Elon Musk wants humans to colonize Mars, in part, so we can escape a robot uprising, the billionaire told Vanity Fair.
“One reason we needed to colonize Mars [is] so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity,” Musk told Vanity Fair. “Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.”
Musk highlighted the dangers of artificial intelligence, and he said robots may not follow humanity to Mars to finish us off.
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” Musk said. “You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”
Musk has his own rocket company, SpaceX, that plans to send missions to Mars in the near future.
The tech billionaire isn’t a fan of President Donald Trump’s plan to send astronauts to the Red Planet by 2033. Musk sees Trump’s focus on sending astronauts back to the moon first as a threat to plans on exploring the Red Planet.
Musk worries that, in the short term, artificial intelligence may replace human jobs and create an economic crisis.
In the long term, the billionaire thinks human brains aren’t fast enough to compete with computers, potentially triggering an anti-human revolution by artificial intelligence.
“It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output,” Musk said at a recent summit in Dubai. “Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.”
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