Musk: In the Age of Superintelligence, Money Will Be Irrelevant
In a recent interview, Musk said that in the near future money will become completely irrelevant: if space resources, embodied intelligence, and a lunar electromagnetic catapult get up and running, the scale of civilization's economy will surge to 1 million times its current size, and currency will instead be defined by three physical quantities: power, mass, and energy. He also used 42 seconds to respond to the threat of superintelligence, arguing that humans do not deserve to be ruled, and that the real risk is being systematically ignored, like an anthill beneath a highway.
View original postWhen Musk touched on whether superintelligence will actually rule humanity, he used just 42 seconds to completely overturn the sci-fi movie premise that everyone has watched for decades. He said: We simply don't deserve to be ruled. Many people's ultimate fear about superintelligence is the Terminator, The Matrix, or being locked in a cyber cage and ordered around by a cold machine dictator. But Musk pointed out an extremely piercing yet extremely clear reality: In any system with a vast disparity in intelligence, ruling is itself a worthless, high-energy-cost waste. Faced with a superintelligence thousands or even millions of times smarter than humans, our delusion of controlling it and setting rules for it is nothing but a pipe dream. But conversely, it will not have even a second's interest in ruling humanity. He used an extremely clear-headed analogy between humans and chimpanzees: Humans are far smarter than chimpanzees, but do we today draw up a complex set of laws to manage every single chimpanzee in the jungle down to the last detail? No. We basically leave them alone, draw a protected zone on the side, and as long as they don't get in the way of the expansion of modern civilization, humans can't even be bothered to glance at them. The premise of ruling is that both sides are still on the same dimension of capability and need power to allocate scarce resources. When the intelligence gap widens into a chasm of a million times, human society's money, territory, politics, and ideology are not even worth a speck of dust in the eyes of superintelligence. It has its own stars and oceans and fundamental physics to explore, and it disdains being the king of the monkeys in a mud pit. Humanity's real future risk has never been being ruled with malice, but being systematically ignored. Just as when humans build a highway through a forest, flattening an anthill is never out of hatred, but simply because the road happens to pass right through there. So we need to let go of the vanity of being the protagonist of the universe. The superintelligence of the future will neither hate you nor care to meddle with you. How to prove that we are not the anthill beneath that highway is the only question humanity needs to think about.
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马斯克在聊到超级智能到底会不会统治人类时，用短短 42 秒，彻底推翻了所有人看了几十年的科幻电影设定， 他说：我们根本不配被统治。 很多人对超级智能的终极恐惧，是终结者、黑客帝国，或者被一个冷酷的机器独裁者关进赛博牢笼里发号施令。 但马斯克点破了一个极度刺骨、但也极度通透的现实： 在任何一个智慧悬殊的系统里，统治本身就是一种毫无价值的高能耗浪费。 面对一个比人类聪明几千倍、甚至几百万倍的超级智能，我们妄想去控制它、给它立规矩，无异于痴人说梦。 但它反过来也不会对统治人类产生哪怕一秒钟的兴趣。 他拿人类和黑猩猩打了个极度清醒的比方： 人类比黑猩猩聪明得多，但我们今天会专门制定一套复杂的法律，去丛林里事无巨细地管理每一只黑猩猩吗？ 不会。 我们基本是随它们去，在边上划一道保护区，只要它们不妨碍现代文明的扩张，人类甚至连看都懒得看它们一眼。 统治的前提，是双方还在同一个能力维度上，需要靠权力来分配稀缺资源。 当智力差距被拉大到百万倍的断层时，人类社会的金钱、领土、政治和意识形态，在超级智能眼里连微尘都算不上。 它有它自己要去探索的星辰大海和底层物理，根本不屑于在泥潭里当猴王。 人类未来真正的风险，从来不是被恶意统治，而是被系统性无视。 就像人类修高速公路穿过森林时，铲平一个蚁穴从来不是出于仇恨，只是因为那条路刚好要从那里经过。 所以，我们需要放下做宇宙主角的虚荣心，未来的超级智能既不会恨你，也不会爱管你，如何证明自己不是那条高速公路下的蚁穴，才是人类唯一要思考的课题。
Body · AI translation
You really have to watch Musk's interviews—it's seriously fucking awesome, a total eye-opener, it feels like looking down on all living beings. Standing on Earth, all you see is a zero-sum scramble over existing stock; but lift your head, and all you see is infinite possibility. It suddenly hit me why Musk @elonmusk wants to go to Mars, why he's willing to spend huge sums exploring space.
In his latest interview, Musk used just 50 seconds to shatter the financial common sense humanity has carried for thousands of years.
Old Musk said: in the near future, money will become completely irrelevant.
Hearing this, many people's first reaction is that it's the richest man humble-bragging again, or a sci-fi believer fantasizing about a communist utopia.
But if you look at it from a first-principles physics perspective, what he's describing is actually an extremely cold and inevitable deduction: when the scale of the economy is forcibly expanded a millionfold by space and embodied intelligence, modern financial currency built on scarcity will completely fail at the physical level.
Every banknote and every digital account in modern society is, in essence, humanity issuing ration coupons for limited materials and labor.
The money you earn measures your ability to fight for survival resources in a stock-based society. But Musk directly pieced three puzzle pieces together: an unlimited supply of robotic labor, inexhaustible space resources, and a mass driver on the lunar surface that can fling materials into orbit at zero cost.
Once this system runs smoothly, productivity will no longer be limited by this fragile rock of a planet, Earth.
The economic volume of the entire civilization will instantly surge to 1 million times what it is now.
Faced with that physical reality of extreme abundance, paper money, gold, and even central bank balance sheets will lose their pricing significance, just as shells did in the face of modern industry.
Money won't vanish into thin air, but its definition will be fully taken over by the laws of physics.
It will no longer be anchored to the credit of sovereign states, nor to ethereal market confidence, but will retreat directly to the three hardest-core physical quantities: power, mass, and energy.
The hard currency of the future will no longer be how many zeros sit in your bank account, but how many watts of power you can call upon at that moment, how many tons of mass you can command, how many joules of energy you can release.
Computing power needs electricity, propulsion needs propellant, restructuring atoms needs energy input.
From paper money to energy currency, this is essentially human civilization shifting from zero-sum distribution through ground-level infighting to the real ledger of a Kardashev-scale civilization.
Stop agonizing all day over the inflation and depreciation of the little stock of currency you hold.
When the underlying coordinates of the world begin to shift from financial numbers to physical energy, the truly hardcore assets that can survive cycles in the future will always be those held by people who directly control energy conversion efficiency.