At the G20 Innovation Ministerial meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on Tuesday, Elon Musk gave an upbeat view on how today’s emerging technologies will change the world.
“I think AI will probably increase the global economy by 20 to 30%,” said Musk, “that’s my rough estimate — meaning in the order of 20 to 30 trillion dollars per year.”
“AI will be able to do anything digital, anything that does not require shaping of atoms by hand, probably by the end of next year,” added Musk, “so, as I’m sure people know, AI is already incredibly good at software. AI will just crush all humans at software. And I think it will be extremely good at all forms of vision and anything digital, literally in twelve to eighteen months”.
“I think the right framework is to consider that the usefulness of a humanoid robot, a general-purpose robot, is going to be roughly: how good is the AI software, times how good is the AI chip in the robot, times how good is the electromechanical dexterity, especially of the hands,” said Musk, “now, all three of those things are improving exponentially. The usefulness of the robot is those three things multiplied by each other. Then, when you make the robots, robots will start manufacturing the robots. It starts off very slowly, but then it grows at an explosive rate. So if you say, ten years from now, I would say there are well over a billion humanoid robots. And the productivity per robot will be probably five times that of a human – the billion humanoid robots will be more productive than all humans combined.”
“The rate at which AI chips is being produced has been rising in the order of 40 to 50% a year,” continued Musk, “but power available outside of China has been rising at 10% to 20% a year. China does have a tremendous amount of electricity, but due to GPU export bans, one cannot establish data centers with the latest chips in China. So this creates an opportunity, I think, for countries around the world — if they’re interested in AI data centers, construct a lot of power, offer that to AI companies. It does create an opportunity for a lot of countries.”
“You have to have an environment that’s relatively free of regulation, meaning that new things must be default legal as opposed to default illegal,” Musk advised, “so in the EU, for example, we find that the regulation level is extraordinarily high and things are generally default illegal, and this inhibits progress with new technologies. It slows it down.”
