Interviewer: So, we want to spend the time today talking about your view of the future and what people should work on. To start off, could you tell us, you famously said, when you were younger, there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on. If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working on be?
Elon: Well, first of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that's a good thing. Like, it doesn't have to change the world. If you make something that has high value to people... And frankly, even if it's something, if it's like just a little game or some improvement in photo sharing or something, if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, I think that's fine. Stuff doesn't need to change the world just to be good. But in terms of things that I think are most like to affect the future of humanity, I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near-term that's likely to affect humanity.
And then, I think, having a high-bandwidth interface to the brain. We're currently bandwidth-limited. We have a digital tertiary self in the form of out email capabilities, our computers, phones, applications. We're practically superhuman. But we're extremely bandwidth-constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself. And helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be, I think, very important in the future as well. Yeah.
Interviewer: How should someone figure out how they can be most useful?
Elon: Well, I think you make some estimates of, whatever this thing is that you're trying to create, what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect. So that's why I think having something that makes a big difference but affects sort of small to moderate number of people is great, as is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people..
Interviewer: When you're trying to estimate probability of success, so this thing will be really useful, good area under the curve...I guess to use the example of SpaceX, when you made the go-decision that you were actually going to do that, this was kind of a very crazy thing at the time.
Elon: Very crazy. For sure. They were not shy of saying that. But I agreed with them that it was quite crazy. Crazy...if the objective was to achieve the best risk adjusted return, starting off a company is insane. But that was not my objective. I'd soon come to a conclusion that if something didn't happen to improve rocket technology, we'd be stuck on earth forever. And the big aerospace companies had just had no interest in radical innovation. All they wanted to do was try to make their old technology slightly better every year. And in fact, sometimes it would actually get worse. Particularly in rockets, it was pretty bad. In '69 we were able to go to the moon with the Saturn 5. And then the space shuttle could only take people to low-earth orbit. And then the space shuttle retired. And that trend basically trends to zero. People sometimes think technology just automatically gets better every year but actually it doesn't. It only gets better if smart people work like crazy to make it better. That's how any technology actually gets better. By itself, technology, if people don't work at it, actually will decline. Look at the history of civilizations, many civilizations. Look at, say, ancient Egypt, where they were able to build these incredible pyramids and then they basically forgot how to build pyramids. And even hieroglyphics. They forgot how to read hieroglyphics. Or if you look at Rome and how they were able to build these incredible roadways and aqueducts and indoor plumbing, they forgot how to do all of those things. There are many such examples in history. So I think we should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.