The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, part 2, the second time we spoke on the podcast, with parallels, if not in quality, then in outfit, to the objectively speaking greatest sequel of all time, Godfather part 2.

As many people know, Elon Musk is a leader of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company.

What may be less known is that he's a world-class engineer and designer, constantly emphasizing first principles thinking and taking on big engineering problems that many before him will consider impossible.

As scientists and engineers, most of us don't question the way things are done.

We simply follow the momentum of the crowd.

But revolutionary ideas that change the world on the small and large scales happen when you return to the fundamentals and ask, is there a better way?

This conversation focuses on the incredible engineering and innovation done in brain computer interfaces at Neuralink.

This work promises to help treat neurobiological diseases, to help us further understand the connection between the individual neuron to the high-level function of the human brain.

And Finally, to 1 day expand the capacity of the brain through two-way communication with computational devices, the internet, and artificial intelligence systems.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.

And now, as an anonymous YouTube commenter referred to our previous conversation as the quote, historical first video of 2 robots conversing without supervision.

Here's the second time, the second conversation with Elon Musk.

Let's start with a easy question about consciousness.

In your view, is consciousness something that's unique to humans, or is it something that permeates all matter, almost like a fundamental force of physics?

I don't think consciousness permeates all matter.

I don't know about your mind or anything, but the scientific method is like, if you cannot test the hypothesis, then you cannot reach meaningful conclusion that it is true.

Do you think consciousness, understanding consciousness is within the reach of science, of the scientific method?

We can dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness.

You know, I would be hard pressed to say that we understand anything with complete accuracy, but can we dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness?

Does an AI system, in your view, have to have consciousness in order to achieve human level or superhuman level intelligence?

Does it need to have some of these human qualities like consciousness, maybe a body, maybe a fear of mortality, capacity to love, those kinds of silly human things?

You know, there's this, the scientific method which I very much believe in where something is true to the degree that it is testably so.

And otherwise you're really just talking about, you know, preferences or, well, untestable beliefs or that kind of thing.

So it ends up being somewhat of a semantic question where we are conflating a lot of things with the word intelligence.

If we parse them out and say, are we headed towards a future where an AI will be able to outthink us in every way?

In order for an AI system that needs to outthink us in every way, it also needs to have a capacity to have consciousness, self-awareness, and understanding.

I mean, to me, in terms of what consciousness feels like, it feels like consciousness is in a different dimension.

You know, if you damage your brain in some way physically, you damage your consciousness, which implies that consciousness is a physical phenomenon in my view.

The thing is that I think are really quite likely is that digital intelligence will be able to outthink us in every way, and it will certainly be able to simulate what we consider consciousness, so to a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference.

And from the aspect of the scientific method, it might as well be consciousness if we can simulate it perfectly.

If you can't tell the difference, and this is sort of the Turing test, but think of a more sort of advanced version of the Turing test.

If you're talking to a digital super intelligence and can't tell if that is a computer or a human, like let's say you're just having a conversation over a phone or a video conference or something where you think you're talking, looks like a person makes all of the right inflections and movements and all the small subtleties that constitute a human and talks like a human, makes mistakes like a human, like at that, and you literally just can't tell, is this, Are you videoconferencing with a person or an AI?

So on a darker topic, you've expressed serious concern about existential threats of AI.

It's perhaps 1 of the greatest challenges our civilization faces, but since I would say we're kind of an optimistic descendants of apes, perhaps we can find several paths of escaping the harm of AI.

So if I can give you 3 options, maybe you can comment which do you think is the most promising.

So 1 is scaling up efforts on AI safety and beneficial AI research in hope of finding an algorithmic or maybe a policy solution?

2, is becoming a multi-planetary species as quickly as possible?

And 3, is merging with AI and riding the wave of that increasing intelligence as it continuously improves?

What do you think is most promising, most interesting as a civilization that we should invest in?

I think there's a lot, a tremendous amount of investment going on in AI.

Where there's a lack of investment is in AI safety.

And there should be, in my view, a government agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm that it does not represent a public safety risk.

Just as there is a regulatory authority for the Food and Drug Administration, there's NHTSA for automotive safety, there's the FAA for aircraft safety.

We generally come to the conclusion that it is important to have a government referee or a referee that is serving the public interest in ensuring that things are safe when there's a potential danger to the public.

I would argue that AI is unequivocally something that has potential to be dangerous to the public and therefore should have a regulatory agency just as other things that are dangerous to the public have a regulatory agency.

But let me tell you the problem with this is that the government moves very slowly and the rate of, the usually way a regulatory agency comes into being is that something terrible happens.

And years after that, there's a regulatory agency or a rule put in place.

It was known for a decade or more that seat belts would have a massive impact on safety and save so many lives and serious injuries.

And the car industry fought the requirement to put seatbelts in tooth and nail.

And, and I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people probably died because of that.

And they said people wouldn't buy cars if they had seatbelts, which is obviously absurd, you know, Or look at the tobacco industry and how long they fought anything about smoking.

That's part of why I helped make that movie, Thank You for Smoking.

You can sort of see just how pernicious it can be when you have these companies effectively achieve regulatory capture of government, the bad.

People in the AI community refer to the advent of digital superintelligence as a singularity.

That is not to say that it is good or bad, but that it is very difficult to predict what will happen after that point.

And that there's some probability it will be bad, some probability it will be good.

But obviously I want to affect that probability and have it be more good than bad.

Well, let me, on the merger with AI question and the incredible work that's being done at Neuralink, There's a lot of fascinating innovation here across different disciplines going on.

So the flexible wires, the robotic sewing machine, the responsive brain movement, everything around ensuring safety and so on.

So We currently understand very little about the human brain.

Do you also hope that the work at Neuralink will help us understand more about the human mind, about the brain?

Yeah, I think the work at Neuralink will definitely shed a lot of insight into how the brain and the mind works.

Right now, just the data we have regarding how the brain works is very limited.

You know, we've got FMRI, which is, that's kind of like putting a stethoscope on the outside of a factory wall and then putting it all over the factory wall and you can sort of hear the sounds, but you don't know what the machines are doing really.

You can infer a few things, but it's very broad brushstroke.

In order to really know what's going on in the brain, you really need, you have to have high precision sensors and then you want to have stimulus and response.

Like if you trigger a neuron, how do you feel?

How does it change your perception of the world?

You're speaking to physically just getting close to the brain, being able to measure signals from the brain, will give us, sort of, open the door inside the factory.

Being able to have high precision sensors that tell you what individual neurons are doing, and then being able to trigger the neuron and see what the response is in the brain.

So you can see the consequences of, if you fire this neuron, what happens?

It'll be really profound to have this in people because people can articulate their change, like if there's a change in mood, or if they can tell you if they can see better or hear better, or be able to form sentences better or worse, or their memories are jogged, or that kind of thing.

So on the human side, there's this incredible general malleability, plasticity of the human brain.

The human brain adapts, adjusts, and so on.

So there's a firm structure, but nevertheless, there is some plasticity and the open question is, so if I could ask a broad question is, how much of that plasticity can be utilized?

So on the human side, there's some plasticity in the human brain.

And on the machine side, we have neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, it's able to adjust and figure out signals.

So there's a mysterious language that we don't perfectly understand that's within the human brain.

And then we're trying to understand that language to communicate both directions.

So the brain is adjusting a little bit, we don't know how much, and the machine is adjusting.

Where do you see, as they try to sort of reach together, almost like with an alien species, try to find a protocol, communication protocol, that works, where do you see the biggest benefit arriving from on the machine side or the human side?

Do You see both of them working together.

I actually think the machine side is far more malleable than the biological side, by a huge amount.

So it'll be the machine that adapts to the brain.

The brain can't adapt that well to the machine.

You can't have neurons start to regard an electrode as another neuron, because a neuron just, there's like the pulse, and so something else is pulsing.

So there is that elasticity in the interface, which we believe is something that can happen.

But the vast majority of the malleability will have to be on the machine side.

But it's interesting, when you look at that synaptic plasticity at the interface side, there might be like an emergent plasticity.

Because it's a whole nother, it's not like in the brain, it's a whole nother extension of the brain.

You know, we might have to redefine what it means to be malleable for the brain.

So maybe the brain is able to adjust to external interfaces.

There will be some adjustment to the brain, because there's going to be something reading and simulating the brain and so it will adjust to that thing.

But most, the vast majority of the adjustment will be on the machine side.

This is just, it has to be that, otherwise it will not work.

Ultimately, we currently operate on 2 layers.

We have a limbic, like primitive brain layer, which is where all of our impulses are coming from.

It's sort of like we've got a monkey brain with a computer stuck on it.

And a lot of our impulses and everything are driven by the monkey brain.

And the computer, the cortex, is constantly trying to make the monkey brain happy.

It's not the cortex that's steering the monkey brains, the monkey brain's steering the cortex.

But the cortex is the part that tells the story of the whole thing.

So we convince ourselves it's more interesting than just the monkey brain.

The cortex is like what we call like human intelligence, you know, so it's like that's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures.

Other creatures do not have either, really, they don't have the computer or they have a very weak computer relative to humans.

But it's it's like it sort of seems like surely the really smart thing should control the dumb thing, but actually the dumb thing controls the smart thing.

So do you think some of the same kind of machine learning methods, whether that's natural language processing applications, are going to be applied for the communication between the machine and the brain to learn how to do certain things like movement of the body, how to process visual stimuli, and so on?

Do you see the value of using machine learning to understand the language of the two-way communication with the brain?

I mean, we're a neural net and that, you know, AI is basically neural net.

So it's like digital neural net will interface with biological neural net.

And hopefully bring us along for the ride, you know.

But the vast majority of our intelligence will be digital.

So like think of like the difference in intelligence between your cortex and your limbic system is gigantic.

Your limbic system really has no comprehension of what the hell the cortex is doing.

It's just literally hungry, you know, or tired or angry or sexy or something, you know, that's an ad just, and then that communicates that that impulse to the cortex and tells the cortex to go satisfy that.

Then a lot of, a great deal of like a massive amount of thinking, like truly stupendous amount of thinking has gone into sex without purpose, without procreation, which is actually quite a silly action in the absence of procreation It's a bit silly Well, why are you doing it?

Because It makes the limbic system happy.

Well, the whole of existence is pretty absurd in some kind of sense.

But I mean, this is a lot of computation has gone into, how can I do more of that with procreation not even being a factor?

This is, I think, a very important area of research for NSFW.

An agency that should receive a lot of funding, especially after this conversation.

What is the most exciting or some of the most exciting things that you see in the future impact of Neuralink, both on the science, the engineering, and societal broad impact?

So Neuralink, I think at first will solve a lot of brain related diseases.

So it could be anything from like autism, schizophrenia, memory loss, like everyone experiences memory loss at certain points in age.

Parents can't remember their kids names and that kind of thing.

So there's a tremendous amount of good that Neuralink can do in solving critical damage to the brain or the spinal cord.

There's a lot that can be done to improve quality of life of individuals.

And that will be, those will be steps along the way.

And then ultimately, it's intended to address the existential risk associated with digital superintelligence.

Like we will not be able to be smarter than a digital supercomputer.

So therefore, if you cannot beat them, join them.

So you have hope that Neuralink will be able to be a kind of connection to allow us to merge, to ride the wave of the improving AI systems?

He's saying 1 in a billion or 1 in a million, whatever it was, at Dumb and Dumber.

You know, it went from maybe 1 in a million to improving, maybe it'll be 1 in a thousand and then 1 in a hundred, then 1 in 10.

It depends on the rate of improvement of Neuralink and how fast we're able to do, make progress, you know.

that are quite brilliant engineers, so I'm excited.

Yeah, I think it's like fundamentally good, you know, you're giving somebody back full motor control after they've had a spinal cord injury, you know, restoring brain functionality after a stroke, solving debilitating genetically oriented brain diseases.

And in order to do these, you have to be able to interface with neurons at a detailed level and you need to be able to fire the right neurons, read the right neurons, and then effectively you can create a circuit, replace what's broken with silicon, and essentially fill in the missing functionality.

And then over time we can have, we develop a tertiary layer.

So if like the limbic system is a primary layer, then the cortex is like the second layer.

And I said that, you know, obviously the cortex is vastly more intelligent than the limbic system, but people generally like the fact that they have a limbic system and a cortex.

I haven't met anyone who wants to delete either 1 of them.

They're like, okay, I'll keep them both, that's cool.

And then people generally don't want to lose their cortex either.

So they like having the cortex and the Olympic system.

And then there's a tertiary layer, which will be digital superintelligence.

And I think there's room for optimism, given that the cortex is very intelligent and the limbic system is not, and yet they work together well.

Perhaps there can be a tertiary layer where digital superintelligence lies and that that will be vastly more intelligent than the cortex but still coexist peacefully and in a benign manner with the cortex and limbic system.

That's a super exciting future both in low-level engineering that I saw is being done here and actual possibility in the next few decades.

It's important that Neuralink solve this problem sooner rather than later, because the point at which we have digital superintelligence, that's when we pass singularity and things become just very uncertain.

It doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad or good, but the point at which we pass singularity, things become extremely unstable.

So we want to have a human brain interface before the singularity, or at least not long after it, to minimize existential risk for humanity and consciousness as we know it.

But there's a lot of fascinating actual engineering and low-level problems here at Neuralink that are quite exciting.

face at Neuralink are material science, electrical engineering, software, mechanical engineering, micro fabrication.

It's a bunch of engineering disciplines, essentially.

That's what it comes down to is that you have to have a tiny electrode.

So small it doesn't hurt neurons, but it's gotta last for as long as a person, so it's gonna last for decades.

And then you've gotta take that signal, you've gotta process that signal locally at low power.

So we need a lot of chip design engineers that are, you know, cause we're gonna do signal processing and do so in a very power efficient way so that we don't heat your brain up cause the brain's very heat sensitive.

And then we've got to take those signals, and we've got to do something with them.

And then we've got to stimulate the back to, you know, so you could bidirectional communication.

So if somebody's good at material science, software, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chip design, microfabrication, those are the things we need to work on.

We need to be good at material science so that we can have tiny electrodes that last a long time.

And it's a tough thing with the material science problem, it's a tough 1 because you're trying to read and simulate electrically in an electrically active area.

Your brain is very electrically active and electrochemically active.

So how do you have, say, a coating on the electrode that doesn't dissolve over time, and is safe in the brain?

And then how do you collect those signals in a way that is most efficient?

Because you really just have very tiny amounts of power to process those signals.

You know, and then we need to automate the whole thing so it's like Lasik, you know?

So it's not, if this is done by neurosurgeons, there's no way it can scale to a large numbers of people.

And it needs to scale as large numbers of people.

Cause I think ultimately we want the future repeated to be determined by a large number of humans.

Do you think that this has a chance to revolutionize surgery period?

Like if Lasik had to be hand done, done by hand by a person, that wouldn't be great.

And the ophthalmologist kind of just needs to make sure your head's in the right position and then they just press a button and go.

So Smart Summon and soon AutoPark takes on the full beautiful mess of parking lots and their human to human nonverbal communication.

I think it has actually the potential to have a profound impact in changing how our civilization looks at AI and robotics because This is the first time human beings people that don't own a Tesla may have never seen a Tesla or heard about a Tesla Get to watch hundreds of thousands of cars without a driver.

Yeah Do you see it this way almost like an education tool for the world about AI?

Do you feel the burden of that, the excitement of that, or do you just think it's a smart parking feature?

I do think you are getting at something important, which is most people have never really seen a robot.

Yeah, it communicates a certain sort of message with everything from safety to the possibility of what AI could bring, its current limitations, its current challenges, what's possible.

Do you feel the burden of that, almost like a communicator, educator to the world about AI?

We're just really trying to make people's lives easier with autonomy, but now that you mention it, I think it will be an eye opener to people about robotics, because they've really never seen, most people have never seen a robot.

And there are hundreds of thousands of Teslas, won't be long before there's a million of them that have autonomous capability and the drive without a person in it.

And you can see the kind of evolution of the car's personality and thinking with each iteration of Autopilot.

You can see it's uncertain about this, or it gets more certain.

Now it's moving in a slightly different way.

Like I can tell immediately if a car is on Tesla Autopilot because it's got just little nuances of movement.

It just moves in a slightly different way.

Cars on Tesla Autopilot, for example, on the highway are far more precise about being in the center of the lane than a person.

If you drive down the highway and look at how, where cars are, the human driven cars are within their lane, they're like bumper cars.

Yeah, so the incredible work that's going into that neural network, it's learning fast.

We don't actually know how hard it is fully, of course.

You look at most problems you tackle, this 1 included, with an exponential lens.

But even with an exponential improvement, things can take longer than expected sometimes.

So where does Tesla currently stand on its quest for full autonomy?

When can we see successful deployment of full autonomy?

Well, on the highway already, the probability of intervention is extremely low.

So for highway autonomy, with the latest release especially, the probability of needing to intervene is really quite low.

In fact, I'd say for stop-and-go traffic, it's far safer than a person right now.

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Elon Musk: Neuralink, AI, Autopilot, and the Pale Blue Dot | Lex Fridman Podcast #49