In life, we've seen, within this part of the world, great people, like Al-Khawarizmi who invented algorithms. You are re-inventing a certain industry, from the rocket industry with SpaceX to the car industry with Tesla. Life as we know it. But then the part that I find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure, and it makes people excited about the future.
You know, life can't just be about solving problems. There's got to be things that people find inspiring, and make life worth living. I mean, you look at our life, and I heard you before speaking. - Yeah, me too, exactly.
Yeah, we both played the same game. Everything is possible in life. I mean there's... Yeah, particularly like things tend to be accelerating to something. I mean, if we look at our life, it seems in the past 100 years life has been accelerating quite fast.
- Yeah. Well, I think this is one of those things that are quite difficult to predict. When you think of, say, the first controlled power flight was in 1903 with the Wright Brothers. On the other side of the world, and if you have a Wi-Fi connection, it's free.
It would be incredibly difficult to predict these things in the past. So, I think the one thing that we can be quite certain of is that any predictions we make today for what the future will be like in 50 years will be wrong that's for sure. I think directionally, I can tell you what I hope the future has, as opposed to maybe what it will be. My guess is in probably 10 years, it will be very unusual for cars to be built that are not fully autonomous.
Yeah. I think almost all cars built will be able full autonomy in about 10 years. As it is, the Tesla cars that are made today, have the sensor system necessary for full autonomy. So, autonomy will be widespread.
I think one of the most troubling questions s artificial intelligence. And I don't mean narrow AI, like, vehicle autonomy I would put in the narrow AI class. I mean, there are two views, one view is that artificial intelligence will help humanity, and there's another school of thought that artificial intelligence is a threat to humanity. Well, digital superintelligence will be like an alien.
I mean, if you look at this part of the world. They believe that human beings are not from earth, they came from somewhere else.
So, in a way, human beings are aliens to this land. If there are super-intelligent aliens out there, they're probably already observing us. Maybe 20 million years max. This is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah, exactly, let's keep that a secret. I think this is going to sound a little... I mean, it seems so much trivial or, but... I've been saying this for many years now but I think that the solution to urban congestion is a network tunnel el under more under we're rare team more underfunded don't 2-D plan of tunnels, I mean tunnels that go many levels deep. So, you can have a network of tunnels that's 20, 30, 40, 50 levels, as many levels as you want. And so, given that, you can overcome the congestion situation in any city in the world.
So, if tunnel technology can be improved to the point where you can build tunnels fast, cheap, and safe, then that would completely get rid of any traffic situations in the cities. And so, that's why I think it's an important technology. I think things are going well in China. So, have figured out charging and service infrastructure and various other things, but now it's actually going well, and...so the timing seems to be good to make a significant debut in this region, starting in Dubai.
In your opinion, what is the new disturbing thing that will come next in technology? What's next in technology? - What's next in technology? - That will disturb the way we live, the way we think, the way we do business. Well, the nearest to impact from a technological standpoint is autonomous cars, like fully self-driving cars. Because there are... Quick means different things to different people. There are about two billion vehicles in the world.
Approaching 2.5 billion cars and trucks in the world. The total new vehicle production capacity is about a hundred million. Which makes sense, because the life of a car or truck before it's finally scraped is about 20-25years. So, the point at which we see full autonomy appear will not be the point at which there is massive societal upheaval because it will take a long time to make enough autonomous vehicles to disrupt employment.
Still, 20 years is a short period think something like 12 to 15 per cent of the world force is unemployed. Well, I think the first bit of advice is to pay close attention to... the development of artificial intelligence. I think this is, we need to just be very careful in... how we adopt artificial intelligence, and to make sure that researchers don't get carried away, because sometimes what happens is that scientists can get so engrossed in their work, they don't necessarily realize the ramifications of what they're doing. So, I think it's important for public safety that we... you know, governments keep a close eye on artificial intelligence and make sure that it does not represent a danger to the public.
The transition to electric vehicles. So, thinking about that in context...the electricity demand increases dramatically, currently, in terms of total energy usage in the world, it's about 1/3, about 1/3 transport, about 1/3 heating. - Universal basic income. These are simply things that I think probably will happen. The... So... I think the biggest... I think we'll just end up doing universal basic income. You think of big digital tools that you have, your phone and your computer, the applications that you have.
Like the fact that as I mentioned earlier you can ask a question and instantly get an answer from Google or other things. And, and so you already have a digital touches layer. I say touches because you can think of the limbic system, kind of the animal brain or the primal brain and then the cortex, kind of the thinking, planning part of the brain, and then your digital self as a third layer. So, you already have that, and I think if somebody dies, their digital ghost is still around.
So, over time I think we'll probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. And it's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and you're digital...the digital extension of yourself. You decided that you wanted to land your rocket back, - you failed, 7 times, 8 times? - Yeah, something like that. Sometimes they are pushing the human limit.
Well, I... I think about what technology solution is necessary to achieve that particular goal and then try to make as much progress in that direction as possible. So, in the case of space flight, the critical breakthrough that's necessary for space flight is the rapid incomplete reusability of rockets. Because you can buy like, say, 747 might be... 250 million dollars, 300 million dollars, something like that. Our rocket costs... 60 million dollars, roughly.
So, a capital cost if it can be used once in 60 million Dollars. But if the capital it is, I fit can be used house and times, thousand Dollars. So, then if you can carry a lot of people for a flight, you can get the cost of space flight to be something not far from the cost of air flight. The difficulty of making a rocket reusable is much greater than the difficulty of making an aircraft reusable.
That's why a fully reusable rocket has been developed that far. But if you use the most advanced materials, the most advanced design techniques, and you get everything just right, then I'm confident that you can do a fully reusable rocket. So, what was your biggest challenge in life? The biggest challenge in life? - No challenge? - Well, no, there's a lot of them. One of the biggest challenges I think is making sure you have a corrective feedback loop, and then maintaining that corrective feedback loop over time, even when people want to tell you exactly what you want to hear.
- That's very difficult. Like, not just the equations, the equations are certainly very helpful, but the way of thinking in physics, it's the best framework for understand encounter-intuitive things And, you know, always take the position that you are to some degree wrong, and your goal is to be less wrong over time. One of the biggest mistakes people generally make and I'm guilty of it too is wishful thinking. This is a very difficult trap to avoid.
They don't want to tell you the bad things.
