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AUSTIN — The most interesting businessman in America came to SXSW to dance. And to talk.
After dancing his way onstage to the tune of Randy Newman’s “My Little Buttercup” — a longtime favorite of his — Elon Musk spent over an hour talking to Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan about his hopes and fears for technology, from colonizing Mars to the risks of “digital super-intelligence.”
Mars as startup hub
The founder of SpaceX, Tesla (TSLA), Solar City (SCTY) and the Boring Company led off by discussing his Martian ambitions. A month after the successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in service, Musk said work on a much larger launch vehicle called the BFR — you may think of that as short for Big Falcon Rocket — is proceeding well.
“We’re making good progress on the ship and the booster,” he said of this gigantic, fully reusable spacecraft that can lift 150 tons to Earth orbit. He hopes to see the first test flights next year.
SpaceX’s schedule calls for the first Mars cargo flight in 2022, with humans following in 2024. Musk allowed that people might not trust that forecast: “People have told me that my timelines historically have been optimistic.”
Musk warned that life on Mars would be difficult at first. “It kind of reads like Shackelton’s ad for Antarctic explorers,” he said. “Difficult, dangerous, good chance you will die, exciting if you survive.”
But things should pick up soon as Earth-to-Mars travel becomes routine in the way that Union Pacific railroad made transcontinental travel something you could reliably schedule.
“Once you can get there, the opportunity is immense,” he said. “There’s going to be an explosion of entrepreneurial opportunities. Mars is going to need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints.”
AI anxiety
Space travel may not make Musk uneasy, but the prospect of artificial intelligence unconfined to specific tasks does.
“We have to figure out some way that the advent of digital super-intelligence is somehow symbiotic with humanity,” Musk warned as he noted the breathtaking progress of such narrow AI ventures as AlphaGo, the game-playing AI owned by Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot.
And he wants government to make sure of that.
“I’m not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight,” he said. “There needs to be a public body that his insight and oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely.”
Musk said the downside of a misguided or malevolent AI could be worse than nuclear war.
“Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. Far,” he said. “So why do we have no regulatory oversight? That’s insane.”