Getting Stoned: Interview With Elon Musk

We should approach making life multiplanetary with a sense of urgency ... This is the first time that the window of opportunity has been open for life to become multiplanetary, and that window may be open for a long time or a short time. I think it would be wise for us to assume it will be open for a short time and take action now.

A lot of people think that there's too many humans on the planet and the planet can't sustain this number of humans. This is absolutely not true. We could double the population without any meaningful damage to the environment.

I hope that the AI is nice to us ... I've lost a lot of sleep thinking about AI as an existential risk ... I think there should probably should be a regulatory agency that oversees advanced AI, because it's a public safety risk.

The thing is that negative news now, we get news from all around the world that can't possibly affect us or is very unlikely to affect us ... We get the news from far away that doesn't affect us directly but still makes us sad.

The population decline problem, I think, is possibly the biggest risk to civilization. It's certainly one of the biggest risks.

I don't think we're quite there for artificial general intelligence in a sense if that's defined as intelligence that exceeds humans in every way. We're not quite there yet, but... if progress continues, that's what will happen—we'll have digital intelligence that exceeds human intelligence in every way.

It appears that consciousness is rare, and it takes a long time for it to arise. And so, to the the best of our knowledge, we are alone. And so, we have to accept the possibility that we may be it—at least in this sector of the galaxy or in the Milky Way, perhaps.

The more that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the more we're likely to understand the fundamental questions around the meaning of life and nature of the universe.

Earth is 4 and a half billion years old. The sun is slowly expanding. As the sun expands over millions of years, the temperature on Earth will rise. And eventually the sun will engulf Earth, and everything will be incinerated.

Given enough time, humanity will go extinct.

I'm actually pro-nuclear as well. I think nuclear has a bad rap. People really shouldn't be shutting down nuclear power stations in my view.

These days, you can learn almost anything online. Like MIT, for example, has all of their lectures online, and a number of other universities do ... If you want to, you can learn almost anything at a very low cost.

With the Internet, you've got instant access to basically all the world's information. And so, information quality is really incredible compared to where it used to be.

I think we'll continue to see opposition to Tesla ... If we have the people on our side and we've got our customers supporting us, I think, with customer support, or with Tesla owners' support, I think we'll win most of the battles. We're not gonna win them all, probably, but we'll win most of them.

There are three pillars to a sustainable energy future: One is electric transport; the other is sustainable power generation, primarily through solar and wind; and the third is stationary battery energy storage.

Energy is the foundation of the economy. Civilization would crumble immediately if we didn't have it.

In general, I think manufacturing is underrated ... Manufacturing used to be really cool in the US, and it became, for some reason, I think, kind of uncool for quite a long time. A lot of talented people went in other directions, but I sure hope a lot more talented people get into manufacturing.

There's over a million people that die every year in car accidents and I think about 10 million that are severely injured ... There's a lot of good that can be done with autonomy. I think we'd probably improve those things by a factor of 10, like maybe 10 times better, at least.

Generally, the wealthier someone is, the fewer kids they have.

There are too many smart Americans in finance and law.