An earlier version of this story incorrectly named Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon. The story has been corrected.
Jeff Bezos has said AI will save humanity rather than make it extinct, claiming he would like to see the human population grow to a trillion and live in huge cylindrical space stations far from Earth.
In an interview with Amazon AMZN podcaster Lex Fridman,
founder and former CEO rejected the idea that humans should colonize other planets, saying instead that he believes building out giant O’Neill space colonies is the only way to achieve such population growth.
“I would like to see a trillion people living in the solar system. If we had a trillion people, we would have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins at any given time,” he said. “The only way to achieve that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are simply far too small.”
Bezos, who is currently worth $172 billion, said that building a series of O’Neill space colonies near Earth, using materials from the moon and several other objects in the asteroid belt, would be beneficial to allow humans to reach our current planet to visit on holiday.
The concept of O’Neill colonies was created by science fiction writer Gerard K. O’Neill as a solution to creating livable environments in space. The space stations, which consist of two cylinders rotating around an axis, provide an artificial, Earth-like environment on the inside and use rotation to create artificial gravity.
Bezos’ vision is at odds with that of Tesla TSLA,
CEO Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world. Through his company SpaceX, Musk has said he currently wants to colonize Mars and hopes humans will become a “multiplanetary species.”
In Bezos’ vision, cylindrical O’Neill space colonies would help support a population 125 times the current population of Earth.
He said that people would be free to choose whether to live in space, but that those who chose the O’Neill colonies would be able to “use far more energy and far more material resources in space than they could on Earth.” to use.” Soil.”
Bezos also said that those living in space still have the opportunity to travel to Earth on vacation, “the same way you would go to Yellowstone National Park.”
However, the American billionaire acknowledged that he “won’t live long enough to see the fruits” of his own efforts to colonize space, while arguing that the rewards of his work with space company Blue Origin “come from building a path into space. .”
In the interview, Bezos also offered an optimistic view of the future of artificial intelligence, despite warning that it has the potential to be “incredibly destructive.”
He argued that AI has the potential to save humans from extinction, while arguing that people who are “overly concerned” about the dangers of the technology “may be missing part of the equation.”
“Even with all this uncertainty, I believe that these powerful tools are far more likely to help and save us than they are, on balance, to hurt and destroy us,” Bezos said.
He explained that AI has the potential to help humanity “develop better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies” that could ensure its long-term survival.
Musk, on the other hand, has repeatedly expressed concern about the dangers of AI, saying it poses a “risk” to humanity.
Despite the disagreements, however, Bezos said he thinks Musk “must be a very capable leader” because of the successes he has had with SpaceX and Tesla.
‘I don’t know Elon very well. I know his public persona, but I also know that you can’t know someone by their public persona. It’s impossible. You may think so, but I guarantee you won’t,” Bezos said.
Bezos added that people need to start thinking more long-term as he warned about the dangers of nuclear weapons and climate change. “We have to start training ourselves to think longer term,” he said.
He also talked about his own childhood, saying that working on his grandfather’s ranch in Texas instilled in him a “problem-solving mentality” as a child.
He explained that between the ages of 4 and 16, he spent summers at the ranch to give his mother, who had Bezos at age 17, a break. During this time, he worked various jobs while taking daily breaks with his grandfather to watch the soap opera Days of Our Lives.
Bezos said the ingenuity he developed on the ranch helped him on his path to becoming an “inventor.” He said he now hopes that the inventions he makes will be taken for granted in the future.
“That is an inventor’s greatest dream: that his inventions are so successful that one day they will be taken for granted. No one thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore,” Bezos said.
“No one considers customer reviews an invention. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they’re so common. The same goes for one-click shopping and so on, but that’s a compliment. You come up with something that is so used and so useful by so many people that they take it for granted.”
The entrepreneur also said that his encounters at Princeton University with a fellow student from Sri Lanka convinced him not to be a theoretical physicist because they made him realize that “your brain must be wired a certain way.”
He explained that the student, named Yosanta, was able to solve in seconds a “difficult partial differential equation problem” that Bezos and a fellow student had previously worked on for three hours without making any progress.