but I mean this does a lot of computation has gone into how can I do more of that with the co-creation not even being a factor this is I think a very important area of research for NSFW an agency that should receive a lot of funding especially after this decision if I propose the formation of a new agency oh boy what is the most exciting or some of the most exciting things that you see in the future impact of neural link both on the size engineering a societal broad impact so in your link I think that first will solve a lot of brain related diseases so creating from like autism schizophrenia memory loss like everyone experiences memory loss that at certain point in in age parents can't remember their kids names and that kind of thing so there's like mount of good that neural link can do in solving a critical critical damage to brain or the spinal cord there's a lot that can be done to improve quality of life of individuals and that will be those three steps along the way and then ultimately it's intended to address the the risk of the existential risks associated with digital super intelligence like we will not feel to be smarter than a digital supercomputer so therefore if you cannot beat them join them and released we won't have that option so you have hope that your link will be able to be a kind of connection to allow us to to merge to ride the wave of the improving AI systems I think the chances above zero percent it's nonzero yeah there's a chance and that's so what I've seen dumb and dumber yes so I'm saying there's a chance he's saying one in a billion or one in a million whatever it was the dumb and dumber you know it went from maybe one a million to improving maybe it'll be one in a thousand and then 100 then one in ten depends on the rate of improvement of neural link and how fast we're able to do make progress you know well I've talked to a few folks here quite brilliant engineers some I'm excited yeah I think it's like fundamentally good you know who you know giving somebody back full motor control after they've had a spinal cord injury you know restoring brain functionality after a stroke solving debilitating genetically orange brain diseases these are all incredibly great I think and in order to do these you have to be able to interface with the neurons at detail level and each build fire they're not write neurons read the write neurons and and then effectively you can create a circuit replace what's broken with with silicon and actually fill in them the missing functionality and then over time we can have with develop a tertiary layer so if like limbic system is a primary layer then the cortex is like a sector the second layer now and I said that you know the cortex is vastly more intelligent than the limbic system but people generally like the fact that they have a living system and a cortex I've met anyone who wants to lead either one of them there like a girl keeping both that's cool the limbic system is kind of fun tell us what the fun is absolutely and then you people generally don't lose the cortex either all right they're like having the cortex and the limbic system yeah and and then there's a tertiary layer which will be digital super intelligence and I think there's room for optimism given that the cortex the cortex is very intelligent and limbic system is not and yet they work together well perhaps they can be a tertiary layer where digital super intelligence lies and that that will be vastly more intelligent than the cortex but still coexist peacefully and in the end of an EIN manner with the cortex and limbic system that's a super exciting future both on the low-low of engineering that I saw is being done here and actual possibility in the next few decades it's important that Norling solved this problem sooner rather than later because the point at which we have digital super intelligence that's when we pass the singularity and and things become just very uncertain it doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad or good for the point which we passed singularity things become extremely unstable so we want to have a human brain interface before the singularity or at least not long after it to minimize existential risk for Humanity and consciousness as we know it but there's a lot of fascinating actual engineering a low-level problems here at your link that yeah quite quite exciting what the problems that we face in your like art material science Electrical Engineering software mechanical engineering micro fabrication it's a bunch of engineering disciplines essentially that's where it comes down to you have to have a a tiny electrode so so small it doesn't hurt hurt neurons but it's got to last for as long as a person so it's gonna last for decades and then you've got to take that signal you've got to process that single looks signal locally at low power so we need a lot of chip design engineers that you know cuz we're gonna do signal processing and do so in a very power efficient way so that we don't heat your brain up because the brain is very heat sensitive and then and then we're going to take those signals I'm going to do something with them and then we better stimulate interest of stimulate the back too you know so you could buy directional communication so he's good at material science software mechanical engineering Electrical Engineering trip design micro fabrication that's what those are the things we need to work on we need to a good material science so that the we can have tiny electrodes that last a long time and as the tough thing with the science problems a tough one because you're trying to read and simulate electrically in a an electrically active area your brain is very electrically active in electro chemically active so how do you have a coating on the electrode that doesn't dissolve over time and and is safe in the brain this is a very hard problem and then and then how do you collect those signals in a way that is most efficient because you really just have very tiny amounts of power to process those signals you know and then we need to automate the whole thing so it's like LASIK you know so it's just it's it's not if this is done by neurosurgeons there's no way it can scale to large numbers of people and it needs to scales large numbers of people because I think ultimately we want the future repeated to be determined by a large number of the of humans do you think that this has a chance to revolutionize surgery period so neurosurgery and Ellis yeah for sure it's gotta be like lazy like you met if LASIK had to be hand done not done by hand by a person that wouldn't be great you know it's done by a robot and they'll off the mall it just kind of just needs to make sure yo-you heads in my position and then they just press button and go it's a smart summon and soon Auto Park takes on the full beautiful mess of parking lots and their human human nonverbal communication I think it has actually the potential to have a profound impact in changing how our civilization looks at AI in robotics because this is the first time human beings people that don't own and test them Eve never seen it doesn't hurt about a Tesla get to watch hundreds of thousands of cars without a driver yeah do you see it this way almost like an education tool for the world about AI do you feel the burden of that the excitement of that or do you just think it's a smart parking feature I do think you are getting at something important which is most people have never really seen a robot or at and what what is the card that is autonomous it's a four wheeled robot yeah the it communicates a certain sort of message with everything from safety to the possibility of what AI could bring his current limitations its current challenges its what's possible do you feel the burden of that almost like a communicator educator to the world about AI we were just really trying to make fuels lives easier with autonomy but now you mention it I think it will be an eye-opener to people about robotics because they have really never seen most people never seen a robot and are hundreds of thousands of Tesla's won't be long before there's a million of them that have autonomous capability and the drive without a person in it and you use you can see the kind of evolution of the cars personality and and thinking with each iteration of autopilot you can see it's it's uncertain about this or it gets it but now it's more certain now now it's moving in a slightly different way like I can tell immediately if a car is on tells autopilot because got just little nuances of movement it just moves in a slightly different way it will cause aunt Ella for example on the highway are far more precise about being in the center of the lane than a person if you drive down the highway and look at how at where cars are the human driven cars are in within their lane that like bumper cars then like moving all over the place the car and autopilot dead center yes of the incredible work that's going into that in your network it's learning fast autonomy is still very very hard we don't actually know how hard it is fully of course you look at the most problems you tackle this one included in with an exponential lens but even with an exponential improvement things can take longer than expected sometimes so where does Tesla currently stand on its quest for full autonomy what's your sense when can we see successful deployment of full autonomy well on the highway already the the probability of an intervention is extremely low yes so for highway autonomy with latest release especially the probability of need to intervene is this query is really quite low in fact I'd say for stop-and-go traffic did its Matt as far safer than a person right now it's not forget the probability of an injury or an impact is much much lower for a pilot in a person and it was navigating change lanes take highway interchanges and then we're coming at it from the other direction which is low speed full autonomy and in a way this is like it's like how does a person learn to drive you learn to drive in parking lot you know you know first time you learn to drive probably wasn't jumping on Wolcott Street in San Francisco that'd be crazy you're driving in the parking lot get things get things right at low speed and and then the missing piece that were working on is traffic lights and stuff streets dr. Esau streets obviously actually also relatively easy because you know you kind of know where the stuff Street is was casing geocoded and then use visualization to see where the line is and stop the line to illuminate the GPS are so it actually this is probably complex traffic lights and very windy roads are the two things that need to get sold what's harder perception of control for these problems so being able to perfectly perceive everything or figuring out a plan once you perceive everything how to interact with all the agents in the environment in your sense from a learning perspective is perception or action harder and then giant beautiful multitask learning neural network the hardest thing is having a kur representation of the physical objects in vector space so transportation the visual input primarily visual input some sonar and radar and and then at creating the an accurate vector space representation of the objects around you once you have an accurate vectors based representation the flanker and control is relatively easier it is relatively easy basically once you have accurate vector representation then then you're kind of like a video game like it cars in like Grand Theft Auto or something like they work pretty well they drive down the road they don't crash you know pretty much unless you crash into them that's because they've they've got an accurate vectors based representation of where the cars are and they're just bent and then they're rendering that as the as the output you have a sense high level that Tesla's on track on being able to achieve full autonomy so on the highway yeah yeah absolutely and still no driver state as a driver sensing and we have driver sensing with talk in the wheel that's right yeah by the way just a quick comment on karaoke most people think it's fun but I also think it's a driving feature I've been saying for a long time singing in a car is really good for attention management and vigilance management uh sorry Tesla karaoke again it's great it's the one of the most fun features of the car do you think of a connection between fun and safety sometimes yeah they're both the same time that's great I just met with and ruin wife of uh Carl Sagan oh yeah directed cut cosmos I'm generally a big fan of Paul Sagan he's super cool and they had a great way of bringing things all that consciousness all civilization everything we've ever known and done is on this tiny blue dot people also get they get too trapped in there this is like squabbles amongst humans and this don't think of a big picture they take civilization and not continuing existence for granted I shouldn't do that look at the history of civilizations their eyes and they fall and now civilization is all it's globalized and so we're civilization I think now rises and falls together there's no there's not geographic isolation this is a big risk things don't always go up that should be that's an important lesson of history in 1990 at the request of Carl Sagan the Voyager 1 spacecraft which is a spacecraft that's reaching out farther than anything human made into space turned around to take a picture of Earth from 3.7 billion the way and as you're talking about the pale blue dot that picture there takes up less than a single pixel in that image you know appearing as a tiny blue dot as pale blue dot as Carl Sagan called it so he spoke about this dot of ours in 1994 and if you could humor me I was wondering if in the last two minutes you could read the words that he wrote described in this buildup sure yes finally the universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old earth-like four-and-a-half billion years old you know another half billion years or so the Sun will expand and probably evaporate the oceans and make life impossible on earth which means that if it had taken consciousness temp sent longer to evolve it would never have balled it all its attempts and longer and I wonder I wonder how many dead one planet civilizations that are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet and ultimately extinguish themselves or were destroyed by external factors probably a few it's only just possible to try to travel to Mars just barely if G was 10% more wouldn't work really if it empty was 10% lower it would be easy plucking go single stage from surface of module away surface of the earth there's Mars it's 37-cent with gravity they're about a giant blue stick you know forth channeling Costigan look again at that dot that's here that's home that's us on it everyone you love everyone you know everyone you've ever heard of every human being who ever was lived out their lives the aggregate of our joy and suffering thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and destroyer of civilization every King and peasant every young couple in love every mother and father hopeful child inventor and Explorer every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every superstar every Supreme Leader every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark in our obscurity in all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves the earth is the only world known so far to harbor life there is nowhere else at least in the near future to which our species could migrate this is not true this is Fault Mars and I think Carl Sagan would agree with that he couldn't even imagine it at that time so thank you for making the world dream and thank you for talking today I really appreciate it thank you you