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So, you think within 20 years… – Yeah… – we’ll have aliens on Earth? Well, digital super intelligence will be like an alien. – It will be like an alien. – Yeah. But my question is, do you think there is other intelligent life outside the Earth? It seems probable. I think this is one of the great questions in physics and philosophy, is, where are the aliens? Maybe they are among us, I don’t know. Some people think I’m an alien. Not true. – Not true. But maybe we are aliens. Maybe we aliens. I mean, if you look at this part of the world. Yeah. They believe that human beings are not from Earth, they came from somewhere else. Eve and Adam came from somewhere else to Earth. So, in a way, human beings are aliens to this land. Do you think we’ll make contact with aliens within the next 50 years? Well, that’s a really tough one to say. If there are super intelligent aliens out there, they’re probably already observing us. That would seem quite likely and we’re not smart enough to realize it. But I can do some back of the envelope calculations and… any advanced alien civilization that is at all interested in populating the galaxy, even without exceeding the speed of light, even if you’re only moving at, say, 10 or 20 per cent of the speed of light, you could populate the entire galaxy in let’s say 10 million years. Maybe 20 million years max. This is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Once you said you wanted to die on Mars. Why? To be clear, I don’t want to die on Mars. It’s like, if… we’re all going to die someday, and if you’re going to pick some place to die, then why not Mars? You know, if you’re born on Earth, why not die on Mars? Seems like may be quite exciting. But, I think given the choice between dying on Earth and dying on Mars, I’d say, yeah, sure, I’ll die on Mars. But it’s not some kind of Mars death wish. And if I do die on Mars, I just don’t want to go on impact. Let’s come back to Earth, actually. You tweeted that you are building a tunnel under Washington D.C. Why? What is it? – It’s a secret plot. – Okay. – Just between us. – Nobody helps you? Yeah, exactly, let’s keep that a secret. I think this is going to sound a little… I mean, it seems like so much trivial or silly, but… I’ve been saying this for many years now, but I think that the solution to urban congestion is a network of tunnels under cities. And when I say that I don’t mean a 2-D plan of tunnels, I mean tunnels that go many levels deep. So, you can always go deeper than you can go up. Like, the deepest mines are deeper than the tallest buildings. So, you can have a network of tunnels that is 20, 30, 40, 50 levels, as many levels as you want, really. And so, given that, you can overcome the congestion situation in any city in the world. The challenge is how do you build tunnels quickly and at low cost and with high safety? 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. And, Washington D.C., L.A and most of the major American cities, most major cities in the world suffer from severe traffic issues. And it’s mostly because you’ve got these buildings which are, these tall buildings that are 3-D and you have a road network that is one level. And then, people generally want to go in and out of these buildings at the exact same time. So, then, you get the traffic jam. Let’s come back to… your year in Dubai. The first time I met you it was the 4th of June 2015, at your office in SpaceX. And, I asked you would you have a presence in UAE? And your answer was: I’m busy with China. Maybe not in the near future, and almost a year and a half later, we are here, seems time goes quite fast. Why now? I think actually things are going really well in China. So, we have some initial challenges figuring out charging and service infrastructure and various other things, but now it’s actually going really well, and… so the timing seems to be good to really 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 most near to impact from a technological standpoint is autonomous cars, like fully self-driving cars. I’d say that’s going to happen much faster than people realize. so, and that’s… it’s going to be a great convenience to be in an autonomous car, but there are many people whose job is to drive. So, if… in fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people is driving in various forms. And so, then we need to figure out new rules for what do these people do. But it will all be very disruptive and very quick. I should characterize what I mean by quick. Because there are… Quick means different things to different people. There are about two billion vehicles in the world. Approaching in fact 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 20-25 years. So, 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. So, that disruption I’m talking about will take place over about 20 years. Still, 20 years is a short period of time to have I think something like 12 to 15 per cent of the world force be unemployed. Thank you. This is the largest global government summit we have over 139 governments here. If you want to advise government officials to be ready for the future, what three pieces of advice can you give them? Well, I think the first bit of advice is to really play close attention to… the development of artificial intelligence. I think this is, we need to be 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. Let’s see, secondly, I would say we do need to think about transport in general. And, there’s the movement towards electric vehicles, sustainable transport, I think that’s going to be good for many reasons, but again, not something that happens immediately, that’s going to happen slower than the self-driving vehicles. Because that’s probably something that happens over 30 or 40 years. The transition to electric vehicles. So, thinking about that in context… the demand for electricity will increase dramatically. So, currently, in terms of total energy usage in the world, it’s about 1/3, about 1/3 transport, about 1/3 heating. So, over time that will transition to almost all… not all, but predominantly electricity, which means that the demand for electricity will probably triple. So, it’s going to be very important to think about, how do you make so much more electricity? And… It seems they’ll have an easy job, that’s it, there are no more challenges for them. No, well, I think maybe… these things do play into each other a little bit, but what to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. And I think ultimately will have to have some kind of universal basic income I don’t think we’re going to have a choice. – Universal basic income. – Universal basic income. I think it’s going to be necessary. So, it means that unemployed people will be paid across the globe. – Yeah. – Because there are no jobs. Machines, robots are taking over. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. That’s simply… And I want to be clear, these are not things that I wish would happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen. And so, if my assessment is correct and they probably will happen, then we need to say what are we going to do about it. And I think some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary. Now, the output of goods and services will be extremely high. So, with automation, there will come abundance. There will be… almost everything will get very cheap. The… So… I think the biggest… I think we’ll just end up doing a universal basic income. It’s going to be necessary. The harder challenge, much harder challenge, is how do people then have meaning? Like a lot of people, they derive their meaning from their employment, so, if you don’t have… if you’re not needed, if there’s not a need for your labor, how do you… what’s the meaning? Do you have meaning? Do you feel useless? That’s a much harder problem to deal with. And then how do we ensure that the future is going to be the future that we want? That we so like.