It should come as not surprise that a man who pioneered his own space travel industry is now stepping heavily into the world of robotics and AI. First teased in 2021, Elon Musk ‘s Tesla Bot, or Optimus, is set for production next year.
Despite it having not even taken its first steps, he’s already thinking far into the future of this bot’s capabilities beyond human busywork, such as consciousness-hosting.
A recent interview with Elon Musk had the man talking about the future of human consciousness.
It began when the interviewer , Mathias Döpfner, asked Musk about Optimus, a recently-presented human robot that Tesla aims to start production on as early as next year.
In the interview, Musk described Optimus as a “general-purpose, sort of worker-droid.” He’s hoping Optimus will take over the “repetitive, boring, or dangerous” tasks that humans don’t want to do.
He already has visions of Optimus performing roles in all sorts of settings.
While initially designed for Tesla factories, he says he could see Optimus being brought into a home to do household chores and such.
Döpfner continues to raise the stakes in asking what Musk thinks Optimus might be used for, at one point asking, “Could you imagine that one day we would be able to download our human brain capacity into an Optimus?”
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“I think it is possible,” Musk replies.
“Yes, we could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique. Now, of course, if you’re not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that.”
He went on the describe the digitization of things like memories as already a part of human evolution.
“Our memories are stored in our phones and computers with pictures and video,” he said, “Computers and phones amplify our ability to communicate, enabling us to do things that would have been considered magical […] We’ve already amplified our human brains massively with computers.”
Not to mention he’s already begun developing another similar technology.
Neuralink, another venture of Musk’s, is developing “brain-machine interfaces” that Musk believes could one day allow people to “store your memories as a backup, and restore the memories.” Not immediately, though.
“Neuralink in the short term is just about solving brain injuries, spinal injuries and that kind of thing,” he said. “So for many years, Neuralink’s products will just be helpful to someone who has lost the use of their arms or legs or has just a traumatic brain injury of some kind.”
It’s worth noting that these ideas aren’t from Musk’s own desire to live forever.
He doesn’t even seem to believe in the idea of artificially extending life, as he said, “I don’t think we should try to have people live for a really long time. That would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind. They just die. So if they don’t die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn’t advance.”
h/t: CNBC
