The First Half of Elon's Economist Interview

This episode of the Economist Insider, featured an interview with the Editor-in-Chief of the Economist and Elon Musk. The latter part of the interview is wildly off-topic, but the first half is very much focused on AI and Robotics, and what it will do to economic modelling.

If you are an economic leftist like me, there is a lot of good stuff to hear about what he says. I don't think he understands himself, or if he does he is careful not to say the quiet part out loud too much or draw the obvious conclusions to his statements.

In essence, he is convinced that in the near term (10-20 years), all productive human labor will be replaced by automated systems, that an AI smarter than any (probably all) humans will be exercising effective control over all production, and money will be deflated so much as to be useless. He even says that his goal is something like a Star Trek utopia. It's almost like he forgot the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism meme.

He admits this will make his wealth, useless. He dodges questions about near-term instability, and really that is the big problem. Getting from here to there is very fraught. Unplanned job displacement, uneven distribution of grids and compute, potential smaller scale catastrophes, etc.

I get the sense he is worried that if he completely says the quiet part out loud, that it will tank his stock values, and acts as a brake on development. He explicitly discusses how it was easier in some ways to be private as opposed to public, because it didn't expose his projects to that risk. And he talks a lot about things that will in essence be anti-competitive in the development of super advanced AI systems. He speaks very highly of Chinese models and the Chinese government central planning.

If wasn't for the latter half of the episode (which is all focused on his politics), you would think he was a techno-futurist leftist.

Has anyone else listened to it? What are your thoughts?