Some of Elon Musk’s ideas and way of thinking give us a picture that he is out of the world, or at least so far before everyone that it is unbelievable. The following year is the one where he promised to release a humanoid robot and put it to market. Will he keep to his word?
Elon Musk is fast to announce everything that gets on his mind via social media. Especially over Twitter, his favorite social media, or at least, it was his favorite social media. Now that he has a legal dispute with the company, I am not so sure about it. However, his 100 million followers there are the first to hear, or read, about his ideas.
Has Elon Musk Downloaded His Brain Into A Robot?
Proof of his ambitions and views far in the future are the predictions that he usually makes. Even though sometimes they seem unbelievable, he wants to strive to achieve something as soon as humanly possible. Take for example his ambition to send people to Mars less than thirty years from now.
“20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential.” – this is the answer that Musk gave when asked about creating a civilization that will live exclusively on Mars. Furthermore, he claims that the rate of populating Mars should be about 100 000 people annually until we reach 1 million people there. After that, it is easy peasy.
I am not sure if it is Musk’s gambling nature if he has some, or whatever it is, but he tends to make some decisions upon unusual terms. Take for example the time when he asked his followers on Twitter to determine whether to sell 10% of his stock in Tesla. The poll had more than 3.5 million votes, 58% of which pro-selling. He pledged to follow their will, and he certainly did so.
Now, after the 10% of Tesla is sold, and after he entered a legal dispute with Twitter over its acquisition, he made the boldest claim until now. Elon Musk claims that he had already downloaded his memory into a machine.
The conversation that led to this revelation starts between Musk and the creator of Dogecoin, Billy Markus.
“If you could upload your brain to the cloud, and talk to a virtual version of yourself, would you be buddies?” – Markus’ tweet from the 18th of July states. “Would be cool to have a competitive game buddy of approximately the same skill level except he would be a computer and have infinite time so I would more just see him get better at everything while I am busy with dumb life things I don’t like this thought exercise anymore.”
Elon Musk replied to this tweet stating – “Already did it.”
Musk had already made a statement that he works on a way to download memory from a physical brain onto a computer. Now, with this recent tweet, he suggests that he already is successful in finding a way to do so.
“Could you imagine that one day we would be able to download our human brain capacity into an Optimus?” – Mathias Dopfner, who is the CEO of Axel Springer asked Tesla’s CEO in an interview. To clarify, Optimus is the name of the humanoid robot manufactured by Tesla.
“I think it’s possible.” – Musk states.
Axel Springer made a connection of this with eternal life after that and Musk agreed with it. Seems like he found the secret to eternal youth.
“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.”
“I’m not sure if there is a very sharp boundary. I think it is much smoother.” – Musk adds. “There is already so much compute that we outsource. We store our memories in our phones and computers with pictures and videos. 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. I certainly don’t want to have anything that could potentially be harmful to humanity. But humanoid robots are happening.” – Musk says. “The rate of advancement of AI is very rapid.”
Elon Musk views Optimus as a tool that will replace the workers in places where they need to repeat boring and simple stuff. Take production line workers. In near future, according to Musk, robots will replace them. The humans will attend to more complicated work. The billionaire sees the human workforce that is ‘spent’ in such positions as ‘wasted’. He believes that we, as humans, are designed to make more complicated things.
“Optimus is a general purpose, sort of worker-droid. The initial role must be in work that is repetitive, boring, or dangerous. Basically, work that people don’t want to do.” – Musk says.
“Tesla AI Day pushed to Sept 30, as we may have an Optimus prototype working by then.” – Musk says on Twitter on June 2nd. He refers to Tesla Artificial Intelligence day.
If everything goes according to plan, the billionaire promised that he will have the Optimus in serial production by 2023. He doesn’t reveal any of the details, however. Details like what exact operations he will be able to do, or how much would it cost precisely.
It is an interesting idea that the robots will do the ‘boring jobs’ in the future. But, wouldn’t this mean that many people will be lose their jobs? From one side the implementation of robots in human work positions seems interesting and beneficial for companies, but is it a good thing in general?
What is your opinion on this? Would you like to see robots working in factories instead of people?
