Artificial intelligence will save humanity rather than destroy it, Jeff Bezos recently said. The billionaire also said he would like to see humanity grow to a trillion, with most people living in giant cylindrical space stations.
In an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, the founder and former CEO of Amazon AMZN rejected the idea that humans should colonize other planets, saying he believes building 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 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins at any given time,” he said. “The only way to realize this vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are simply far too small.”
Bezos, who has a net worth of $172 billion, said if people lived in near-Earth O'Neill space colonies built from raw materials from the moon and objects from the asteroid belt, they could visit our current planet on vacation.
The concept of O'Neill colonies was developed by science fiction author Gerard K. O'Neill as a solution to the problem of livable environments in space. Designed as two cylinders rotating around an axis, the space stations would provide an artificial Earth-like environment and simulate gravity through rotation.
Bezos' vision contrasts with that of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla TSLA, who is currently the richest person in the world. Musk said he hopes humans will become a “multiplanetary species” and that he wants to colonize Mars with his company SpaceX.
In Bezos' vision, space colonies would help support a population 125 times larger than Earth's current population.
He said people were free to choose whether or not to live in space, but those who chose the O'Neill colonies would be able to “use in space much more energy and much more material resources than they use.” could.” on earth.”
Bezos said people living in space still have the opportunity to travel to Earth on vacation, “just like you might go to Yellowstone National Park.”
He acknowledged that he “will not live long enough to see the fruits” of his efforts to colonize space and said that the personal reward of his work with the space company Blue Origin “will be in building a road to space.” lies.
In the interview, Bezos also expressed an optimistic vision for the future of artificial intelligence, although he warned that it has the potential to be “incredibly destructive.”
AI has the potential to save humans from extinction, and people who are “overly concerned” about the dangers of the technology “may be missing part of the equation,” he argued.
“Even in the face of all this uncertainty, I believe that these powerful tools are much more likely to help and even save us than to ultimately hurt and destroy us,” Bezos said.
AI has the potential to help humanity develop “better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies,” which could ensure its long-term survival, he said.
In contrast, Musk has repeatedly raised concerns about the dangers of AI, saying it poses a risk to humanity.
Despite their differences, Bezos said that given his successes with SpaceX and Tesla, he believes Musk “has to be a very capable leader.”
“I don’t know Elon really well. I know his public persona, but I also know that you can't tell someone by their public persona. It is impossible. “You may think you do, but I guarantee you that’s not the case,” Bezos said.
Bezos also warned about the dangers of nuclear weapons and climate change. “We need to start training ourselves to think longer term,” he said.
He spoke about his childhood and said that working on his grandfather's ranch in Texas helped him develop a “problem-solving mentality.”
Between the ages of 4 and 16, Bezos spent summers at the ranch to give his mother – who was 17 when Bezos was born – a break. He completed various tasks 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, adding that he hopes what he creates will be taken for granted in the future.
“An inventor's greatest dream is that his inventions will be so successful that one day they will be taken for granted. Nobody thinks Amazon is an invention anymore,” said Bezos.
“Nobody thinks customer reviews are an invention. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they've become commonplace. The same goes for one-click shopping and so on. But that’s a compliment,” he said. “You invent something that is so used and so beneficial by so many people that they take it for granted.”
The entrepreneur also said that while studying at Princeton University, an encounter with a fellow student from Sri Lanka convinced him not to pursue a career as a theoretical physicist. Bezos realized, he said, that “your brain has to be wired a certain way.”
He recalled how the student was able to solve in seconds a “difficult partial differential equation problem” – one that Bezos and a fellow student had worked on for three hours without making any progress.