Elon Musk: Neuralink, AI, Autopilot, and the Pale Blue Dot

Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and a co-founder of several other companies. This is the second time Elon has been on the podcast. You can watch the first time on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI or listen to the first time on its episode page https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk/. You can read the transcript (PDF) here https://lexfridman.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/elon_musk_lex_fridman_2_transcript.pdf. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, Medium https://medium.com/@lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584 or support it on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman. Here’s the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode): 00:00 – Introduction 01:57 – Consciousness 05:58 – Regulation of AI Safety 09:39 – Neuralink – understanding the human brain 11:53 – Neuralink – expanding the capacity of the human mind 17:51 – Neuralink – future challenges, solutions, and impact 24:59 – Smart Summon 27:18 – Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving 31:16 – Carl Sagan and the Pale Blue Dot

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, part two, the second time we spoke on the podcast with parallels, if not in quality, than in outfit to the objectively speaking, greatest sequel of all time, Godfather Part Two.

• 0:17Lex Fridman?

  As many people know, Elon Musk is a leader of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company. What may be 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. But 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

• 1:00Lex Fridman?

  done in brain-computer interfaces at Neuralink. 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, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, at Lex Fridman, spelled F R I D M A N. And now, as an anonymous YouTube commenter referred to our

• 1:43Lex Fridman?

  previous conversation as the "historical first video of two robots conversing without supervision", here's the second time, the second conversation with Elon Musk.

• 2:15Lex Fridman?

  Let's start with an easy question about consciousness. In your view, is consciousness something that's unique to humans? Or is it something that permeates all matter? Almost like a fundamental force of physics?

• 2:27Elon Musk?

  I don't think consciousness permeates all matter.

• 2:30Lex Fridman?

  Panpsychists believe that.

• 2:31Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:32Lex Fridman?

  There's a philosophical...

• 2:33Elon Musk?

  How would you tell?

• 2:36Lex Fridman?

  That's true. That's a good point.

• 2:38Elon Musk?

  I believe in scientific method. I don't blow your mind or anything, but the scientific method is like if you cannot test the hypothesis, then you cannot reach meaningful conclusion that it is true.

• 2:47Lex Fridman?

  Do you think consciousness, understanding consciousness, is within the reach of science, of the scientific method?

• 2:54Elon Musk?

  We can dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness. You know, I'd be hard pressed to say that we understand anything with complete accuracy, but can we dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness? I believe the answer is yes.

• 3:10Lex Fridman?

  Does an AI system, in your view, have to have consciousness in order to achieve human level or superhuman level intelligence? Does it need to have some of these human qualities like consciousness, maybe a body, maybe a fear of mortality, capacity to love, those kinds of silly human things?

• 3:32Elon Musk?

  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 testably so. And otherwise, you're really just talking about, you know, preferences or untestable beliefs or that, you know, that kind of thing. So it ends up being somewhat of a semantic question where we are conflating a lot of things with the word intelligence. If we parse them out and say, you know, are we headed towards the future where an AI

• 4:14Elon Musk?

  will be able to outthink us in every way? Then the answer is unequivocally yes.

• 4:22Lex Fridman?

  In order for an AI system that needs to outthink us in every way, it also needs to have a capacity to have consciousness, self-awareness and understanding.

• 4:33Elon Musk?

  It will be self-aware, yes. That's different from consciousness. I mean, to me, it's what consciousness feels like. It feels like consciousness is in a different dimension. But this could be just an illusion. If you damage your brain in some way physically, you damage your consciousness, which implies that consciousness is a physical phenomenon, in my view. The thing is that I think are really quite likely is that digital intelligence will be able to outthink us in every way, and it will suddenly be able to simulate what we consider consciousness. So to a degree, you would not be able to tell the difference.

• 5:16Lex Fridman?

  And from the aspect of the scientific method, it might as well be consciousness if we can simulate it perfectly.

• 5:23Elon Musk?

  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're talking to a digital superintelligence and can't tell if that is a computer or a human, like let's say you're just having a conversation over a phone or a video conference or something where you think it looks like a person makes all of the right inflections and movements and all the small subtleties that constitute a human and talks like a human makes mistakes like a human. And you literally just can't tell.

• 6:05Elon Musk?

  Is this, are you video conferencing with a person or an AI?

• 6:13Lex Fridman?

  Might as well.

• 6:13Elon Musk?

  Might as well.

• 6:14Lex Fridman?

  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 you can comment, which do you think is the most promising? So, one is scaling up efforts on AI safety and beneficial AI research in hope of finding an algorithmic or maybe a policy solution. Two is becoming a multi-planetary species as quickly as possible.

• 6:55Lex Fridman?

  And three is merging with AI 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?

• 7:11Elon Musk?

  I think there's a tremendous amount of investment going on in AI. Where there's a lack of investment is in AI safety. And there should be, in my view, a government agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm that it does not represent a public safety risk, just as there is a regulatory authority for, there's like the Food and Drug Administration, there's NHTSA for automotive safety, there's the FAA for aircraft safety. We generally come to the conclusion that it is important to have a government referee or referee that is serving the public interest in ensuring that things are safe when there's a potential danger to the public.

• 7:55Elon Musk?

  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, the problem with this is that the government moves very slowly. And the rate of, usually the 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 a rule put in place. Take something like seat belts. It was known for

• 8:36Elon Musk?

  A decade or more that seat belts would have a massive impact on safety and save so many lives and serious injuries. And the car industry fought the requirement to put seat belts in tooth and nail.

• 8:52Elon Musk?

  That's crazy.

• 8:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Elon Musk?

  And hundreds of thousands of people probably died because of that.

• 8:59Elon Musk?

  And they said people wouldn't buy cars if they had seat belts, which is obviously absurd. You know, or look at the tobacco industry and how long they fought anything 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 effectively

• 9:23Elon Musk?

  achieve regulatory capture of government, the bad. People in the AI community refer to the advent of digital superintelligence as a singularity. That is not to say that it is good or bad, but that it is very difficult to predict what will happen after that point. And that there's some probability it will be bad, some probability it will be good. We obviously want to affect that probability and have it be more good than bad.

• 9:55Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me, on the merger with AI question and the incredible work that's being done at Neuralink, there's a lot of fascinating innovation here across different disciplines going on. So the flexible wires, the robotic sewing machine, the responsive 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 Neuralink will help us understand more about our, about the human mind, about the brain?

• 10:30Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I think the work in Neuralink will definitely shed a lot of insight into how the brain and the mind works. Right now, just the data we have regarding how the brain works is very limited. You know, we've got fMRI, which is that that's kind of like putting a, 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 the machines are doing really. It's hard. You can infer a few things, but it's very broad brush stroke. 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 neuron, what, how do

• 11:12Elon Musk?

  you feel? What do you see? How does it change your perception of the world?

• 11:16Lex Fridman?

  You're speaking to physically, just getting close to the brain, being able to measure signals from the brain?

• 11:20Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Lex Fridman?

  Will give us sort of open the door inside the factory?

• 11:25Elon Musk?

  Yes, exactly. Being able to have high precision sensors that that tell you what individual neurons are doing. And then being able to trigger a neuron and see what the response is in the brain. So you can see the consequences of, if you fire this neuron, what happens? How do you feel? What does 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 kind of thing.

• 12:09Lex Fridman?

  So on the, on the human side, there's this incredible general malleability, plasticity of the human brain, the human brain adapts, adjusts and so on.

• 12:18Elon Musk?

  It's not that plastic, to be totally frank.

• 12:20Lex Fridman?

  So there's a firm structure, but nevertheless, there is some plasticity in the open question is sort of 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 the 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.

• 13:01Lex Fridman?

  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 biggest benefit arriving from on the machine side or the human side? Do you see both of them working together?

• 13:19Elon Musk?

  I actually think the machine side is far more malleable than the biological side by a huge amount. So it'll be the, the machine that adapts to the brain. That's the only thing that's possible. The brain can't adapt that well to, to, to the machine. You can't have neurons start to regard an electrode as another neuron. Cause like neuron just, there's like the pulse. And so something else is pulsing. So there's, there is that, there is that elasticity in the interface, which we believe is, is something that can, can happen. But the vast majority of the malleability will have to be on the machine side.

• 13:55Lex Fridman?

  But it's interesting, when you look at that synaptic plasticity at the interface side, there might be like an emergent plasticity. Cause 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.

• 14:16Elon Musk?

  There'll be some adjustments to the brain, cause there's, there's gonna be something reading and simulating the, the brain. And so it will adjust to, to that thing.

• 14:26Elon Musk?

  But, but most, the vast majority of the adjustment will be on the machine side.

• 14:32Elon Musk?

  This is just, it has to be that, otherwise it will not work. Ultimately, like, we currently operate on two layers. We have sort of a limbic, like, prime primitive brain layer, which is where all of our kind of impulses are 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, the computer, the cortex, is constantly trying to make the monkey, monkey brain happy. It's not the cortex that's steering the monkey brains. The monkey brain's steering the cortex. You know?

• 15:08Lex Fridman?

  But the cortex is the part that tells the story of the whole thing. So we convince ourselves it's, it's more interesting than just the monkey brain.

• 15:16Elon Musk?

  The cortex is like what we call like human intelligence. You know, so it's like, that's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures. Other creatures do not have either, really, they don't, they don't have the computer. Or they have a very weak computer relative to humans. But, but it's, it's like, it sort of seems like surely the really smart thing should control the dumb thing, but actually the dumb thing controls the smart thing.

• 15:45Lex Fridman?

  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? To, 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?

• 16:12Elon Musk?

  Sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're a neural net. And that, you know, AI is basically neural net. So it's like digital neural net will interface with biological neural net.

• 16:25Elon Musk?

  And hopefully bring us along for the ride. But the vast majority of our of our intelligence will be digital. Does it like like so like think of like the difference in intelligence between your the cortex and your limbic system is gigantic. Your your limbic system really has no comprehension of what the hell the cortex is doing.

• 16:50Elon Musk?

  You know, it's just literally hungry, you know, or tired or angry or sexy or something, you know, that's and and just and then that communicates that that impulse to the cortex and tells the cortex to go satisfy that. Then a lot of a great deal of like a massive amount of thinking, like truly stupendous amount of thinking, has gone into sex without purpose, without procreation, without procreation.

• 17:21Elon Musk?

  Which which which is actually quite a silly action in the absence of procreation. It's it's a bit silly. So why are you doing it? Because it makes the limbic system happy, that's why.

• 17:33Lex Fridman?

  That's why.

• 17:35Elon Musk?

  But it's pretty absurd, really.

• 17:38Lex Fridman?

  Well, the whole of existence is pretty absurd in some kind of sense.

• 17:41Elon Musk?

  Yeah. But but I mean, this is a lot of computation has gone into how can I do more of that with the procreation not even being a factor? This is, I think, a very important area of research by NSFW.

• 17:57Lex Fridman?

  An agency that should receive a lot of funding, especially after this conversation.

• 18:01Elon Musk?

  If I propose the formation of a new agency.

• 18:04Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy.

• 18:09Lex Fridman?

  What is the most exciting or some of the most exciting things that you see in the future impact of Neuralink, both on the science, the engineering, and societal broad impact?

• 18:19Elon Musk?

  So Neuralink, I think, at first will solve a lot of brain-related diseases. So it could be anything from like autism, schizophrenia, memory loss, like everyone experiences memory loss at certain points in in age. Parents can't remember their their kids' names and that kind of thing. So there's, I think, a tremendous amount of good that Neuralink can do in solving critical

• 18:44Elon Musk?

  Critical damage to the 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 will be steps along the way. And then ultimately,

• 18:57Elon Musk?

  it's intended to address the existential risk associated with digital superintelligence. Like, we will not be able to be smarter than a digital supercomputer. So therefore, if you cannot beat them, join them.

• 19:15Elon Musk?

  And at least we won't have that option.

• 19:18Lex Fridman?

  So you have hope that Neuralink will be able to be a kind of connection to allow us to merge, to ride the wave of the improving AI systems?

• 19:29Elon Musk?

  I think the chance is above 0%.

• 19:32Lex Fridman?

  So it's non-zero.

• 19:34Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 19:34Lex Fridman?

  There's a chance. And that's...

• 19:36Elon Musk?

  So have you seen Dumb and Dumber?

• 19:39Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 19:39Elon Musk?

  So I'm saying there's a chance.

• 19:41Lex Fridman?

  He's saying one in a billion or one in a million, whatever it was in Dumb and Dumber.

• 19:45Elon Musk?

  You know, it went from maybe one in a million to improving, maybe it'll be one in a thousand and then one in a hundred, then one in 10. It depends on the rate of improvement of Neuralink and how fast we're able to do, make progress, you know?

• 19:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, I've talked to a few folks here, they're quite brilliant engineers, so I'm excited.

• 20:02Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I think it's fundamentally good, you know, giving somebody back full motor control after they've had a spinal cord injury,

• 20:11Elon Musk?

  you know, restoring vein functionality after a stroke,

• 20:15Elon Musk?

  solving debilitating genetically oriented brain diseases. These are all incredibly great, I think. And in order to do these, you have to be able to interface with neurons at a detailed level and you have to be able to fire the right neurons, read the right neurons. And then effectively, you can create a circuit, replace what's broken with silicon and essentially fill in the missing functionality. And then over time...

• 20:45Elon Musk?

  We can have, we develop a tertiary layer. So if like limbic system is a primary layer, then the cortex is like a second layer. And as I said, you know, obviously the cortex is vastly more intelligent than the limbic system, but people generally like the fact that they have a limbic system and a cortex. I haven't met anyone who wants to delete either one of them. They're like, okay, I'll keep them both. That's cool.

• 21:05Lex Fridman?

  The limbic system is kind of fun.

• 21:07Elon Musk?

  That's what the fun is. Absolutely. And then people generally don't want to lose their cortex either. So they're like having the cortex and the limbic system.

• 21:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Elon Musk?

  And then there's a tertiary layer, which will be digital superintelligence. 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 there can be a tertiary layer where digital superintelligence lies, and that will be vastly more intelligent than the cortex, but still coexist peacefully and in a benign manner with the cortex and limbic system.

• 21:46Lex Fridman?

  That's a super exciting future, both in the low level engineering that I saw as being done here and the actual possibility in the next few decades.

• 21:55Elon Musk?

  It's important that Neuralink solve this problem sooner rather than later, because the point at which we have digital superintelligence, that's where we pass singularity and things become just very uncertain. It doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad or good, but the point at which we pass 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.

• 22:23Lex Fridman?

  But there's a lot of fascinating actual engineering, low level problems here at Neuralink that are quite, quite exciting. What?

• 22:31Elon Musk?

  The problems that we face in Neuralink are material science, electrical engineering, software, mechanical engineering, microfabrication. It's a bunch of engineering disciplines, essentially. That's what it comes down to, is that you have to have a tiny electrode, so small it doesn't hurt neurons, but it's got to last for as long as a person, so it's going to last for decades. And then you've got to take that signal, you've got to process that single signal locally at low power, so we need a lot of chip design engineers, you know, because we've got to signal processing.

• 23:13Elon Musk?

  And do so in a very power efficient way so that we don't heat your brain up.

• 23:19Elon Musk?

  Because the brain is very heat sensitive. And then, and then we've got to take those signals and we're going to do something with them. And then we've got to stimulate, stimulate the back to, to, you know, so you could

• 23:31Elon Musk?

  bidirectional communication. So if somebody's good at material science, software, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chip design, microfabrication, that's what, those are the things we need to work on. We need to be good at material science so that the, we can have tiny electrodes that last a long time. And it's, it's a tough thing with the, the materials science problem is a tough one because you're trying to read and simulate electrically in an electric, an electrically active area. Your brain is very electrically active and electrochemically active. So how do you have a, say a coating on the electrode that doesn't dissolve over time?

• 24:10Elon Musk?

  And, and is safe in the brain? This is a very hard problem.

• 24:16Elon Musk?

  And, and then how do you collect those signals? In a way that is most efficient because you, 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, it's not, if, if this is done by neurosurgeons, there's no way it can scale to a large numbers of people. And it needs to scale to large numbers of people because I think ultimately we want the future to be determined by a large number of, of humans.

• 24:49Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that this has a chance to revolutionize surgery period? So neurosurgery and surgery all across?

• 24:56Elon Musk?

  Yeah, for sure. It's, it's got to be like Lasik. Like if, if Lasik had to be hand done, done by hand by a person, that wouldn't be great. You know?

• 25:06Elon Musk?

  It's done by a robot.

• 25:09Elon Musk?

  And the automaton just kind of just needs to make sure your head's in the right position and then they can just press a button and go.

• 25:16Lex Fridman?

  So smart summon and soon auto park takes on the full beautiful mess of parking lots and their human to human nonverbal communication. I think it has actually the potential to have a profound impact in changing how our civilization looks at AI and robotics because this is the first time human beings, people that don't own a Tesla, may have never seen a Tesla or heard about a Tesla, get to watch hundreds of thousands of cars without a driver.

• 25:44Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 25:57Elon Musk?

  I do think you are getting at something important, which is, most people have never really seen a robot.

• 26:02Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 26:02Elon Musk?

  And what is the car that's autonomous? It's a four wheeled robot.

• 26:06Lex Fridman?

  Right. Yeah, it communicates a certain sort of message with everything from safety to the possibility of what AI could bring, to its current limitations, its current challenges, it's what's possible. Do you feel the burden of that, almost like a communicator educator to the world about AI?

• 26:25Elon Musk?

  We're just really trying to make people's lives easier with autonomy. But now that you mention it, I think it will be an eye opener to people about robotics because they've really never seen, most people have never seen a robot and there are hundreds of thousands of Teslas, 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 can see the kind of evolution of the car's personality and thinking with each iteration of autopilot. You can see it's uncertain about this or it gets, but now it's more certain, now it's moving in a slightly different way.

• 27:07Elon Musk?

  Like I can tell immediately if a car is on Tesla autopilot because it's got just little nuances of movement, it just moves in a slightly different way. Cars on Tesla autopilot, 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, where cars are, the human driven cars are within their lane, they're like bumper cars, they're like moving all over the place. The car on autopilot, dead center.

• 27:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so the incredible work that's going into that neural network is 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, 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?

• 28:13Elon Musk?

  Well, on the highway already, the probability of intervention is extremely low.

• 28:17Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 28:18Elon Musk?

  So for highway autonomy, with the latest release especially, the probability of needing to intervene is really quite low. In fact, I'd say for stop and go traffic, it's far safer than a person right now. It's stop and go. The probability of an injury or an impact is much, much lower for autopilot than a person. And then with navigating autopilot, it can 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 the parking lot. You know, the first time you learn to drive probably wasn't jumping on Margaret Street in San Francisco. That'd be crazy. You learn to drive in the parking

• 29:03Elon Musk?

  lot, get things right at low speed. And then the missing piece that we're working on is traffic lights and stop streets. Stop streets, I would say, actually also relatively easy because you kind of know where the stop street is, worst case, you geocoded, and then use visualization to see where the line is and stop at the line to eliminate the GPS error. So it's actually, I'd say it's probably complex traffic lights and very windy roads are the two things that need to get solved.

• 29:38Lex Fridman?

  What's harder, perception or 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 and the environment? In your sense, from a learning perspective, is perception or action harder? And that giant, beautiful multitask learning neural network.

• 29:59Elon Musk?

  The hottest thing is having accurate representation of the physical objects in vector space. So taking the visual input, primarily visual input, some sonar and radar, and then creating the, an accurate vector space representation of the objects around you. Once you have an accurate vector space representation, the planning and control is relatively easier. It's relatively easy. Basically, once you have accurate vector space representation, then you're kind of like a video game, like cars in like Grand Theft Auto or something. They work pretty well. They drive down the road, they don't crash, you know, pretty much unless you crash into them.

• 30:42Elon Musk?

  That's because they've, they've got an accurate vector space representation of where the cars are. And they're just, and then they're rendering that as the, as the output.

• 30:49Lex Fridman?

  Do you have a sense, high level, that Tesla's on track

• 30:55Lex Fridman?

  on being able to achieve full autonomy? So on the highway?

• 31:00Elon Musk?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:01Lex Fridman?

  And still no driver state, driver sensing.

• 31:05Elon Musk?

  And we have driver sensing with torque on the wheel.

• 31:07Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 31:08Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Lex Fridman?

  By the way, just a quick comment on karaoke. Most people think it's fun, but I also think it is a driving feature. I've been saying for a long time, singing in a car is really good for attention management and vigilance management.

• 31:21Elon Musk?

  That's right. Tesla karaoke, yeah, is great. It's one of the most fun features of the car.

• 31:26Lex Fridman?

  You think of a connection between fun and safety sometimes?

• 31:29Elon Musk?

  Yeah, you can do both at the same time. That's great.

• 31:33Lex Fridman?

  I just met with Andrew, in wife of Carl Sagan.

• 31:36Elon Musk?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:37Lex Fridman?

  Who directed Cosmos.

• 31:39Elon Musk?

  I'm generally a big fan of Carl Sagan. He's super cool and they had a great way of putting things. All of our consciousness, all civilization, everything we've ever known and done is on this tiny blue dot. People also get, they get too trapped in their, it's like squabbles amongst humans. And there's, don't think of the big picture. They take civilization and our continued existence for granted. They shouldn't do that. Look at the history of civilizations. They rise and they fall. And now civilization is all, it's globalized.

• 32:13Elon Musk?

  And so civilization, I think, now rises and falls together. 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.

• 32:30Lex Fridman?

  In 1990, at the request of Carl Sagan, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is a spacecraft that's reaching off farther than anything human-made into space, turned around to take a picture of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. And as you're talking about the pale blue dot, that picture, the Earth takes up less than a single pixel in that image.

• 32:52Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 32:53Lex Fridman?

  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 describing this pale blue dot.

• 33:14Elon Musk?

  Sure. It's funny, the universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old. Earth is like 4.5 billion years old. In 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 10% longer to evolve, it would never have bothered at all. Just 10% longer. And I wonder, I wonder how many dead one-planet civilizations there are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planets and ultimately extinguished themselves

• 33:58Elon Musk?

  or were destroyed by external factors. Probably a few. It's only just possible to travel to Mars, just barely. If G was 10% more, it wouldn't work, really. If G was 10% lower, it would be easy. Like, you can go a single stage from the surface of Mars all the way to the surface of the Earth, because Mars is 37% of Earth's gravity, or about. You need a giant booster to get off Earth.

• 34:35Elon Musk?

  Channeling Carl Sagan.

• 34:38Elon Musk?

  Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. Honor to 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,

• 35:23Elon Musk?

  every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

• 35:31Elon Musk?

  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.

• 35:53Elon Musk?

  This is false. Mars.

• 35:56Lex Fridman?

  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.