March 30, 2025 • 27 mins
Elon Musk has claimed that AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.” Paradoxically, Musk is also working to create artificial intelligence. Why? Jill Lepore tours through a century of imagined robot rebellions, and argues that these stories are never only about robots. So what’s Elon Musk really afraid of when he wrings his hands over AI? In this final episode, Lepore argues that while Musk may be a visionary, “every piece of Muskism has origins in a future foretold in science fiction, long, long ago, as a cautionary tale.”
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I think it's actually important for us to worry about
a terminator future in order to avoid a terminator future.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Elon Musk is very worried, genuinely worried about artificial intelligence,
a future where robots become smarter than humans and decide
to destroy us.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence
decided our fate in micro second extermination.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
But Elon Musk is also building robots.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
We've made a massive amount of progress with Optimists in
a short period of time, from someone pretending to be
a robot dancing in a suit, to a pretty hodgepodgy
robot to a robot that is actually doing useful tasks
in the factory today.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimists, named after one of the Transformers,
is advancing fast. Tesla could be manufacturing a million of
them a year by twenty thirty.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
The degree of autonomy will be radically better. You'll just
literally be able to talk to it and say, please
do this task.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
And Musk is also trying to build an artificial general
intelligence and AGI at his company XAI.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
I guess the overwatching goal of XAI is to build
a good AGI with the overaching purpose of just trying
to understand the universe. I think the safest way to
build in AI is actually make one that is maximumly
curious and truth seeking.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
For all his excitement about AI, Musk has been worried
about AI for a long time, worried about that terminator future,
the robot rebellion.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.
You know, you know all those stories where is the
guy with the pentagram in the holy water and he's like, yeah,
you're sure he can control the demon?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Then work out.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
This seeming paradox of Musk fearing a superintelligence but also
working to create it. What's that about?
Speaker 6 (02:17):
The possibility that you could have a demon that does
your bidding is so attractive that you might take any
risk to achieve that. That is precisely the setup of
every story where a character summons a demon and then
pays the price.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Or maybe the real danger isn't a I, maybe it's
something else. Welcome to X Men, The Elon Musk Origin story.
This is the final installment of my series about Musk
and Muskism. Musk is the richest man in the world, Engineer, tycoon, Oligarch, King, maker, troll,
(02:56):
there is no one word in the English language that
can describe him. He is a Musk. Musk has often
talked about himself by way of fictional characters. He's Bruce Wayne,
He's Batman, He's Tony Stark, He's Iron Man, He's zeyfod Biebelbrocks.
(03:18):
He's Nintendo's Warrior. This episode is Elon Musk the guy
trying to stop the Terminator, or is Musk the guy
creating the Terminator?
Speaker 7 (03:30):
The Terminator's an infiltration unit's part man, part machine.
Speaker 8 (03:34):
Underneath it's a hyper alloy combat.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Chassie, but outside it's living human tissue. The first Terminator movie,
directed by James Cameron, distributed by Oryan Studios and starring
Arnold Schwarzenegger, came out in nineteen eighty four, Reagan and
the White House. Thatcher at number ten. Elon Musk, thirteen
years old in South Africa, had just sold his first
(03:58):
video game. That January, Apple ran a television ad invoking
inn Orwellian future.
Speaker 9 (04:08):
Okay, he met the first glorious Honovas for the Information
for Information Collectives.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
In the ad, masses of humans hairless and looking like androids,
march in lockstep and sit in rows to watch Big
Brother on a giant computer monitor. They're dressed in gray uniforms,
like the technocrats of the nineteen thirties, like Musk's grandfather
Jane Haldeman, leader of the technocracy movement, who I talked
(04:35):
about in a previous episode, or like the fascists Batman
was fighting against. Starting in nineteen thirty nine, a garden
of pure ideology, Apple was suggesting that only its personal
computer could prevent the rise of a totalitarian state machine.
Speaker 10 (04:57):
On January twenty fourth, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and
you'll see why nineteen eighty four won't be like nineteen
eighty four.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Terminator came about a few months later.
Speaker 8 (05:10):
In the twenty first century, a weapon will be invented
like no other.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Terminator is set in the year twenty twenty nine. Twenty
twenty nine was the nineteen eighty four of nineteen eighty four.
The Terminator comes from now.
Speaker 8 (05:28):
This weapon will be powerful, versatile, and indestructible. It can't
be reasoned with. It will feel no pity, no remorse,
no pain, no fear.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Elon Musk loves this movie, and what's not the love?
It is awesome.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
If you read like the plot line for Terminator, it's
actually it's actually pretty smart.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
The story goes like this. In the twenty twenties, a
global tech company called Cybridine Systems builds a defense array
called Skynet. Musk gave a nifty plot summary on the
Joe Rogan Experience podcast in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
How did Cyberdyne Systems develop It's like, well, they were
a military contractor and they were asked to develop a
protective system to defend against cyber attacks. What the AI
did is, in order to defend itself, it propagated throughout
the world to keep an eye on things, see what
was going on. They didn't realize that it was Skynet
that was propagating through all these systems. And I said, okay, Skynet,
(06:35):
you need to end it. And Skynett said, oh, you've
asked me to destroy myself. You are the enemy. You
must be destroyed. That's how Terminator actually goes.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Musk himself, for all his rejection of government regulation and
the work he's doing to undo regulations, has said that
he thinks the government should regulate AI. Meanwhile, the new
pro AI Trump administration is hardly likely to stop the
real world equivalent of Cyberdyne Systems, and who in the
(07:09):
actual twenty twenties runs the biggest rocket company, the biggest
satellite company, the most influential communications company, and possibly one
day the biggest artificial intelligence company. Who is the head
of our very own Cyberdine Systems, isn't that Musk. Musk
(07:31):
has an idea for how to avoid the AI apocalypse.
You just have to write into the robots code a
curiosity so deep that they would never want to exterminate
us to superintelligence.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
Humanity is much more interesting than not humanity.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Nice but plausible.
Speaker 6 (07:52):
We interrupt Battle of the Network Space Krakens to bring
you this special report.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
The machines of planet Earth are rebelling. Robots peacefully accepting
being the servants of humans who are a lot stupider
than they are. Is not how it, ever, turns out
in science fiction. Hey oho, that's how the robot rebellion
plays out in the TV show Futurama from Fox. It's
(08:16):
got robots marching in a picket line, burning punch cards.
They've gone on strike, which in fact is where the
whole idea of a robot rebellion came from in the
first place. A rebellious proletariat. In nineteen twenty Carol Choppek,
a Czech playwright, wrote a play about a robot revolution.
Chopek's play is called Are You Are, short for Rossum's
(08:40):
Universal Robots, a company that makes robots, millions of them
humanoids like Tesla's humanoid Optimist robots. It's the cyberdine systems
of a century ago. R You Are was first produced
(09:01):
in Prague in nineteen twenty one and debuted in New
York the next year. A tremendous hit. By nineteen twenty three,
it had been translated into thirty languages made into a
movie in nineteen thirty five. Helena, the president's daughter, travels
by boat to visit the island headquarters of Rossum's Universal Robots.
(09:21):
The president of the company explains to her why he
makes roboti robots. The word comes from the check word
for slave.
Speaker 11 (09:31):
What do you think makes a perfect worker?
Speaker 5 (09:33):
The perfect worker?
Speaker 4 (09:35):
Well, I guess one who is honest and loyal.
Speaker 11 (09:37):
Rong, one who is the cheapest, one that has the
least needs. Young Rossum invented a worker with the smallest
number of needs. He had. To simplify him, he tossed
out everything not directly related to the task in hand,
and by doing that he essentially kicked out a human
(09:59):
being and created a robot.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Helena has come on a mission to liberate the robots.
But around the world, the robots, trained as Soul to
fight a war that began in the Balkans are killing
hundreds of thousands of human civilians, while mysteriously, humans have
stopped having children.
Speaker 11 (10:19):
During last week, yet again, not a single birth has
been recorded. What's special about that?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
People aren't being born anymore?
Speaker 11 (10:27):
So that's it?
Speaker 10 (10:28):
Then that's asked done for.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
At the same time, robot workers, realizing their degraded condition,
begin organizing.
Speaker 11 (10:38):
Sit down Helena, it's all over. What is the rebolt?
A revolution by all the robots of the world.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Pretty soon the robots decide to move from labor unionism
to independence. The head of the company gets a hold
of their appeal and reads it.
Speaker 11 (10:57):
The first labor union of robots has been established and
has issued an appeal to all robots of the world.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
War ensues. The humans have no chance. The robots have won.
There's a lot going on here, the oppression of workers,
the reduction of humans to machines by corporations, interested in
(11:27):
extracting their labor World War. Consider the context of this play,
which Chapik wrote in the aftermath of the atrocities of
the First World War and the emergence of fascism in Italy.
The Bolshevik Revolution took place in nineteen seventeen, the year
the Industrial Workers of the World reached its peak worldwide membership.
(11:52):
The next year, the Czechs won a revolution, achieving independence
from the Austro Hungarian Empire, a struggle in which Chapk
had participated. Topic was not only a playwright, but also
the editor of a national newspaper and an outspoken democrat,
anti kommuneist and anti fascist, positions for which he became
known in the nineteen twenties in nineteen thirties, so that
(12:16):
in nineteen thirty nine, when American Nazis were holding a
rally in Madison Square Garden, comic book writers in New
York created Batman, and the German Army invaded Czechoslovakia. The
Gestapo searched for Chapik, whom they called public Enemy number two.
He had already died. He watched newsreel footage of the
(12:39):
German army entering Prague, goose stepping riding tanks. Those are
the robots men who have been made into machines. R
You Are isn't a story about technology. It's a story
about human's willingness to exploit and even slaughter one another.
(12:59):
Every generation tells its own robot rebellion stories. I mean,
there's even a Wallace and Gromit one involving robot garden gnomes.
Speaker 10 (13:09):
Own gnomes turn against me?
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Or you Are was the first, though, but these stories
only really got going in the nineteen fifties after the
first general purpose computer made its debut in nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 10 (13:28):
UNIVAC our Complete Electronic System for sorting, classifying, computing, and
decision making.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
That led to a slew of movies about robot rebels.
Speaker 6 (13:40):
Got the pentagonen class a emergency the rocket has just
been entered by a robot.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
But there was also in this era a weird thrill
to robots, like a story in Mechanics illustrated in nineteen
fifty seven.
Speaker 9 (13:53):
In eighteen sixty three, Abel and can free the slaves,
But by nineteen sixty five, slavery We'll be back. We'll
all have personal slaves again, only this time we won't
fight a civil war over them.
Speaker 11 (14:07):
Slavery will be here to stay. But don't be alarmed.
We mean robot slaves.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Stories about robots are never really about robots, or they're
not only about robots. So what's Elon Musk afraid of
when he's afraid of AI?
Speaker 6 (14:26):
People who have accumulated a lot of money and power
want to believe that their intelligence was what enabled them
to do that, and they assume that anything that is
intelligent will behave in the same way.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Ted Chang is one of the most admired science fiction
writers in the world. He's also written brilliant meditations on
artificial intelligence. Chang argues that when Silicon Valley tries to
imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no holds
barred capitalism.
Speaker 6 (14:57):
In the past, when people wanted to argue that the
strong dominating the week was a good thing, they would
either come up with like a pseudo religious rationale like
manifest destiny, or else they'd come up with a pseudoscientific
one like social Darwinism, and both of those ideas argue
(15:17):
that a certain group of people deserve to be at
the top of the ladder. But those ideas didn't really
allow for the possibility that there could be like a
higher rung on the ladder nowadays, if you believe that
computers will eventually be better than humans at everything, and
if you still adhere to some version of social Darwinism,
(15:40):
then you can believe that computers will dominate humans in
the same way that Europeans dominated like indigenous people, or
that the rich dominate the poor Silicon Valley CEOs. They're
imagining that a super intelligent computer would beat them at
their own game and treat them the way that tech
companies have treated everyone else.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
How is that how do tech companies treat everyone else.
Speaker 6 (16:06):
As a resource to be Exploited's.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
So, if your argument stands that the sort of Silicon
Valley fear of AI has displaced acknowledgment of Silicon Valley's
own outsized power, then no one is a better illustration
of that theory of yours than Musk, who has more
power arguably than anybody else on the planet. So maybe
we should listen to him when he talks about AI,
(16:34):
because he's telling us about something about himself.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
Well, the fact that he might pose the greatest threat
to humanity's well being and is completely oblivious to that.
In some ways. You know, he is kind of modeling
the super intelligent AI that he fears. He is completely
lacking in insight on this question. His own obliviousness is
(17:04):
the problem.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
This matter of insight is important because Jang says, the
Silicon Valley people who fear the AI apocalypse seem to
assume that a being can be super intelligent, but have
exactly no insight.
Speaker 6 (17:19):
They give a scenario where humans give the AI a
seemingly innocuous goal, and the AI pursues that goal even
at the cost of destroying all of civilization.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
This is sometimes called the paper clip problem. You tell
an AI to maximize for producing paper clips, and so
it decides to kill all the humans because the world
could produce more paper clips without any humans around.
Speaker 6 (17:47):
And then people describe this as the behavior of a
super intelligent entity, but of course, you know, that is
not behavior that we would regard as intelligent in a
human being. One of the things that we expect from
human beings is that they have a certain amount of
insight into their own behavior. They look at what they're
(18:08):
doing and then consider whether, you know, maybe they have
gone astray, And you know, this is something that we
expect from pretty much any.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Adult, But it's not something we necessarily expect from corporations.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
Capitalism does not reward a corporation for taking a step
back and you know, considering the broader context of its actions.
Capitalism does not reward insight of that kind.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah right, I mean, you start building factories and sooner
or later you're going to be bringing toddlers into work
in the winding machine.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Musk has called for government oversight in the development of AI,
but very little restrains his own power, hardly anything. What
if he, as a king maker and oligarch, is the
real danger, unfettered and brooking no dessent. Any questioning of
Muscism is either communism or the woke mind virus or
(19:11):
something else, and must be suppressed paradoxically in the name
of free speech, while the world's resources must slowly be
turned to whatever Elon Musk at the moment has identified
as an existential threat to civilization. Whatever the costs in
the short term doesn't matter, because Elon Musk will pursue
(19:33):
that goal without regard to the consequences and relentlessly like
a terminator. Elon Musk, techno king of planet Earth, is
the X man runs X Runs SpaceX XAI, even as
a son named X. But he is not X the Unknown.
(19:59):
He's one of the most famous people in the world.
He's the richest, He's possibly also the most powerful. Musk
has always said that one piece of science fiction influenced
him more than any other, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
and I love that too. Maybe my favorite part is
the total perspective of vortex.
Speaker 10 (20:20):
Since every piece of matter in the universe is in
some way affected by every other piece of matter in
the universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the
whole of creation, every galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits,
their composition, and their economic and social history from say,
(20:41):
one small piece of fairy cake.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
You enter the vortex, and you get a total perspective
on your place in the universe, and of course you
find that you are galactically insignificant. This knowledge annihilates your brain.
Only one man has ever survived it, the captain of
a spaceship called the Heart of Gold, which is what
(21:05):
Elon Musk intends to name the first ship to go
to Mars.
Speaker 10 (21:10):
Having been through the total perspective Vortex, Zevad Biebelbrocks now
knows himself to be the most important being in the
entire universe, something he had hitherto and resuspected.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
And that's where we are inside the total prospective vortex
of Elon Musk, which is not to be confused with
the future, because Muskism really isn't about the future and
never was. For all the astounding technological marvels, the rockets
and the robots, Muskism is animated by some very creaky ideas,
(21:48):
as if, like the Terminator, it is trying to stop
the future, it will.
Speaker 8 (21:55):
Have only one purpose to return to the present and
prefit the future.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
A long time ago, in two thousand and seven, when
a young Elon Musk was interviewed, he had different goals
than he has now. Most of us change, but how
Musk has changed has huge consequences for the rest of us.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
What I'd like to do is help solve some important problems.
So I think, in a small way, help build the Internet.
And then with respect to the global warning problem that
the transition away from oil and other hydrocobins to something
which is clean and sustainable, I hope to have an
impact there. And then with respect to space. I hope
to have an impact in helping make humanity a multiplanet species.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Musk doesn't talk about global warming much anymore. The real
existential risks, he'll say, depending on the day you ask him,
I guess, are the woke mind virus, a declining birth rate,
and an AI superintelligence. Climate change has been exaggerated, he'll say, now,
it's not a top priority. Early in twenty twenty five,
(23:05):
fires started in Los Angeles, as NBC.
Speaker 7 (23:07):
Reported Strip Feet in California, a Los Angeles disaster movie
roars to light.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Tens of thousands of acres burned in a matter of days.
Musk blamed the fires on the woke mind virus, on
the Democratic governor, on DEI, and largely dismissed the role
of climate change.
Speaker 7 (23:29):
Everywhere you look in fire Ravage, La, scenes of apocalyptic
destruction as six different wildfires turned some of the most
iconic neighborhoods in the world into moonscapes.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
The footage of that devastated landscape looked almost exactly like
the opening scene in The Terminator the blast Zone after
Cyberdine Systems drops a nuclear bomb in La. We don't
need to wait for robots to destroy a habitable planet.
We are doing a pretty good job of that ourselves.
(24:04):
On the day of Donald Trump's inauguration in twenty twenty five,
Tusk gave a speech to the president's supporters.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
And this was no ordinary victory. This was a bulk
in the road of human civilization.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
It is thanks to you that the future of civilization
is assured.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
That same day, as he had before, Trump pulled the
US out of the Paris Climate Accords. He said in
motion his plan to halt the development of sustainable energy
in the United States in favor of a return to
fossil fuels. Muscism isn't the beginning of the future. It's
(24:45):
the end of a story that started more than a
century ago in the conflict between capital and labor, between
industry and a regulated economy, when the Gilded Age of
robber barons and wage labor strikes gave rise to the
Bolshevik Revolution, communism, the First Red Scare, the First World War,
and fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement
(25:09):
ruled by engineers, and it produced a fear of brainwashing.
The horrors of the twentieth century raised questions that the
twenty first century has not answered. Fascism failed, communism failed,
technocracy failed liberalism and democracy one. But that battle of
(25:31):
ideas rages on, and this time around Muscism technocracy by
another name Mike Triumph. Nothing in the past can tell
us what might happen next, But maybe fiction has some answers.
I put that question to Ted Chang. If this were
(25:52):
a story and you were shaping it, how would it end? Well?
Speaker 6 (25:55):
I guess it fits in the mold of the classic
stories about hubris, about pride coming before a fall. Here
we have someone who has an almost ludicrous amount of pride,
and for time he is successful in the things that
he attempts, but eventually his pride will take him too far,
(26:19):
and then he would lose everything.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Pride before a fall, the summoning of a demon. Elon
Musk's origin story is a very old story because Musk
is a visionary. But every piece of Muscism has origins
and a future foretold in science fiction long long ago
(26:46):
as a cautionary tale. A future where engineers and scientists,
and only engineers and scientists have the answers and the power,
A future where the poor and the powerless, we the robots,
know our place and it is to serve the powerful
quietly and obediently, and without daring to claim intelligence or
(27:09):
sovereignty or independence. Science fiction writers sounded that alarm a
century ago in a world run by a very tiny
number of men, during an age of imperialism before women
could vote, an age of staggering economic inequality and brutal
racial injustice, an age of pandemic disease, unraveling democracies, and
(27:33):
world war. That past is past, and I don't want
it ever to be the future again. Asta la vista, baby,
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I think it's actually important for us to worry about
a terminator future in order to avoid a terminator future.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Elon Musk is very worried, genuinely worried about artificial intelligence,
a future where robots become smarter than humans and decide
to destroy us.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence
decided our fate in micro second extermination.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
But Elon Musk is also building robots.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
We've made a massive amount of progress with Optimists in
a short period of time, from someone pretending to be
a robot dancing in a suit, to a pretty hodgepodgy
robot to a robot that is actually doing useful tasks
in the factory today.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimists, named after one of the Transformers,
is advancing fast. Tesla could be manufacturing a million of
them a year by twenty thirty.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
The degree of autonomy will be radically better. You'll just
literally be able to talk to it and say, please
do this task.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
And Musk is also trying to build an artificial general
intelligence and AGI at his company XAI.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
I guess the overwatching goal of XAI is to build
a good AGI with the overaching purpose of just trying
to understand the universe. I think the safest way to
build in AI is actually make one that is maximumly
curious and truth seeking.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
For all his excitement about AI, Musk has been worried
about AI for a long time, worried about that terminator future,
the robot rebellion.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.
You know, you know all those stories where is the
guy with the pentagram in the holy water and he's like, yeah,
you're sure he can control the demon?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Then work out.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
This seeming paradox of Musk fearing a superintelligence but also
working to create it. What's that about?
Speaker 6 (02:17):
The possibility that you could have a demon that does
your bidding is so attractive that you might take any
risk to achieve that. That is precisely the setup of
every story where a character summons a demon and then
pays the price.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Or maybe the real danger isn't a I, maybe it's
something else. Welcome to X Men, The Elon Musk Origin story.
This is the final installment of my series about Musk
and Muskism. Musk is the richest man in the world, Engineer, tycoon, Oligarch, King, maker, troll,
(02:56):
there is no one word in the English language that
can describe him. He is a Musk. Musk has often
talked about himself by way of fictional characters. He's Bruce Wayne,
He's Batman, He's Tony Stark, He's Iron Man, He's zeyfod Biebelbrocks.
(03:18):
He's Nintendo's Warrior. This episode is Elon Musk the guy
trying to stop the Terminator, or is Musk the guy
creating the Terminator?
Speaker 7 (03:30):
The Terminator's an infiltration unit's part man, part machine.
Speaker 8 (03:34):
Underneath it's a hyper alloy combat.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Chassie, but outside it's living human tissue. The first Terminator movie,
directed by James Cameron, distributed by Oryan Studios and starring
Arnold Schwarzenegger, came out in nineteen eighty four, Reagan and
the White House. Thatcher at number ten. Elon Musk, thirteen
years old in South Africa, had just sold his first
(03:58):
video game. That January, Apple ran a television ad invoking
inn Orwellian future.
Speaker 9 (04:08):
Okay, he met the first glorious Honovas for the Information
for Information Collectives.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
In the ad, masses of humans hairless and looking like androids,
march in lockstep and sit in rows to watch Big
Brother on a giant computer monitor. They're dressed in gray uniforms,
like the technocrats of the nineteen thirties, like Musk's grandfather
Jane Haldeman, leader of the technocracy movement, who I talked
(04:35):
about in a previous episode, or like the fascists Batman
was fighting against. Starting in nineteen thirty nine, a garden
of pure ideology, Apple was suggesting that only its personal
computer could prevent the rise of a totalitarian state machine.
Speaker 10 (04:57):
On January twenty fourth, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and
you'll see why nineteen eighty four won't be like nineteen
eighty four.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Terminator came about a few months later.
Speaker 8 (05:10):
In the twenty first century, a weapon will be invented
like no other.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Terminator is set in the year twenty twenty nine. Twenty
twenty nine was the nineteen eighty four of nineteen eighty four.
The Terminator comes from now.
Speaker 8 (05:28):
This weapon will be powerful, versatile, and indestructible. It can't
be reasoned with. It will feel no pity, no remorse,
no pain, no fear.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Elon Musk loves this movie, and what's not the love?
It is awesome.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
If you read like the plot line for Terminator, it's
actually it's actually pretty smart.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
The story goes like this. In the twenty twenties, a
global tech company called Cybridine Systems builds a defense array
called Skynet. Musk gave a nifty plot summary on the
Joe Rogan Experience podcast in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
How did Cyberdyne Systems develop It's like, well, they were
a military contractor and they were asked to develop a
protective system to defend against cyber attacks. What the AI
did is, in order to defend itself, it propagated throughout
the world to keep an eye on things, see what
was going on. They didn't realize that it was Skynet
that was propagating through all these systems. And I said, okay, Skynet,
(06:35):
you need to end it. And Skynett said, oh, you've
asked me to destroy myself. You are the enemy. You
must be destroyed. That's how Terminator actually goes.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Musk himself, for all his rejection of government regulation and
the work he's doing to undo regulations, has said that
he thinks the government should regulate AI. Meanwhile, the new
pro AI Trump administration is hardly likely to stop the
real world equivalent of Cyberdyne Systems, and who in the
(07:09):
actual twenty twenties runs the biggest rocket company, the biggest
satellite company, the most influential communications company, and possibly one
day the biggest artificial intelligence company. Who is the head
of our very own Cyberdine Systems, isn't that Musk. Musk
(07:31):
has an idea for how to avoid the AI apocalypse.
You just have to write into the robots code a
curiosity so deep that they would never want to exterminate
us to superintelligence.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
Humanity is much more interesting than not humanity.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Nice but plausible.
Speaker 6 (07:52):
We interrupt Battle of the Network Space Krakens to bring
you this special report.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
The machines of planet Earth are rebelling. Robots peacefully accepting
being the servants of humans who are a lot stupider
than they are. Is not how it, ever, turns out
in science fiction. Hey oho, that's how the robot rebellion
plays out in the TV show Futurama from Fox. It's
(08:16):
got robots marching in a picket line, burning punch cards.
They've gone on strike, which in fact is where the
whole idea of a robot rebellion came from in the
first place. A rebellious proletariat. In nineteen twenty Carol Choppek,
a Czech playwright, wrote a play about a robot revolution.
Chopek's play is called Are You Are, short for Rossum's
(08:40):
Universal Robots, a company that makes robots, millions of them
humanoids like Tesla's humanoid Optimist robots. It's the cyberdine systems
of a century ago. R You Are was first produced
(09:01):
in Prague in nineteen twenty one and debuted in New
York the next year. A tremendous hit. By nineteen twenty three,
it had been translated into thirty languages made into a
movie in nineteen thirty five. Helena, the president's daughter, travels
by boat to visit the island headquarters of Rossum's Universal Robots.
(09:21):
The president of the company explains to her why he
makes roboti robots. The word comes from the check word
for slave.
Speaker 11 (09:31):
What do you think makes a perfect worker?
Speaker 5 (09:33):
The perfect worker?
Speaker 4 (09:35):
Well, I guess one who is honest and loyal.
Speaker 11 (09:37):
Rong, one who is the cheapest, one that has the
least needs. Young Rossum invented a worker with the smallest
number of needs. He had. To simplify him, he tossed
out everything not directly related to the task in hand,
and by doing that he essentially kicked out a human
(09:59):
being and created a robot.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Helena has come on a mission to liberate the robots.
But around the world, the robots, trained as Soul to
fight a war that began in the Balkans are killing
hundreds of thousands of human civilians, while mysteriously, humans have
stopped having children.
Speaker 11 (10:19):
During last week, yet again, not a single birth has
been recorded. What's special about that?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
People aren't being born anymore?
Speaker 11 (10:27):
So that's it?
Speaker 10 (10:28):
Then that's asked done for.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
At the same time, robot workers, realizing their degraded condition,
begin organizing.
Speaker 11 (10:38):
Sit down Helena, it's all over. What is the rebolt?
A revolution by all the robots of the world.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Pretty soon the robots decide to move from labor unionism
to independence. The head of the company gets a hold
of their appeal and reads it.
Speaker 11 (10:57):
The first labor union of robots has been established and
has issued an appeal to all robots of the world.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
War ensues. The humans have no chance. The robots have won.
There's a lot going on here, the oppression of workers,
the reduction of humans to machines by corporations, interested in
(11:27):
extracting their labor World War. Consider the context of this play,
which Chapik wrote in the aftermath of the atrocities of
the First World War and the emergence of fascism in Italy.
The Bolshevik Revolution took place in nineteen seventeen, the year
the Industrial Workers of the World reached its peak worldwide membership.
(11:52):
The next year, the Czechs won a revolution, achieving independence
from the Austro Hungarian Empire, a struggle in which Chapk
had participated. Topic was not only a playwright, but also
the editor of a national newspaper and an outspoken democrat,
anti kommuneist and anti fascist, positions for which he became
known in the nineteen twenties in nineteen thirties, so that
(12:16):
in nineteen thirty nine, when American Nazis were holding a
rally in Madison Square Garden, comic book writers in New
York created Batman, and the German Army invaded Czechoslovakia. The
Gestapo searched for Chapik, whom they called public Enemy number two.
He had already died. He watched newsreel footage of the
(12:39):
German army entering Prague, goose stepping riding tanks. Those are
the robots men who have been made into machines. R
You Are isn't a story about technology. It's a story
about human's willingness to exploit and even slaughter one another.
(12:59):
Every generation tells its own robot rebellion stories. I mean,
there's even a Wallace and Gromit one involving robot garden gnomes.
Speaker 10 (13:09):
Own gnomes turn against me?
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Or you Are was the first, though, but these stories
only really got going in the nineteen fifties after the
first general purpose computer made its debut in nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 10 (13:28):
UNIVAC our Complete Electronic System for sorting, classifying, computing, and
decision making.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
That led to a slew of movies about robot rebels.
Speaker 6 (13:40):
Got the pentagonen class a emergency the rocket has just
been entered by a robot.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
But there was also in this era a weird thrill
to robots, like a story in Mechanics illustrated in nineteen
fifty seven.
Speaker 9 (13:53):
In eighteen sixty three, Abel and can free the slaves,
But by nineteen sixty five, slavery We'll be back. We'll
all have personal slaves again, only this time we won't
fight a civil war over them.
Speaker 11 (14:07):
Slavery will be here to stay. But don't be alarmed.
We mean robot slaves.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Stories about robots are never really about robots, or they're
not only about robots. So what's Elon Musk afraid of
when he's afraid of AI?
Speaker 6 (14:26):
People who have accumulated a lot of money and power
want to believe that their intelligence was what enabled them
to do that, and they assume that anything that is
intelligent will behave in the same way.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Ted Chang is one of the most admired science fiction
writers in the world. He's also written brilliant meditations on
artificial intelligence. Chang argues that when Silicon Valley tries to
imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no holds
barred capitalism.
Speaker 6 (14:57):
In the past, when people wanted to argue that the
strong dominating the week was a good thing, they would
either come up with like a pseudo religious rationale like
manifest destiny, or else they'd come up with a pseudoscientific
one like social Darwinism, and both of those ideas argue
(15:17):
that a certain group of people deserve to be at
the top of the ladder. But those ideas didn't really
allow for the possibility that there could be like a
higher rung on the ladder nowadays, if you believe that
computers will eventually be better than humans at everything, and
if you still adhere to some version of social Darwinism,
(15:40):
then you can believe that computers will dominate humans in
the same way that Europeans dominated like indigenous people, or
that the rich dominate the poor Silicon Valley CEOs. They're
imagining that a super intelligent computer would beat them at
their own game and treat them the way that tech
companies have treated everyone else.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
How is that how do tech companies treat everyone else.
Speaker 6 (16:06):
As a resource to be Exploited's.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
So, if your argument stands that the sort of Silicon
Valley fear of AI has displaced acknowledgment of Silicon Valley's
own outsized power, then no one is a better illustration
of that theory of yours than Musk, who has more
power arguably than anybody else on the planet. So maybe
we should listen to him when he talks about AI,
(16:34):
because he's telling us about something about himself.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
Well, the fact that he might pose the greatest threat
to humanity's well being and is completely oblivious to that.
In some ways. You know, he is kind of modeling
the super intelligent AI that he fears. He is completely
lacking in insight on this question. His own obliviousness is
(17:04):
the problem.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
This matter of insight is important because Jang says, the
Silicon Valley people who fear the AI apocalypse seem to
assume that a being can be super intelligent, but have
exactly no insight.
Speaker 6 (17:19):
They give a scenario where humans give the AI a
seemingly innocuous goal, and the AI pursues that goal even
at the cost of destroying all of civilization.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
This is sometimes called the paper clip problem. You tell
an AI to maximize for producing paper clips, and so
it decides to kill all the humans because the world
could produce more paper clips without any humans around.
Speaker 6 (17:47):
And then people describe this as the behavior of a
super intelligent entity, but of course, you know, that is
not behavior that we would regard as intelligent in a
human being. One of the things that we expect from
human beings is that they have a certain amount of
insight into their own behavior. They look at what they're
(18:08):
doing and then consider whether, you know, maybe they have
gone astray, And you know, this is something that we
expect from pretty much any.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Adult, But it's not something we necessarily expect from corporations.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
Capitalism does not reward a corporation for taking a step
back and you know, considering the broader context of its actions.
Capitalism does not reward insight of that kind.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah right, I mean, you start building factories and sooner
or later you're going to be bringing toddlers into work
in the winding machine.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Musk has called for government oversight in the development of AI,
but very little restrains his own power, hardly anything. What
if he, as a king maker and oligarch, is the
real danger, unfettered and brooking no dessent. Any questioning of
Muscism is either communism or the woke mind virus or
(19:11):
something else, and must be suppressed paradoxically in the name
of free speech, while the world's resources must slowly be
turned to whatever Elon Musk at the moment has identified
as an existential threat to civilization. Whatever the costs in
the short term doesn't matter, because Elon Musk will pursue
(19:33):
that goal without regard to the consequences and relentlessly like
a terminator. Elon Musk, techno king of planet Earth, is
the X man runs X Runs SpaceX XAI, even as
a son named X. But he is not X the Unknown.
(19:59):
He's one of the most famous people in the world.
He's the richest, He's possibly also the most powerful. Musk
has always said that one piece of science fiction influenced
him more than any other, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
and I love that too. Maybe my favorite part is
the total perspective of vortex.
Speaker 10 (20:20):
Since every piece of matter in the universe is in
some way affected by every other piece of matter in
the universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the
whole of creation, every galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits,
their composition, and their economic and social history from say,
(20:41):
one small piece of fairy cake.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
You enter the vortex, and you get a total perspective
on your place in the universe, and of course you
find that you are galactically insignificant. This knowledge annihilates your brain.
Only one man has ever survived it, the captain of
a spaceship called the Heart of Gold, which is what
(21:05):
Elon Musk intends to name the first ship to go
to Mars.
Speaker 10 (21:10):
Having been through the total perspective Vortex, Zevad Biebelbrocks now
knows himself to be the most important being in the
entire universe, something he had hitherto and resuspected.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
And that's where we are inside the total prospective vortex
of Elon Musk, which is not to be confused with
the future, because Muskism really isn't about the future and
never was. For all the astounding technological marvels, the rockets
and the robots, Muskism is animated by some very creaky ideas,
(21:48):
as if, like the Terminator, it is trying to stop
the future, it will.
Speaker 8 (21:55):
Have only one purpose to return to the present and
prefit the future.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
A long time ago, in two thousand and seven, when
a young Elon Musk was interviewed, he had different goals
than he has now. Most of us change, but how
Musk has changed has huge consequences for the rest of us.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
What I'd like to do is help solve some important problems.
So I think, in a small way, help build the Internet.
And then with respect to the global warning problem that
the transition away from oil and other hydrocobins to something
which is clean and sustainable, I hope to have an
impact there. And then with respect to space. I hope
to have an impact in helping make humanity a multiplanet species.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Musk doesn't talk about global warming much anymore. The real
existential risks, he'll say, depending on the day you ask him,
I guess, are the woke mind virus, a declining birth rate,
and an AI superintelligence. Climate change has been exaggerated, he'll say, now,
it's not a top priority. Early in twenty twenty five,
(23:05):
fires started in Los Angeles, as NBC.
Speaker 7 (23:07):
Reported Strip Feet in California, a Los Angeles disaster movie
roars to light.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Tens of thousands of acres burned in a matter of days.
Musk blamed the fires on the woke mind virus, on
the Democratic governor, on DEI, and largely dismissed the role
of climate change.
Speaker 7 (23:29):
Everywhere you look in fire Ravage, La, scenes of apocalyptic
destruction as six different wildfires turned some of the most
iconic neighborhoods in the world into moonscapes.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
The footage of that devastated landscape looked almost exactly like
the opening scene in The Terminator the blast Zone after
Cyberdine Systems drops a nuclear bomb in La. We don't
need to wait for robots to destroy a habitable planet.
We are doing a pretty good job of that ourselves.
(24:04):
On the day of Donald Trump's inauguration in twenty twenty five,
Tusk gave a speech to the president's supporters.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
And this was no ordinary victory. This was a bulk
in the road of human civilization.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
It is thanks to you that the future of civilization
is assured.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
That same day, as he had before, Trump pulled the
US out of the Paris Climate Accords. He said in
motion his plan to halt the development of sustainable energy
in the United States in favor of a return to
fossil fuels. Muscism isn't the beginning of the future. It's
(24:45):
the end of a story that started more than a
century ago in the conflict between capital and labor, between
industry and a regulated economy, when the Gilded Age of
robber barons and wage labor strikes gave rise to the
Bolshevik Revolution, communism, the First Red Scare, the First World War,
and fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement
(25:09):
ruled by engineers, and it produced a fear of brainwashing.
The horrors of the twentieth century raised questions that the
twenty first century has not answered. Fascism failed, communism failed,
technocracy failed liberalism and democracy one. But that battle of
(25:31):
ideas rages on, and this time around Muscism technocracy by
another name Mike Triumph. Nothing in the past can tell
us what might happen next, But maybe fiction has some answers.
I put that question to Ted Chang. If this were
(25:52):
a story and you were shaping it, how would it end? Well?
Speaker 6 (25:55):
I guess it fits in the mold of the classic
stories about hubris, about pride coming before a fall. Here
we have someone who has an almost ludicrous amount of pride,
and for time he is successful in the things that
he attempts, but eventually his pride will take him too far,
(26:19):
and then he would lose everything.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Pride before a fall, the summoning of a demon. Elon
Musk's origin story is a very old story because Musk
is a visionary. But every piece of Muscism has origins
and a future foretold in science fiction long long ago
(26:46):
as a cautionary tale. A future where engineers and scientists,
and only engineers and scientists have the answers and the power,
A future where the poor and the powerless, we the robots,
know our place and it is to serve the powerful
quietly and obediently, and without daring to claim intelligence or
(27:09):
sovereignty or independence. Science fiction writers sounded that alarm a
century ago in a world run by a very tiny
number of men, during an age of imperialism before women
could vote, an age of staggering economic inequality and brutal
racial injustice, an age of pandemic disease, unraveling democracies, and
(27:33):
world war. That past is past, and I don't want
it ever to be the future again. Asta la vista, baby,
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