Transcription
Elon Musk has sat down for an hour with the editor-in-chief of The Economist magazine, um, where he was challenged on his agitation on behalf of the European far-right.
"Elon, you have what is it, close to 250 million followers on X?"
"Yeah."
"You say things like..."
"Popular guy."
"...'Civil war in Britain is inevitable.' Just a question, on the current trends."
"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 not..."
"You live in a closed existence."
"No, I don't actually. And the numbers also disprove what you say."
"What numbers?"
"All the numbers about London 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, 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."
"I haven't said any of those things."
"For example, your, your 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. I think that it's, it's a movie, um, and it's worth watching."
"Now, I hadn't heard of this movie, 'Citizen Vigilante,' I have to admit. Unlike the host, I haven't watched it yet. I probably never will. It's an action movie starring Armie Hammer. Um, and this is from the synopsis on Wikipedia, so they say. Um, this is not a review, it's just, you know, a synopsis of what happened in it. In an un— 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 US 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 multi— to multiple unexplained deaths involving judges. Sanders visits the home of Ysef, one of the rapists, and takes him and his family hostage. As Ysef's relatives excuse his action and blame the victim, Sanders orders Ysef to summon his accomplices to the apartment. Once they arrive, Sanders executes Ysef, 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 say 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 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 Zani Minton Bedos."
"Zani. Wow. That's that's a name. A real name. Yeah."
"The editor-in-chief of The Economist."
"Yeah. The editor-in-chief. So, I watched more of 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, over and over again, she says, 'Well, you're not that popular and you're not that like, and 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 as 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 the myth [clears throat] 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. I live rent-free in London."
"I, mate, girl, and I'm going to get on to 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, Anders Breivik, 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 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'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, yes, in many ways, London is a very, very difficult city to live in. But it's not because Whitechapel 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 the 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, I think it's quite a nice destination. We just need some better like..."
"Just need some more wealth distribution and it'll be wonderful. A lot of it, I come back to a lot, but a lot of it does come back to the smartphone, which is when I look at the videos I see of London, it is of like people smashing windows and like a gang sort of robbing a shop and no one 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, the person in the shop would have seen it and maybe three passers-by. Now it gets uploaded online and a million people see it and like, 'Oh my god, that's 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..."
"But it hasn't happened."
"But it hasn't. And like the reason that London is tough, you know, as 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."
"Is there, is there, pick, if it had got more violent, it would have been because of inequality, but inequality is increasing, violence got less. So, are you not, are you not, have you not made a sort of argumentative jump you didn't really need to make?"
"It's more 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, 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 increasing 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, 'cause 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 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. And when I listened to it, I was incredibly outraged."
"Do you think there's still a 10 to 20% chance that killer robots mean the end of humanity? That's a high p— as they say."
"Well, in the long run, we're all dead, of course. Um, you know, um, so I mean, so 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, meaning, sort of, the heat death of 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 was, you know, you know, created OpenAI as a, essentially a counterweight to to Google, because at the time they were, um, they had more or less a monopoly on AI in creating OpenAI and then having Anthropic spin out of that, and now currently Anthropic is 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 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 interests 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 went pushed about, you know, 'If you seriously think the technology you're building might kill everyone, like a very high, a one in five chance of killing everyone, why are you doing it?' Said, 'Well, you know, I tried to make this company OpenAI, um, so that that would sort of help be a counterbalance to Google. But now OpenAI is making the AI and and then Anthropic stuff. So, what can you do? I might as well join 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, Dalia, 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 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 it X. I feel like I'm, I'm, I'm giving into him. Um, an infra— 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 to so easily use it in 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, SpaceX, it's not just a thing. It's not just about shooting rockets into space. It's like this vertically integrated like manufacturing and comms infrastructure that v— 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 is like a cancer in society. And the fact that he's also a racist idiot just makes the whole thing like [laughter] even more apocalyptic. And even, but I mean, it, it, it, in the rest of the interview, you know, he talks about his vision for the uto— like the possible utopia of AI, 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, we're, 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, 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 ecosystems. 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 [ __ ] 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, 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 like the competition is often over stuff that I don't really see what there, how there is a technological fix for it. I suppose he's very into robotics. So, you get these robots that everyone decides, 'Let's change planning law,' and then the robots build really nice apartments for everyone in the next five years. It doesn't sound particularly..."
"But there's more like, there's more to that than just the things that can be automated, right? It's what, like he always says, like, 'Oh, driverless cars, 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 would have to like completely redesign all of the roads. And like, why? 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 in it. And I'm like, I don't want to do that."
"I feel like the driverless cars might get really good even in complexities."
"Invest 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, do you remember what his, what his solution was to try and avoid apocalypse..."
"In the interview? I'm not sure. I, I listened to the whole..."
"Have more kids. It was going to be a weekly or bi-weekly call between Elon, Demis, Asabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman where they could discuss what was going on."
"No, like I'll be getting on that SpaceX rocket, fling me into space. I want— No, that alone will make my life worse."
"I mean, the people in space are going to be much more like Sam and Demis and Dario than the people."
"Yeah, exactly."