According to Jeff Bezos, artificial intelligence is more likely to save humanity than to harm it. The billionaire also stated that he would like to see the human population rise to one trillion people, with the majority of them living in massive cylindrical space stations. The Amazon AMZN, +1.73% founder and former CEO opposed the idea of humanity colonizing other planets in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, arguing that creating space colonies is the only way to achieve such population increase. “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” he said. “The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small.”
The space stations, which are constructed as two rotating cylinders around an axis, would provide an artificial Earth-like environment
Bezos, who has a net worth of $172 billion, stated that if people lived on O’Neill space colonies near Earth, constructed with raw materials from the moon and asteroid belt, they would be able to visit our current planet on vacation. Gerard K. O’Neill proposed the notion of O’Neill colonies as a solution to the problem of living habitats in space. The space stations, which are constructed as two rotating cylinders around an axis, would provide an artificial Earth-like environment and use rotation to replicate gravity.
Bezos’s vision is in opposition to that put forward by Tesla TSLA, +0.98% CEO Elon Musk, who is currently the richest person in the world. Musk has said that he hopes that humans will become a “multi-planetary species” and that he aims to colonize Mars via his company SpaceX. In Bezos’s vision, space colonies would help support a population that is 125 times the size of the Earth’s current population. He said people would be free to choose whether or not to live in space, but those who opted for the O’Neill colonies would “’ be able to use much more energy and much more material resources in space than they would be able to use on Earth.”
Bezos said people living in space would still have the opportunity to travel to Earth on vacation
Bezos said people living in space would still have the opportunity to travel to Earth on vacation, in the “same way that you might go to Yellowstone National Park.” He acknowledged that he “won’t live long enough to see the fruits” of his efforts to colonize space, saying that the personal rewards of his work with space company Blue Origin “come from building a road to space.” Bezos also presented an optimistic image of the future of artificial intelligence in the interview, warning that it has the potential to be “incredibly destructive.” AI can save humanity from extinction, and people who are “overly concerned” about the technology’s risks “may be missing part of the equation,” he claims. “Even in the face of all this uncertainty, my view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us, even, than they are to, on balance, hurt us and destroy us,” he said.
According to him, AI can assist humanity in developing “better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies,” which might secure its long-term survival. Musk, on the other hand, has often expressed alarm about the perils of AI, claiming that it poses harm to humanity. Despite their disagreements, Bezos believes Musk “must be a very capable leader” given his triumphs with SpaceX and Tesla. “I don’t know Elon all that well. I’m aware of his public persona, but I’m also aware that you can’t judge someone by their public persona. It’s not possible. “You may believe you do, but I assure you that you do not,” Bezos stated.
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 talked about his childhood, saying 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 on the ranch in order, he said, to give his mother — who was 17 years old when Bezos was born — a break. He did a variety of chores while taking daily breaks with his grandfather to watch the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”
Bezos said the resourcefulness he developed on the ranch helped him in his path to becoming an inventor, adding that he hopes what he creates will be taken for granted in the future. “That’s an inventor’s greatest dream, is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore,” Bezos said. “Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they’re so commonplace. Same thing with one-click shopping and so on. But that’s a compliment,” he said. “You invent something that’s so used, so beneficially used by so many people, that they take it for granted.”
The entrepreneur also stated that an experience with a fellow student from Sri Lanka at Princeton University convinced him not to pursue a career as a theoretical physicist. According to Bezos, “your brain has to be wired in a certain way.” He recalled how the student solved a “difficult partial differential equations problem” — one that Bezos and another student had been working on for three hours with no progress — in seconds.