Elon Musk's Cultural Dissonance Regarding Religion and AI - His Interview with the Economist

The Economist's Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes interviewed the world's richest man. So much could be said about it, but I'll limit myself to one observation about its beginning and its end.

At the start, Elon Musk calmly acknowledges that AI could mean an apocalyptic future for mankind — but says he's fairly confident the more probable outcome is that AI and robotics deliver unprecedented, widespread prosperity. Risk acknowledged, reward embraced.

At the end, he's defending his prediction that Britain — a place he admits he hasn't visited in years — is headed for civil war because it lets in people from other cultures, primarily Muslims, whose beliefs will create a rupture. Risk acknowledged, reward forgotten.

Notice the accounting. For his own disruptive creation, Musk holds danger and promise in the same hand and bets on promise. For the disruption of unfamiliar beliefs, he can no longer find the promise at all.

Which is odd, because the promise is the modern world's founding wager. The First Amendment may be the most brilliant social invention in history. (Yes, that's the US, not Britain — but Musk claims it as his creed; free speech absolutism was his stated reason for buying Twitter.) Put simply, it commits a nation to welcoming ideas that others find offensive — on the bet that the collision of beliefs produces more progress than protection from them ever could.

Musk is clear-eyed that welcoming AI means welcoming an intelligence that may reject us, oppose us, or synthesize with our own to create unprecedented progress. He seems unable to see that welcoming foreign religions, philosophies, and perspectives is the same wager — one that may applaud us, boo us, or synthesize with our own beliefs to create unprecedented progress. It's a wager the West has been winning for centuries.

In this sense, AI isn't a break from history. It's the newest entrant in a long series of disruptive arrivals — democracy, thousands of religions including atheism, philosophies, lifestyles, ideas — that collided to create the modern world.

The modern world is nothing if not a belief in the benefit of welcoming — of making ourselves vulnerable to — what is foreign, new, and possibly disruptive. The entanglement of risk and reward is something intrinsic to progress. 

https://www.economist.com/insider/the-insider/an-interview-with-elon-musk