Artificial intelligence is more likely to save humanity than destroy it, Jeff Bezos recently said. The billionaire also said he would like to see the human population grow to one trillion, with most of them living on giant cylindrical space stations.
In one interview with podcaster Lex Fridmanthe Amazon
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The founder and former CEO rejected the idea that humans should colonize other planets, saying he believes that creating space colonies is the only way to achieve such population growth.
“I would love to see a trillion people living in the solar system. If we had a trillion people, we would have, at any given moment, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” he said. “The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. Planetary surfaces are very small.”
Bezos, who has a net worth of $172 billion, said that if people lived in O’Neill space colonies near Earth, built using raw materials from the moon and objects in the asteroid belt, they could visit today’s planet us for vacation.
The concept of O’Neill colonies was developed by science fiction writer Gerard K. O’Neill as a solution to the problem of sustainable environments in space. The space stations, designed as two cylinders rotating around an axis, will provide an artificial Earth-like environment and use rotation to simulate gravity.
Bezos’ vision contrasts with that proposed by Tesla
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CEO Elon Musk, who is currently the richest person in the world. Musk has said he hopes humans will become a “multiplanetary species” and aims to colonize Mars through his company SpaceX.
In Bezos’ vision, space colonies would help support a population 125 times larger than Earth’s current population.
He said people would be free to choose whether or not to live in space, but those who chose the O’Neill colonies “could use far more energy and far more material resources in space than they could use on earth .”
Bezos said people living in space would still have the opportunity to travel to Earth for vacation, the same way you could go to Yellowstone National Park.
He acknowledged he “won’t live long enough to see the fruits” of his efforts to colonize space, saying the personal rewards of his work with space company Blue Origin “come from building a road to space.”
In the interview, Bezos also presented an optimistic vision for the future of artificial intelligence, despite warning that it has the potential to be “incredibly disruptive.”
Artificial intelligence has the potential to save humans from extinction, and people who are “overly concerned” about the risks of the technology “may be missing part of the equation,” he argued.
“Even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that these powerful tools are far more likely to help and save us than to harm and destroy us,” Bezos said.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to help humanity develop “better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies” that could ensure its long-term survival, he said.
Musk, by contrast, has repeatedly raised concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence and has said it poses a danger to humanity.
Despite their differences, Bezos said he believes Musk “must be a very capable leader” given his successes with SpaceX and Tesla.
“I don’t really know Elon very well. I know his public persona, but I also know that you can’t know anyone by his public persona. It’s impossible. You may think you do, but I guarantee you you don’t,” Bezos said.
Bezos also warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons and climate change. “We have 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 mindset.”
Between the ages of 4 and 16, Bezos spent summers at the ranch in order, he said, to give his mother — who was 17 when Bezos was born — a break. He worked various jobs while taking daily breaks with his grandfather to watch the soap opera ‘Days of Our Lives’.
Bezos said the ingenuity he developed at 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.
“That’s an inventor’s greatest dream, is that his inventions are so successful that one day they are taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore,” Bezos said.
“No one thinks of customer reviews as an invention. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they’re so common. Same thing with one click purchases and so on. But that’s a compliment,” he said. “You invent something that is used so much, so beneficially, that it is taken for granted.”
The businessman also said that while 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 a “difficult partial differential equation problem”—one that Bezos and a fellow student had been working on for three hours without making any progress—in seconds.