Aiming for the stars
> Silicon Valley star and visionary Elon Musk plans to send tourists on a trip around the Moon and maybe beyond
still out on the wisdom of the Tesla acquisition of SolarCity.
“He can certainly sell his ideas,” Enderle said. “The fact [that] his businesses have held together so long indicates he is not a con man.”
Musk more than a year ago took part in creating a nonprofit research company devoted to developing artificial intelligence that will help people and not hurt them.
He found himself in the middle of a technology world controversy by holding firm that AI could turn on humanity and be its ruin instead of a salvation.
Technology giants including Google, Apple and Microsoft have been investing in making machines smarter, contending the goal is to improve lives.
“If we create some digital super-intelligence that exceeds us in every way by a lot, it is very important that it be benign,” Musk said at a conference in California.
He reasoned that even a benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI would put people so far beneath the machine they would be “like a house cat”.
“I don’t love the idea of being a house cat,” Musk said, envisioning the creation of neural lacing that magnifies people’s brain power by linking them directly to computing capabilities.
Some of his ideas have prompted questions about whether Musk is a visionary or mad scientist.
He has raised eyebrows with a theory that the world as it is known may be a computer simulation.
“I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk said while fielding a question on the topic at the conference.
He maintained that “the odds that we are in base reality is one in billions”.
Musk lives in Los Angeles and holds American, Canadian and South African citizenship.
He moved to Canada in his late teens and then to the US, earning bachelor’s degrees in physics and business from the University of Pennsylvania.
After graduating, Musk abandoned plans to pursue further studies at Stanford University and started Zip2, a company that made online publishing software for the media industry.
He banked his first millions before the age of 30 when he sold Zip2 to US computer maker Compaq in 1999 for more than US$300 million (RM1.2 billion at today’s rate).
Musk’s next company, X.com, eventually merged with PayPal, the online payments firm bought by internet auction giant eBay in 2002 for US$1.5 billion (RM6.4 billion at today’s rate).
Forbes estimates Musk’s current net worth at US$13.4 billion (RM57.6 billion). – AFP