25 statements by Elon Musk about the future, work and intelligence

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Elon Musk is a distinguished engineer, inventor, innovator and businessman. Founder and CEO of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and SolarCity. Lifehacker publishes Musk's interesting statements from the new book "Elon Musk: Never Give Up" "by the Olymp-Business publishing house.

About innovation and progress

1 -

If a person thinks that he would prefer to live in a different era, it is very likely that he just taught history poorly. Life sucked in the past. People knew very little and had many chances of dying in their youth from some terrible disease. Perhaps at your age you would have lost all your teeth. For a woman, this would be an absolutely terrible situation.

2 -

It is not worth arguing that it is okay to fail. It's a different matter - if you try something new, one idea, another, then many options may not work. This should be considered normal. And if you think that every idea you put out should be successful, you won't get any ideas.

3 -

If you go back a few hundred years, everything that we today consider common things will seem like magic - conversations at a distance, transmission of images, flights, prophecies based on the processing of huge amounts of information. A few hundred years ago, it would have looked like magic.

4 -

If you want to do something truly innovative, you need to focus on analyzing the fundamental principles and not think by analogy. Analogies refer to the past. The analysis of fundamental principles allows you to rely on the indisputably true things that underlie this or that industry. On their basis, you build your reasoning and come to one or another conclusion. And if you see that your conclusion does not coincide with the generally accepted, then you have a chance. You will not always be able to act this way, because too much mental energy is consumed, and most of your life you have to reason by analogy. But if you really want to be an innovator, then you need to start from basic principles to define the problem.

About work

5 -

Just work like hell. If others work forty hours a week, and you plow a hundred hours, then even doing the same, you can achieve results two and a half times faster. What will take others a year, you can do in four months. And if you're lazy, just don't waste time getting your business up and running.

6 -

It is very important that you like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] work will be pretty unhappy.

7 -

It is very important to actively ask for negative reviews and to listen to them with special attention. Usually people avoid them in order not to experience unpleasant emotions. But I think it's a very common mistake not to ask for negative reviews and ignore them.

About business

8 -

If you show people the right path, there will be no problem with motivation.

9 -

We must ask: "Why did you succeed here, but in other cases - no?"

10 -

If some things don't work, do not be fooled into convincing yourself otherwise, otherwise you will get stuck on the wrong decision.

About money

11 -

I feel kind of like my grandmother. She went through the Great Depression and very difficult times. Such things stay with you for a long time. I don't even know if you can get rid of them altogether. Yes, now I am happy, but there is also a pulling feeling that everything can end. Even in old age, when it was obvious that my grandmother would definitely not starve, she still had a special attitude towards food. With Tesla, I decided to bail out more money just in case a disaster struck.

Space exploration

12 -

If we reduce the cost of traveling in space, we can do great things.

13 -

On Mars, you can establish a civilization on self-sufficiency and grow something really big out of it.

14 -

I would like to go to space. Undoubtedly. It would be cool. I used to take risks myself, but now I have children and responsibilities, so I cannot be my own test pilot, this is a bad idea. But I would definitely like to fly when it makes sense.

15 -

I think we are the only one in the launch business to publish prices on the website. The rest arrange something like an oriental bazaar - they will charge you as much as they think you can pay. We rely on consistently low prices and stick to it very much.

About the automotive industry

16 -

[About electric cars and Tesla] Until this day, there was no normal electric car.

17 -

What are we trying to achieve with Tesla? So that you can ride for free, forever and exclusively on the sunshine.

18 -

Every Friday afternoon I meet with the design and engineering teams and we discuss all the nuances of the car. Every bumper, every curve, every little detail. What turns out, what doesn't, what needs to be checked in terms of technical or ergonomic requirements and standards. That is, to be honest, there are many restrictions. You can't make a car of absolutely any shape. It must meet all standards, emergency reliability requirements, and so on. To do this, you need to do a lot of improvements and pay attention to every millimeter. This is how a good product turns out.

19 -

We would very much like to break the stereotype and show that electric vehicles are not just over-praised electric milk tankers. It is the fastest accelerating four-door car in the world. That milk tanker!

20 -

I like the word "autopilot" more than "self-driving". Self-driving means that the car can do what you don't want it to do. Autopilot is good to have on airplanes and should be installed on cars as well.

About intelligence

21 -

It is very important to teach students how to solve certain problems and to talk about the problems themselves, and not just about the tools that are needed to solve these problems. For example, suppose you want to educate people about how an engine works and how it works. In a traditional teaching approach, you will most likely be told, "We will study all the screwdrivers and wrenches that will come in handy for engine repair." In my opinion, this is not quite the correct and very difficult approach to the problem. Much better would be: “Here's the engine. Let's take it apart. How can we take it apart? Easy, you need a screwdriver!"

22 -

You know, Wikipedia is actually pretty damn good. The information in it is 90 percent accurate. It's just not clear what 90 percent it is.

23 -

At the university, I tried to determine what the main problems are facing humanity and will most affect its future. Here are the three that I found most important: the Internet, the transition of the economy to renewable energy sources, and space exploration, and in particular the spread of life to other planets.

24 -

In Idiocracy, Mike Judge shows that smart people should at least maintain their numbers. If evolution goes in the opposite direction, do not expect good. It is necessary at least to maintain parity. If in each subsequent generation, smart people have fewer children, we will be in a bad situation. In Europe, Japan, Russia and China demographic decline is outlined. That is, it turns out that wealth, education and the secularization of society lead to a decrease in the birth rate, there is a clear correlation. I do not want to say that only smart ones should have children. I'm just saying that the smart ones should have children too. At the very least, you need to replace yourself. However, according to my observations, many really smart women either do not have children or give birth to one. And you think: "Oh, our business is bad."

25 -

The successful creation of artificial intelligence will be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it may be the last one if we don't learn to avoid risks.