Elon Musk's New Interview From Today

Thank you for having me. I wouldn't be there in person, but this is an IPO, you know, we've got to get the SpaceX IPO going pretty soon, I think. So, but I look forward to visiting Israel again. So, I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Interesting. Whatever would be interesting. Yeah.

In terms of having self-driving be ubiquitous, I think we're making steady progress. The Tesla full self-driving software, which is really just AI and cameras. We don't use radars or LiDAR or anything like that. It's really trying to drive the car in the same way that a human drives the car, which is primarily with vision and with a biological neural net. We take the same approach with our vehicles, which is a digital neural net and cameras. And I expect this approach to ultimately be at least an order of magnitude safer than humans driving. So, I'm not sure if we have approval for this in Israel. I think we may have, we'll get it soon hopefully and you'll be able to experience it for yourself. But it is quite magical because the car feels like it is sentient. It actually feels like it's alive and as we improve the software you can feel the sentience growing in the car. It feels alive and I think we already have some vehicles operating with no people inside and no safety monitors in three cities in Texas and probably will be widespread in the US by the end of this year and hopefully in Israel too.

The world's going to have a lot of robots in the future. And what Tesla makes is effectively four-wheel robots right now. And in the future we'll also be having humanoid robots. You're seeing a lot of startups with humanoid robots. And my prediction is that there will be far, far more intelligent robots in the world than there will be people. And I think this is most likely to be a good thing. You know, we always want to be a little paranoid or certainly not complacent about the safety of robots. But I think it will usher in an age of not universal basic income but universal high income.

Yeah. Optimus subprime.

Well, I guess people are mostly aware of the rockets that SpaceX does. There's the Starship rocket which we are now in version three of, which I think will achieve full and rapid reusability. This is the fundamental breakthrough necessary to make life multi-planetary, to extend consciousness beyond Earth and have self-sustaining, self-growing cities on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere in the solar system. So this is really quite a profound breakthrough and we might succeed in doing that this year. The critical factor being full and rapid reuse of all parts of the rocket. That's a much bigger deal than people would realize. When that technology is developed that will be a fork in the road of human history where we can become a space-bearing civilization, multi-planet species and I think that's an incredibly exciting thing. Perhaps to some degree, there's also not that many people are aware of Neuralink which is creating a cybernetic interface to AI from your brain. And it has enabled people who have completely lost their brain-body connection to speak again and to use their computer and their phone. And we believe it will enable people to walk again because you can take the signals from the brain, from the motor cortex, and if somebody has say a severe spinal injury you can transmit those signals to a second neural implant and reanimate the body so that people can use their limbs. And we think at some point live a normal life by effectively bridging the signals from the brain to past the point in the spine where the damage has occurred. These are pretty wild things that are possible. And then later this year we expect to do our first implant for what we call blind sight. Where even if somebody has lost both eyes or lost the optic nerve or perhaps has never seen, even if they were blind at birth, it will give them initially limited vision but I think over time very precise vision, perhaps superhuman vision. So, you know, restoring control of people who are tetraplegics and restoring sight I think are pretty big deals, you know, sort of what you might call Jesus-level sort of technologies.

Miracles, yes, exactly. I mean, miracles of science, yeah.