Elon Musk Gives CHILLING Interview To The Economist

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: elon musk has sat down for an hour with the editor-in-chief of the economist magazine and where he was challenged on his agitation on behalf of the european far right [00:00:09] Speaker 2: elon you have what is it close to 250 million followers on x yeah you say things like popular guy quote civil war in britain is inevitable just a question yes i mean when were you last in the uk um a few years ago exactly so so i live there i'm there the whole time that is you live out of clustered existence no i don't actually and the numbers also disprove what you say all the numbers about clinton is a much safer city than any city in the united states violent crime in the uk is not where you think it is in fact it's coming down you you have painted and because you have so many followers so many americans believe it a kind of view that europe and the uk are kind of you know overrun with terrifying muslim immigrants there's rape on every corner there's a sort of civilizational destruction said any of those things for example you're you're posting for what was it 48 hours of citizen vigilante that film which you know paints a dystopian i've watched it yes it was not fun i watched it yesterday it's not a very good movie but it also paints a dystopian picture of europe and it glorifies vigilante violence it glorifies the murdering of a muslim immigrant family i honestly think that it is irresponsible for you to put that up on x [00:01:25] Speaker 3: up or next i think that it's it's a movie um and it's worth watching now i hadn't heard of this [00:01:32] Speaker 1: movie citizen vigilante i have to admit unlike the host there i haven't watched it yet i probably never will um it's an action movie starring army hammer and this is from the synopsis on wikipedia so they say um this is not a review it's just you know a synopsis what happened in it in an unnet so spoiler alert i suppose in an unnamed european city a young mother is fatally stabbed in front of her son by a passing migrant a news report states that parents are afraid to let their children play outside and that women avoid going out after dark michael sanders is a former u.s army officer who moved to europe after inheriting his estranged father's real estate business he secretly operates as the vigilante citizen a ruthless vigilante who targets those who have escaped justice sanders later meets a teenage rape victim whose six migrant attackers were released without punishment because judge reinhold the presiding judge in the case considered them to be victims too citing their difficulties integrating into society the teenage victim tells sanders that she has been denied justice sanders kills reinhold and stages it as a suicide the police later link the incident to a multiple unexplained deaths involving judges sanders visits the home of yusuf one of the rapists and takes him and his family hostage as yusuf's relatives excuse his action and blame the victim sanders orders yusuf to summon his accomplices to the apartment once they arrive sanders executes yusuf his family and the other attackers so as i say i haven't watched it probably never will um but from the synopsis on wikipedia i mean this is like a far-right fever dream which is also like a far-right fever dream where there is this sort of like protagonist who they can all identify with who says what like the the legal system the police they're all out to protect the migrants you've got to be a strong very violent man um to to protect your women essentially is the is the message we're getting from that yeah i mean it's [00:03:23] Speaker 4: basically like far-right ai slop except it's not ai it's just like human slop um it's it's i mean that's like unbelievable um but i think also you know that that interaction with um that the the interviewer firstly she's called zannie minton beddoes zan wow that's that's a name it's quite [00:03:44] Speaker 1: a real name yeah editor-in-chief of the economist yeah the editor-in-chief so i watched more of [00:03:49] Speaker 4: the whole interview and like the first thing that really struck me is these like legacy media like journalists really don't understand who elon musk is talking to she oh over and over again she says well you're not that popular and you're not that like don't you think that people won't like it that you say that which is complete fodder for how elon musk wants himself to be thought of you know she thinks that oh i'm you know my audience is the audience who are watching this you know the economist audience who will be completely on side with everything i'm saying or see what i'm saying is being having a lot of clarity whereas elon musk is treating that interview as like a platform to get clips to circulate amongst his followers who are you know far the far right online trolls or whatever where being told by like a mainstream establishment journalist that you know he's unpopular or he's not very he's not very polite or he's not very he's not very um you know he's not very upstanding is like compounds hit the myth that he wants to construct about himself but i think the whole the whole thing about london you know london really it lives rent free in in the minds of the far right which i live rent free in london i mate go and i'm gonna get onto that but you know it lives rent free in the minds of like the far right and it has for a really long time um i don't know if you remember that guy andres brevik who was that norwegian guy who assassinated dozens of young people at a climate camp and he had this really long manifesto like analysis of society he was a far right uh um far right guy and in it like he goes on and on and on about tower hamlets and how like tower hamlets is where the whole of europe is going and it was emblematic of what's going to happen to europe if it keeps letting in all these muslim immigrants uh you have you know uh the the the idea of the no-go zone in london being this fixture of fox news and you know it kind of trickles down even beyond people i would consider far right i was in york a few months ago and i got chatting to this woman in this cafe and she was really sweet like i have no reason to believe in fact i i'm sure that she's not far right at all we talked about a lot of different things and she seemed to have like a fairly progressive politics but when you know she asked me like where i'm from and i said oh i'm from london and it was amazing she just kind of was oh my god like how how what's it like like it was like i told her that i was fighting in vietnam like she was like what's it like you know i keep seeing online all these things come to find out this woman lived in tottenham in the 80s and look like tottenham has changed for a lot of reasons and not all a lot of them aren't good you know people are being displaced being gentrified you know a lot of the core reasons why tottenham was a tough place to live in the 80s haven't been solved they've just been kind of pushed out but the idea that someone who lived in tottenham in the 80s when it was objectively a tough place to be thinks that london now is this like cesspit of horror and theft and violence is so it's it shows you that even beyond just the far right this trickle down effect of this idea that places that have high immigration have become inhospitable specifically to like white people is so widespread when the reality is is that yes in many ways london is a very very difficult city to live in but it's not because white chapel has a sign in bengali it's because rents are out of control it's because austerity has destroyed our third spaces has destroyed our youth centers because our housing market is basically a casino rather than something that actually shelters people that's like inequality and poverty is why london is becoming a very difficult place to live in if anything migration and diversity is the thing that keeps it going it's a thing that makes it feel like something that any like anything other than just this husk for the super wealthy like this this playground for the super wealthy so london has always had that because it's always been a really diverse city but with the the the kind of explosion of this algorithm driven interface that like shapes how people imagine places it has become this you know people who have never stepped foot in london think of it as you know the final destination if immigrants continue to be allowed into europe and i think it's quite a nice destination we just need some better like just need some more wealth redistribution and it'll be wonderful a lot of i come back to a lot but a lot of it does come back [00:08:23] Speaker 1: to the smartphone which is when i look at the videos i see of london is it is of like people smashing windows yeah like a gang sort of robbing a shop and no one's stopping them and they are shocking and they are bad and you know that shouldn't happen but it used to happen more and just there was no one there to film it and also so normally two people with the person in the shop would have seen it and maybe three passes by yeah now it gets uploaded online and a million people see it and like oh my god that's [00:08:47] Speaker 4: what london's like and it's also it's all they see and in a sense kind of conflict and things like that is part of urban life like it always has been and even if we were to take this idea that like violence has increased in london which it hasn't if we are to accept that it's because of inequality it's because of it hasn't happened but it hasn't and like the reason that london is tough you know someone who's lived in london all my life and i'm sure you'll agree in many ways london has become safer and better the re the ways in which it has become tougher is not because of immigration [00:09:24] Speaker 1: if it had got more violent it would have been because of inequality yeah but inequality has increased and violence has got less so yeah are you not well are you not have you not made a sort of [00:09:33] Speaker 4: argumentative jump you didn't really need to make that when we see things like increased theft increase you know petty crime and all these things that have populated the imagination of london more often than not the court the the root cause of that is inequality and poverty it's not immigration that's the point i was trying to make so there have been other consequences to the rise in inequality they happen to not be increase in violence which is a great thing but that doesn't but i also didn't want to act like london is this kind of safe haven that is so welcoming and wonderful because there's a lot of difficulty and a lot of other kinds of violence that exist in the city it's just not the kind that people like elon musk want us to believe it's it's economic violence let's um look at another [00:10:18] Speaker 1: part of the interview which actually i you know obviously the far-right stuff is terrible this is the part though that actually i think that most people if they watched it would be the most shocked by it and when i listened to it i was incredibly outraged do you think there's still a 10 to 20 chance that [00:10:36] Speaker 2: killer robots mean the end of humanity [00:10:40] Speaker 3: that's a high p doom as they say well in the long run we're all dead of course um you know um so i mean i also i mean like according to the standard model of physics the end of the universe is um a long boring sort of thin gray soup of uh gradual cooling um i mean it's sort of the heat death the universe is called so now if if the heat death of the universe is in fact the outcome for our reality then it really is all about the journey for the longest time i declined to participate in ai or which you know you know created open ai as a essentially a counterweight to google because at the time they were um they had more or less a monopoly on ai in creating open ai and then having anthropics been out of that and now currently anthropics the leader in ai um i mean these actions have actually resulted in knock-on effects that accelerated ai which wasn't really my intention so it just seems like all roads lead to acceleration of ai so then i'm like okay well you can just sort of be sad about it or [00:12:05] Speaker 1: join the club i suppose so the argument is in his own words you know obviously there's debate about whether or not the idea of ai bringing about some sort of apocalypse is is is genuine or not as you you know i think it's real um or at least i think that there are enough very smart people without vested interest saying it's real that i think we we should take it very seriously but he you know by his own account thinks there is a 10 to 20 chance that this technology is going to kill everyone um and then he says well you know the universe is going to end at some point anyway so you know if it ends it ends and then sort of when pushed about you know if you seriously think the technology you're building might kill everyone like a very high one in five chance of killing everyone why are you doing it said well you know i tried to make this company open ai um so that that would would sort of help be a counterbalance to google but now open ai is making the ai and and then anthropics what can you do i might as well go in the club and if we die we die and it's like i i don't think that's acceptable like he might be quite relaxed about the possibility of human extinction right because i mean he's had a good time he's lived a good life i don't know how much he cares about his children i know that he's disowned one of them because they were trans so he's probably not a particularly good father but the idea that sort of oh the universe is going to end at some point so if my technology kills everyone well what can you do you might as well look on the bright side like dahlia i think that clip should be radicalizing to to everyone really who watches it i mean the thing with elon musk is that he is not [00:13:44] Speaker 4: a tech genius he actually obviously he probably has more of an understanding of the technology than your average person but within the world of ai he's certainly not at the forefront of the expertise he's actually just like a rich charlatan who who chats too much you know and and that is is and the but the problem is is that he's also got a form not only like an amount of power but a form of power that we are that is actually quite unprecedented i think historically because of course you know we've always had very powerful states or we've had very powerful industrialists we've had very powerful business owners but people who own infrastructures like twitter or x i just i hate calling x i feel like i'm i'm giving in to him um an infrastructure if you think about like an infrastructure like twitter like a comms infrastructure there has never been a communications infrastructure that reaches the territories like the scale and territory that x reaches historically and it's owned by one man and one man seems to be able to use it to so easily use it in ways that can shape people's opinions globally like that kind of infrastructure has never existed and it makes the monopolies of the past you know like ford or you know um general motors or these other kind of big industries that have been that have been very very powerful it makes them look like local businesses you know when you think about the kinds of infrastructures that elon musk um is building and owns you know space x it's not just uh thing it's not just about shooting rockets into a space it's like this vertically integrated like manufacturing and comms infrastructure that bar like exceeds any state that is so deeply powerful and again is headed by one man who has a level of wealth that again has never been matched historically and so it's a form of power that we are not used to fighting i don't think we fully understand how how to kind of tackle and then on top like that alone is a problem and it's like a cancer in society and the fact that he's also a racist idiot just makes the whole thing like even more apocalyptic and even but i mean it just it it in the rest of the interview you know he talks about his vision for the uto like the possible utopia of ar you know he says the dystopia is that it kills us all but his utopia is equally dystopic to me because his he says that you know in in a utopian version of ai where it's going to become more powerful than humans in five years and what's going to happen is that everyone's going to have everything they want now not only is that delusional but it's also like i don't think that that's a very good thing like i don't think it's a good thing that that you know humans release all autonomy to these you know to these ais and can have everything they want whenever they want like why does he get to decide that sounds like a spiritually bereft society to me and it's also delusional and impossible because even if you strip away all of the politics and the spirituality and the the culture of ai fundamentally on a material level ai is destroying our ecosystem like we've just done a story on wildfires ai it uses unbelievable amounts of water it destroys ecosystems it destroys like through mining through water use so that alone is going to make everyone's lives shitter even before you get to like what is it going to do to us like cognitively and spiritually and culturally to outsource human things like creation and writing and all of this to machines like i i don't even think his vision for you a utopian ai society is desirable let alone his dystopian one [00:17:34] Speaker 1: which is probably more likely and it is i don't understand how like how does agi get us all really nice houses i suppose because that's exactly like the competition is often over stuff that i don't really see how there how there is a technological fix for it i suppose he's very into robotics you get these robots that everyone decides let's change planning law and then the robots builds really nice apartments for everyone in the next five years it doesn't sound particularly but there's more like there's more [00:18:02] Speaker 4: to that than just the things that can be automated right it's what like he always says like oh driverless cars like we're on the cusp of driverless cars it's like okay we might be on the cusp of a car that can self-drive in very particular conditions but in order for us to have a society that has driverless cars we actually have we'd have to like completely redesign all of the roads and like white like if to use london as an example like just pave over the whole of london and reconstruct it so that a driverless car can function efficiently and effectively and i'm like i don't want to do that i feel like the driverless [00:18:34] Speaker 1: cars might get really good even in public transport yeah i mean i i'm i'm indifferent about driving cars but i i suppose i'm more convinced that the tech is very powerful than some people so i feel like driverless cars will eventually come even in a city like london um do you remember what his what his solution was to try and avoid apocalypse in the interview i'm not sure i listened to the have more kids no if you're white it was going to be a weekly or bi-weekly call between elon demisa sabis dario amadei and sam altman where they could discuss what was going on no like i'll be getting [00:19:11] Speaker 4: on that spacex rock fling me into space i won't know that that alone will make my life worse i mean [00:19:17] Speaker 1: the people in space are going to be much more like sam and demis and daria than the people yeah exactly [00:19:36] Speaker ?: you