Question: What are your opinions on Elon Musk and his work. e.g Tesla and Spacex

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 10 Nov 2017:

Thank you for asking this question, many other people asked it to me before but now is the time to give a thorough and good answer. I haven’t interacted much with Elon Musk myself directly, I never attended (or watched) one of his talks or worked with any of his companies’ technical products, I know him based on what he said and a few Wikipedia articles (which I assume to be correct) and I base my answer on that. I think Mr. Mask is an excellent businessman and entrepreneur and it seems that he built his fortune mostly by himself and being very good at that. This has merit. At the same time, it sounds to me that Mr. Mask is a terrible engineer (which is fine, you don’t need to be an engineer to run a business but it can help). Saying that robot intelligence could explode beyond boundaries tells me that he is unaware of the fact that memory in computers is a finite and precisely countable quantity because they are digital systems (i.e. you can store exactly X many images on a disk) and robots (and AI systems) run on computers and are digital systems too. A human brain is a biological “system” which can store a lot of concepts and we are not even sure how is storing them in its own “memory” and how big its memory is. Thinking that you can replicate such a complexity into a limited-space object like a hard disk (or a computer) with fundamental changes and even dreaming of it being possible in the short time it implies a very poor knowledge of engineering. Yet some of his companies are very good ideas: PayPal is very useful, Tesla looks from outside a sound product and I would give merit to SpaceX as well, although it sounds overambitious to get people to space at the moment, it is worth trying I think (although I don’t know much on space exploration myself). I think the worst thing he said, and I am aware of, is his own point of view on AI (and possibly robotics as well). Claiming extinction of human race with no sound justification or explanation other that “AI is satan” and similar statements has the same validity of saying “Redhead girls are possessed by the devil” as in Jayne Eyre or in medieval times: you can’t prove it with facts, persuading other people into it causes discrimination and fears, and still a single “angelic” redhead (or non-satanic AI) “disproves” the theory as a whole (which was never proved in the first place). Normally the job of philosophers asking those sort of fundamental questions and seeking plausible answers if there is a lack of evidence. Everyone can became a philosopher (although studying philosophy really helps a lot) but his explanations still sound weak to me. The only practical gain I see in telling facts not grounded to evidence is that people get scared since who is speaking is the “influential expert in AI”, and nothing more than that. For some reason the opinion of the scientists and engineers is left unheard despite the fact that they actually developing and inventing AI systems and know how they work. The worst thing of all is that, despite all his efforts in forecasting the future and telling us how AI will destroy humanity before it came to practical existence, he is funding and working with AI the most! I don’t believe in his main case of giving a dangerous weapon (which in this case is an AI) to everyone will keep us safe, because anti-nuclear proliferation agreements are trying to do exactly the opposite for a reason: if everyone would have the nuclear bomb, the end of the human race would be round the corner. I can’t understand what is the grand plan in working so much on something which at the same time you are trying to politically destroy by terrorizing people, but I am sure a reason must be there. I think Elon Musk should be treated and praised for what he really is: an excellent entrepreneur with great business ideas, he is not an engineer and he is definitively not a philosopher. More and more often Silicon Valley is giving us very good businessmen which claim to be “experts” based on their commercial success. Never forget that you became expert only studying and working with something and not by managing the process that create that something: that makes you an expert in the process. If I would be selling robotic artists and I would be asked a question on whether the artistic talent of the impressionist could have been spotted by the French academia of painters already when they performed their very first art exhibition I will be able to produce an answer. That answer won’t be meaningful, because I am not an artist myself, but one of my employees might give you a meaningful answer since only an artist can teach my robot how to paint artistically, otherwise it won’t be a successful commercial product. You should have asked the question directly to my employee in the first place not to me.
SHORT VERSION FOR LAZY READERS: I think Mr. Musk is a good businessman and some of his products are very good ideas, but he looks to me a terrible engineer and many things he says look to me completely ungrounded to reality and should be questioned more. A single person with complete opinions and solutions to everything does not exists (see long answer to find out why). I have nothing against him personally, of course