Elon Musk came out of the closet, so to speak, and this week declared that he would not take a Covid-19 vaccination, and refused to commit to paying his staff who chose to stay at home to avoid getting the virus. He is, in other words, something of an anti-vaxxer, and probably not a nice person to work for. I could be wrong. Whatever, and wherever the truth may lie, Musk sometimes gets a bad rap. Sometimes it’s fair, other times it’s not. If we consider only his investment in technological innovation, he probably has no peers – other than perhaps Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whom we will return to very briefly, below – and criticisms of Musk may, indeed, be misplaced.
Other than the fact that we share a birthday, I have nothing nasty to say about Pretoria-born Musk and even if I did, it’s for another discussion. It is Musk’s endeavours in the scientific realm that are intriguing and exciting, and draw out my interests in physics, astrophysics, cosmology, artificial intelligence and robotics. A case can be made, also, for an umbilical link between reports of his fraudulent and deeply problematic conduct as a businessperson, his ethical outlook with respect to AI, robotics and his obsession with terraforming and creating a type of colony on Mars. This idea or theory of terraforming Mars is up for debate – and the evidence just does not match the theory perfectly enough. In the words of the great 20th-century physicist Richard Feynman, it’s perfectly in order to have a theory, but if the evidence does not support that theory, abandon it, and move on.
Terraforming Mars is at least 100 years away
While my entry point to advances in physics, astronomy or cosmology – as well as AI and robotics – is almost always political, economic and philosophical, if only because my actual knowledge of the science is infinitesimal (I should parade knowledge and say it’s smaller than a single Planck length), I will be bold enough to say that to the extent that Mars can be terraformed, it is at least 100 years away.
The Martian atmosphere is made up mainly of carbon dioxide. This means that it is far too thin and too cold to support liquid water, which almost everyone agrees is an essential ingredient for life. On Mars, the pressure of the atmosphere is less than 1% of the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere. Any liquid water on the surface would very quickly evaporate or freeze. Potential colonists like Musk and Bezos believe that to terraform Mars, they would release gases – mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour (H2O) – from existing sources on the planet to thicken the atmosphere, and increase the temperature to the point where liquid water becomes sufficiently stable. This would create a type of Greenhouse Effect that would trap heat and warm the climate on Mars. As things stand (with the scientific knowledge and technology we have), this is simply not possible.
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One important conclusion is that while there may be quantities of some form of liquid, say water, on Mars (as my colleague Tiara Walters reported earlier this week), it is not enough to create water vapour. Scientific inquiries have shown that by itself water cannot provide significant warming. Temperatures do not allow enough water to persist as vapour without first having significant warming by CO2. But this is the beauty of science. Scientists, which Musk certainly is not, find great satisfaction in being wrong – it gives them extra energy to keep searching.
You can’t have your cake and eat it
While scientists get a thrill out of being wrong, Musk would rather throw a tantrum if he cannot have his way. To quote Feynman again:
“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”
Earlier this year, Musk took to Twitter to voice his frustrations about the ongoing Covid-19 lockdown in California, where he employs about 10,000 people. In response to the lockdown, Musk threatened to take his car manufacturing company to another state if it was not allowed to reopen immediately. This fits somewhat neatly with the anti-vaxing position stated at the top of this essay. Anyway, in May this year, Musk announced that he would be resuming production at the facility in contravention of the lockdown. Within days, county administrators caved in to Musk and announced that his factory would be allowed to resume production under government supervision. This did not endear Musk to California’s political leaders. After Musk’s initial tweet threatening to leave the state, San Diego Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez took to Twitter (on 10 May) with a succinct tweet: “F*ck Elon Musk.”
Gonzalez added: “So much of the clash our state is experiencing with the tech/Silicon Valley companies is of our own making. We let gig companies violate labour laws for over a decade. We subsidised Tesla as they operated with severe safety issues & actively union busted. They got used to it… It’s time that all companies, no matter how cool, abide by the same laws.”
As the kids would say, Elon Musk got told.
The future of AI and robotics
Musk helped found the AI research laboratory OpenAI, and has made some insightful claims and statements about the future of artificial intelligence, less so on robotics and the future of work. While I generally agree that we will mass produce AI/robots that will eventually be more intelligent than humans, I disagree that this will happen in the next five years – unlike Musk.
Our biggest fear, as humans, is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which will give us Terminator-type machines, and that may be about 50 years into the future. What AI can (already) do is read legal texts (lawyers beware), and accounting; in some senses what we have now is a threat to white-collar jobs.
We have, in other words, mightily intelligent machines that can think millions of times faster than the human brain, but they are purpose-built “expert machines” that are designed to do specific things. We are a long way from Terminator-type machines (AGI), that can make a multiplicity of decisions on their own, without human interface.
This brings us to the ethics and regulatory frameworks required for political-economic functioning. There are, already, robots that have displaced manual labour. There may arise a necessity to tax robots. In this situation, it may become necessary to lay down ethical regulations for robotic function, and direct taxes that are collected towards a universal basic income – especially for those people who have been made redundant by robots.
As for Musk, as mentioned, sometimes he gets things right and sometimes he gets things wrong. He is, first and foremost a businessperson and an entrepreneur with a very courageous and vivid imagination, but he is not a scientist. Having made a lot of money, and being a successful businessperson, does not come with scientific genius in some cosmic manner.
Bezos joins Musk in the quest to colonise distant planets in our solar system. Bezos is a stupendously successful businessperson, but all his wealth does not make him a scientist. In an interview with a scientific magazine, Bezos said the human brain uses 1.5 times the amount of power the rest of the body does. Scientists (in particular Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University), explained that Bezos was simply wrong. The scientific evidence proved just how wrong he was.
I guess the conclusions from all of the above is that both Musk and Bezos are smart business people, but they’re not scientists. Their investment in space flight, Blue Origin (Bezos) and SpaceX (Musk), are the result of entrepreneurship, vision, imagination and, well, money.
There is no way that we will terraform Mars this century. There is no way that the robots, anthropomorphic robots driven by AGI, are coming, and we probably should start thinking about regulating and taxing robots (well, their owners), and use proceeds of this tax towards a universal basic income.
If there is any certainty in all of this, it is that manual work will be displaced in the very short term and white-collar jobs in the medium term. I guess when white-collar professionals become redundant AI will be taken more seriously. DM