The Terminator from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Elon Musk has claimed that AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.” Paradoxically, Musk is also working to create artificial intelligence. Why? Jill Lepore tours through a century of imagined robot rebellions, and argues that these stories are never only about robots. So what’s Elon Musk really afraid of when he wrings his hands over AI? In this final episode, Lepore argues that while Musk may be a visionary, “every piece of Muskism has origins in a future foretold in science fiction, long, long ago, as a cautionary tale.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:07.0 | I think it's actually important for us to worry about a Terminator future in order to avoid a Terminator future. |
| 0:15.0 | Elon Musk is very worried, genuinely worried about artificial intelligence, |
| 0:22.3 | a future where robots become smarter than humans and decide to destroy us. |
| 0:28.0 | They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. |
| 0:32.2 | Decided our fate in a microsecond, extermination. |
| 0:36.1 | But Elon Musk is also building robots. |
| 0:39.1 | We've made a massive amount of progress with Optimus in a short period of time, |
| 0:42.8 | from someone pretending to be a robot dancing in a suit, |
| 0:45.6 | to a pretty hodgepodgey robot, to a robot that is actually doing useful tasks in the factory today. |
| 0:52.6 | Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, named after one of the Transformers, is advancing fast. |
| 0:59.0 | Tesla could be manufacturing a million of them a year by 2030. |
| 1:03.3 | The degree of autonomy will be radically better. |
| 1:06.1 | You'll just literally be able to talk to it and say, please do this task. |
| 1:09.7 | And Musk is also trying to build an artificial general intelligence, an AGI, at his company, |
| 1:16.4 | XAI. |
| 1:17.8 | I guess the overarching goal of XAI is to build a good AGI with the overarching purpose |
| 1:24.3 | of just trying to understand the universe. |
| 1:26.4 | I think the safest way to build an AI is actually make one that is maximally curious |
| 1:30.3 | and truth-seeking. |
| 1:33.3 | For all his excitement about AI, Musk has been worried about AI for a long time, |
| 1:38.3 | worried about that Terminator future, the robot rebellion. |
... |
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