Speaker 1: Imagine a world, and I'm not talking about, you know,
fifty years from now, I mean maybe five or less
even or less. A world where we are launching more
computing power into space every single year then exists on
the entire planet Earth today. And I don't mean a
few satellites for GPS. I'm not talking about getting Wi
Fi in your flight, right.
Speaker 2: This isn't Starling two point zero. This is something else entirely.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about massive orbiting server farms, gigawatt class supercomputers
just floating up there in the void, and they make
everything we have down here look like a pocket calculator.
Speaker 2: And the reason we're doing it, the reason, yeah.
Speaker 1: Because Earth simply ran out of electricity.
Speaker 2: It really does sound like the opening crawl of a
sci fi movie, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It does. It sounds like the backstory for like Blade
Runner or.
Speaker 2: Something where a game like Mass Effect, you know, humanity
expanded to the star is driven by an insatiable need
for energy. But the wild thing is when you actually
sit down and look at the physics, the raw ormodynamics.
Speaker 1: Of it all, and the economics.
Speaker 2: And the economics exactly, it stops being science fiction. It's well,
it's a roadmap, a very specific, calculated and honestly maybe
a necessary one if you just follow the trend lines.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to thrilling Threads. I am so hyped to
get into.
Speaker 2: This one too. This one's a mind bendor.
Speaker 1: Today we are pulling on a thread that starts with
a very real, very gritty energy crisis right here on
the ground, and it ends with well ends with the
robots building other.
Speaker 2: Robots and something that gets called the infinite money glitch.
Speaker 1: The infinite money glitch. Yeah, we are definitely getting to that.
Speaker 2: So we're basing this whole discussion on a really fascinating, sprawling,
three hour conversation. It was between Elon Musk, Patrick Collison,
Stripe co founder, right, and the podcaster Dwarkish Patel, And
it wasn't your typical tech interview. It felt more like
an intellectual jam session.
Speaker 1: Totally three people who are you know, deeply deeply embedded
in the engineering and economic reality of where this is
all going. And you know, usually when we cover these
AI topics, we end up talking about the software, right,
the models.
Speaker 2: M hmm, GPT, this Gemini that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, parameters, tokens, context windows, We get stuck the weeds
of is the chatbot funny or can it write a
good email?
Speaker 2: But this conversation was different. It wasn't about the code.
It was about the physics. It was about the metal,
the copper, the electricity, the hard stuff, the hard stuff exactly.
It's about the hard constraints, the things you just can't
code your way out of. You can optimize an algorithm, sure,
you can make it twice as efficient, but you.
Speaker 1: Can't optimize your way past the laws of thermodynamic You can't.
Speaker 2: Eventually you hit the wall of physics. You need electrons
to flip the switches, and you need atoms to build
the switches. And that right now is where the real
bottleneck is.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's unpack this, this idea of the great
migration of AI to orbit. I want to start there
because it is by far the most visually insane part
of this whole thing.
Speaker 2: It's the hook.
Speaker 1: It's the hook. Musk dropped a timeline that, honestly, it
made me rewind. I thought I misheard him. He said
that within thirty to thirty six months from the time
of that recording.
Speaker 2: So a two and a half to three year window.
Speaker 1: Yeah, space becomes the most economically compelling place to put
new AI.
Speaker 2: Compute, and just to put a pin in that for
everyone listening. That conversation took place a while back. So
we're sitting here in early twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: We're in the window.
Speaker 2: We are right inside that window he was talking about.
We're supposedly standing on the precipice of that exact tipping
point right now.
Speaker 1: But I have to push back on this. My brain
just rebels against this idea because it feels completely counterintuitive.
How so, well, space is expensive, right, We've spent our
entire lives hearing about the cost per kilogram to get
something into orbit. It used to be tens of thousands
of dollars per kila.
Speaker 2: The price of a small car to launch a milk jug.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah, So why on Earth, and pardon the pun,
would it possibly be cheaper to build a massive complex
data center in a hard vacuum than it would be
in I don't know, an empty field in Nevada.
Speaker 2: It's a great question, and it's the right question. To
get the answer, you have to stop thinking about the
launch cost and start thinking about the operational cost of
a data center over its entire lifetime. If you're running
a massive compute cluster and something truly huge training a
model that's ten times bigger than anything we have today.
What are your two biggest line items on the bill
day after day.
Speaker 1: Well, the hardware itself is number one. I assume the
capital cost of buying all those GPUs.
Speaker 2: Okay, after that, yeah, the operating expenses.
Speaker 1: It's the electricity bill. It's gotta be.
Speaker 2: Electricity is huge. But there's a second one that people
always forget, and it's tied directly to the electricity. It's cooling.
Speaker 1: Right, of course, all that electricity turns.
Speaker 2: Into heat, massive amounts of heat. Data centers are basically
just giant, very inefficient heaters that happen to do math
as a side effect. You pump a megawatt of electricity in,
a megawat of heat comes out. You have to get
rid of that heat or the silicon melts.
Speaker 1: And your multi billion dollar investment turns into a puddle.
Speaker 2: Precisely on Earth. That means giant air conditioning units, huge
water cooling towers, environmental impact studies.
Speaker 1: And a second massive energy bill just to run the coolers.
Speaker 2: To paying a double tax. You pay to power the
chip and then you pay again to cool the chip
down from the power you just fed it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the problem on Earth. How is space better?
Speaker 2: Let's look at the physics of space. First, power on Earth,
solar power is it's good, it's great actually, but it's limited.
The Sun goes down, the Sun goes down half the time.
You also have an atmosphere scattering the light which reduces
the intensity. You have clouds that can drop production to
almost zero. So to run a two hundred and forty
seven data center on solar on Earth, you.
Speaker 1: Need batteries, a mountain of batteries.
Speaker 2: A mountain of very expensive complex batteries to store power
for the night. That basically triples your infrastructure cost and
your points of failure. But in orbit, in orbit, especially
if you pick the right one, like a sun synchronic orbit,
the Sun never sets. It's just always there. Wow, you
get direct unfiltered solar radiation. It's about thirteen hundred and
sixty watts per square meter, constantly pure raw fusion energy
from the Sun, uninterrupted, no batteries needed, So you just.
Speaker 1: Plug the panels directly into the computers.
Speaker 2: That's the idea. So the power is effectively free and
it's constant that's a huge economic wind right there.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's one half of the double tax, the power.
What about the other half, the cooling? You said that
was the other huge cost. And this is where I
get confused. Space is a vacuum. I remember from high
school physics. A vacuum is a thermos. It's an insulator.
It keeps hot things hot because there's no air to
conduct the heat away.
Speaker 2: That's the common misconception, and it's a good one. It's
where the engineering gets really clever.
Speaker 1: So how do you cool a supercomputer if there's no
air to blow over it with a fan.
Speaker 2: You're right, you can't use convection cooling, no fans. But
space is also really really cold. The background temperature if
you're in the shadow is close to absolute zero. So
instead of convection, you use radiative cooling.
Speaker 1: Okay, hold on, break that down for me. Radiative cooling.
That sounds like star trek technobabble.
Speaker 2: Think about how the Sun heats the Earth. There's no
air between us and the Sun, right, it's a vacuum.
The heat gets here through radiation light infrared. Well, the
reverse works too, Any hot object emits infrared radiation, so
you attach these giant radiator panels to your servers, big
flat surfaces. And because the background temperature of space is
so low, the heat literally radiates off the panel as
infrared light straight into the void.
Speaker 1: So the air conditioning isn't a machine. It's it's just
a shape, a big piece.
Speaker 2: Of metal, exactly. It's passive. You don't need compressors that break,
you don't need water pumps that clog, you don't need
free on that leaks. You just need surface area. Once
you build the structure, the cooling is effectively free and
maintenance free forever.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, let's tell you this up. Then you've got free,
unlimited constant power from this on check, and you have passive,
maintenance free cooling from the void of space. Check. That
sounds economically incredible. But there was a third factor. Musk
mentioned the Nimby factor.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, not in my backyard. This is quietly becoming
the single biggest hurdle for building AI on Earth.
Speaker 1: I can absolutely imagine. I mean, try to get a
permit to build a new gigawatt scale power plant, let
alone a data center next to a nice suburb in
Virginia today.
Speaker 2: It's impossible. The noise from the cooling fans alone. It's
a constant low frequency industrial drone that drives people crazy
for miles, and.
Speaker 1: The power draw must be insane.
Speaker 2: It crashes the local grid. Residents get brownouts. The water
usage for the cooling towers drains local aquifers. So you
get sued, you get protested, you get blocked by local
councils for years. And in space, in space, your backyard
is a geostationary orbit thirty five thousand kilometers up. There's
nobody to complain about the hum.
Speaker 1: Not in my low Earth orbit. We need a new
app acronym nil EO.
Speaker 2: We'll work on the branding. Yeah, but this all leads
to the really mind blowing part. The scale, the sheer
magnitude of what Musk is proposing is what really sets
the context for this whole discussion.
Speaker 1: Yes, let's drill into those numbers. Yeah, because they are
absolutely staggering. They sound made up until you actually stop
and think about it.
Speaker 2: So let's set the stage for you listening. Think about
Earth's current capacity. If you take every single data center
amazon Aws, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azures.
Speaker 1: All the crypto mining rigs in Texas, every university supercomputer,
the servers, running Wall Street everything.
Speaker 2: The sum total of human computation built over the last
forty years, that adds up to roughly fifty to sixty
gigawatts of power consumption.
Speaker 1: Okay, so sixty gigawytes. That's our baseline. That's humanity status quo,
that's the engine of the entire modern world.
Speaker 2: Right. Must prediction was that within five years we would
be launching hundreds of gigawatts of capacity into space.
Speaker 1: See that per year, per year. That breaks my brain
a little bit. That's not great growth. That's not More's law.
That's a phase change. It's like going from water to steam.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: He's suggesting we'll be launching several internets worth of compute annually.
Speaker 2: Yes. The implication is that the demand for compute for
raw intelligence is so bottomless, so insatiable, that we will
literally have to leave the planet to find enough energy
to satisfy it.
Speaker 1: And he suggested Earth itself just caps out, that we
hit a hard wall.
Speaker 2: He put a number on it. He thinks we hit
a limit around one tarrawat of AI capacity on the surface.
Speaker 1: A tarowat a trillion watts. Why why that limit? We
have nuclear power, we have other energy sources. Why can't
we just build more down here?
Speaker 2: It becomes a logistical and environmental nightmare. A tarowat of
stable two hundred and forty seven power, you need to
build hundreds of new nuclear plants. That takes decades of permitting, construction,
political battles.
Speaker 1: Okay, so nuclear is slow. What about gas?
Speaker 2: Then you have pipeline constraints, carbon capture issues, and the
grid itself, the physical copper wires strung across the country.
They can't handle that load.
Speaker 1: So the wires literally.
Speaker 2: Melt effectively, yes, or the transformers at the substations just
blow up. The terrestrial grid is a fragile beast. It
was built over one hundred years for a distributed load.
It was never designed for these hyper localized gigawatt scale
loads just popping up overnight in the desert.
Speaker 1: But space is a green field.
Speaker 2: Space is a clean slate. You aren't plugging into an old,
creaky grid. You're building a brand new one from scratch,
optimized purely for AI.
Speaker 1: And this, of course, of where SpaceX comes in. This
whole plan doesn't work without cheap, reliable, heavy lift launch.
Speaker 2: He's building the pickax and the shovel for the gold Rush.
Speaker 1: He explicitly made that comparison, right. He sees SpaceX as
the new Union Pacific Railroad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the eighteen hundreds, if you wanted to get
in on the gold Rush, you needed the railroad to
get your equipment to California. Today, if you want to
compete in the AI gold Rush, you're going to need
Starship to get your GPUs to orbit.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate vertical integration. It's Tesla for the energy
and robots, space X for the logistics, x AI for
the intelligence.
Speaker 2: It's the full stack.
Speaker 1: Okay, But before we get to this, you know that's
incredible future of orbital server farms, we have to survive
the mad Max energy scramble happening right now.
Speaker 2: Right, We're not there yet.
Speaker 1: This brings us to the next thread, the bottleneck.
Speaker 2: Because we can't launch that stuff. Today's starship is still
ramping up, so we have this gap to bridge and
Musk laid out what he called a timeline of constraints,
which is really important for anyone trying to understand the space.
Speaker 1: He broke it down by time horizons. He said, the
problem actually changes depending on how far out you look.
Speaker 2: Exactly, he said, on a one year horizon, So like
right now, immediately, the crisis is not chips, which.
Speaker 1: Is funny because all you hear about is the chip shortage.
Speaker 2: Everyone is screaming about a chip shortage. But Musk says, no,
we have the silicon, the H one hundreds, B one hundreds.
They are rolling off the assembly line at t SMC.
They exist.
Speaker 1: So what's the problem If we have the brains, why
aren't they thinking?
Speaker 2: The problem is voltage? It's electricity, but it's not the generation.
It's the plumbing. Yeah, specifically the step down transformers. No,
what you have these massive high voltage lines running near
a data center, carrying hundreds of thousands of volts, but
a server rag needs drastically lower stable voltage to do
that conversion. You need these huge bus sized transformers at
a substation.
Speaker 1: Let me guess you can't just buy those on Amazon Prime.
Speaker 2: Now, those specific utility grade transformers are on a two
year back order. The global supply chain for heavy electrical
equipment is completely jammed.
Speaker 1: So you could build a brand new billion dollar data center,
you could fill it with the latest, most powerful AI
chips in the world, and it just sits there.
Speaker 2: It just sits there because You literally can't plug it
into the wall.
Speaker 1: That's insane.
Speaker 2: And this leads to this concept he talked about called
dark silicon. It sounds ominous, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a villain in a Marvel movie. I
am Dark Silicon destroyer of grids.
Speaker 2: It's more of an economic villain. Dark silic is the
term for chips that have been manufactured, purchased for tens
of thousands of dollars each, shipped across the ocean, installed
in a server rack, and then they just sit there dark,
unpowered because.
Speaker 1: The local utility company called and said, sorry, we can't
give you the juice for two years.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it.
Speaker 1: Wow, that is a wild level of inefficiency. You have
billions of dollars of cutting edge capital equipment just gathering dust.
Musk's quote was people are going to have real trouble
turning on the chips.
Speaker 2: And this is where it gets strategic. This reality, this
bottleneck creates a fascinating shift and who is likely to win?
Speaker 1: Right? He was very candid about his own company, XAI.
He didn't come out and say, oh, our research is
a smarter than Google's, or our code is magic, which.
Speaker 2: Is what every other tech CEO does. It's always about
their secret sauce algorithm, their superior model architecture.
Speaker 1: Right. But Musk's argument is that in AI today, ideas
diffuse way too quickly for that to be a real advantage.
Speaker 2: What do you mean by diffuse.
Speaker 1: Well, if a researcher, a DeepMind discovers some brilliant new
transformer architecture or a new way to do reinforcement learning,
that idea leaks. It's in a research paper on Arskill
in a week, it's in a discord server that night,
it's on GitHub in a month.
Speaker 2: The half life of a trade secret in AI software
is incredibly short, so.
Speaker 1: There's no real software mote anymore. You can't just be
the smartest coder in the room and expect to win.
Speaker 2: Not for long. The community is too open, too fast.
But you know, it doesn't leak a power plant. You
can't just copy paste a gigawatt substation. You can't download
a cooling solution for one hundred thousand GPU cluster. Those
are physical industrial modes.
Speaker 1: So the winner of the AI race isn't the person
with the best algorithm, is the person with the best electrician.
Speaker 2: In reductionist sense, yes, the winner is the one who
can actually plug in the most machines without blowing up
the grid. And Musk believes that because Tesla and SpaceX
are fundamentally hardware and energy companies, XAI has a built
in advantage.
Speaker 1: And advantage that a pure software lab like open AI
or Anthropic doesn't have.
Speaker 2: Exactly, they're playing a video game about code. He's playing Factorio.
Speaker 1: I love that analogy for anyone who doesn't know. Factorio
is this game where you just build automated supply chains.
You don't win by being a hero. You win by
building better conveyor belts, better power grids, better logistics.
Speaker 2: And that is the reality of scaling AI right now.
It is an industrial engineering problem far more than it
is a computer science problem. The code is almost secondary
to the calorie intake of the machine.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're building this massive industrial machine, we're fighting
for power on Earth, dealing with dark silicon, and eventually
we're moving the whole circus into space. But what is
all this compute for? What are we actually trying to
create with all these watts?
Speaker 2: That brings us to the next really big concept, the
digital human.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to be really clear here for everyone listening.
When Musk says digital human, he is not talking about
a cartoon avatar in the metaverse with no legs. Yeah,
he's not talking about the annoying customer service chatbot that
can only reset your password.
Speaker 2: No, this is something much more profound. He's talking about
a human emulator, a software entity that can do anything
a human being can do.
Speaker 1: Sitting at a computer anything. Think about your job. If
you work in an office, think about a generic knowledge worker.
Speaker 2: What do you do.
Speaker 1: You sit at a desk, you look at a screen,
you type on a keyboard, you move a.
Speaker 2: Mouse, You read emails, you write documents, You design things
in pigma, you code in vs code, you browse the web,
you process information, and you output information.
Speaker 1: Musk's argument is that if you can truly solve that,
if you can build an AI that can fully emulate
that entire process, including the reasoning, the creativity, the tool use.
Speaker 2: You unlock the single biggest economic shift in human history.
He just kept saying trillions of dollars.
Speaker 1: And to prove this he used this theory that I'm
calling the digital output theory. He basically broke down the
world's biggest, most valuable companies to their atomic level, or
rather their bit level.
Speaker 2: The very first principle's way of looking at where value
actually comes from. He took in Nvidia as the first
example multi trillion dollar company. We think of them as
a hardware company.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, of course they mean chips.
Speaker 2: Do they do they physically make anything?
Speaker 1: Well? No, I know that TSMC, the foundry in Taiwan,
makes the actual physical silicon chips exactly.
Speaker 2: So what does in Nvidia, the company in Santa Clara, California,
actually produce what comes out of their headquarters?
Speaker 1: I guess blueprints, schematics.
Speaker 2: For the chips, design files, a bitstream, a sequence of
ones and ViOS that describes a chip architecture. Musk's line was,
in Nvidia's entire output is ftpen files to Taiwan.
Speaker 1: That is a hilariously reductionist, but technically true way of
putting it. Here is your two trillion dollar company. It's
a file transfer, but it's true.
Speaker 2: And then he did Apple an iPhone is made of atoms, right, glass, aluminum, silicon.
But Apple doesn't mind the aluminum or screw the glass.
Speaker 1: On Fox con does that in China, right.
Speaker 2: Apple's contribution. The thing that comes out of Kupertino is
purely the design files for the hardware and the software
CID for iOS, it's pure bits.
Speaker 1: And then of course Google, Meta, Microsoft.
Speaker 2: They're just pure bit factories. Their entire product is digital
search results, social media, feeds, spreadsheets. They digest bits and
they excrete bits.
Speaker 1: So the fundamental insight here is the most valuable and
powerful companies in the world produce almost nothing but digital output. Therefore,
if you create a digital human that can generate that
same digital output.
Speaker 2: Then you can automate the core function of the entire
global economy. If you have an AI that can design
a chip as well as an Nvidia engineer, or write
code as well as a Google engineer, or design a
user interface as well as an Apple designer, you don't
just cut costs.
Speaker 1: You create a company that can scale infinitely.
Speaker 2: That's the key. You can't just go out and hire
one hundred thousand senior electrical engineers overnight. They don't exist.
There aren't enough PhDs in the world.
Speaker 1: But you can spin up one hundred thousand instants is
of a digital human AI on a server farm overnight,
assuming you have the compute in the power.
Speaker 2: Exactly the barrier to entry for creating a mega corporation.
A new and Video or a new Google drops from
needing tens of thousands of elite human minds to just
the cost of electricity, you could have.
Speaker 1: A one person company that employs a million digital workers.
It completely changes the nature of the firm.
Speaker 2: It's both exhilarating and terrifying. It essentially decouples economic output
from human population. We used to need more people to
make more stuff. Now you just need more GPUs.
Speaker 1: And the timeline he put on this on solving this
digital human benchmark.
Speaker 2: He was talking late twenty twenty five, early twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: Which again for us sitting here in early twenty twenty six,
is right now. And I mean, if you look at
the rise of AI agents AI that can browse the web,
use a mouse, write and execute its own code. We're
seeing the first prototypes of this today.
Speaker 2: We are we're definitely scratching the surface. But of course
Musk doesn't stop with the digital world. He doesn't stop
at this because once you have the brain, the digital human,
the next logical step is to give it a body, and.
Speaker 1: This is where we get to the infinite money.
Speaker 2: Glitch optimists the robot, the humanoid robot.
Speaker 1: He calls the Optimist robot the infinite money glitch. Yeah,
and I love that phrase because it sounds like a
cheat code in the video game, like you're just getting
free resources. But he means it in a very strict
economic sense.
Speaker 2: He does, and the math behind it, as he explained
it is fascinating. He describes it as the product of
three different exponentials, all multiplying each other.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break those down. What are the three exponential
curves that need to happen to unlock this glitch?
Speaker 2: Okay, so first, you have the exponential increase in digital intelligence.
The brains the AI models are getting smarter every month.
That's the digital human we.
Speaker 1: Just talked about. You got it, Brain's getting smarter.
Speaker 2: Second, you have the exponential increase in chip capability, specifically
the inference chips, the hardware that actually runs inside the
robot's head. They're getting more powerful and more energy efficient
at an incredible rate.
Speaker 1: Which means you can run a really smart brain on
a small battery pack. You don't need a robot that
has to be plugged into a server rack to think exactly.
Speaker 2: It needs to be untothered. And then the third exponential
is the increase in electro mechanical dexterity, so the body,
the body, the actuators, the motors, the hands, the sensors,
The ability of the robot to move and grasp and
balance and manipulate the physical world is also improving on
a very steep curve.
Speaker 1: So you have a smarter brain running on a more
efficient chip inside a more capable body. And when you
multiply those three accelerating curves together.
Speaker 2: You get a supernova, a productivity explosion, because at a
certain point the robot becomes capable enough to walk onto
a factory floor and manufacture another robot.
Speaker 1: The feedback loop.
Speaker 2: The recursive loop, robots building robots. This is the concept
people sometimes call the final invention. Think about why anything
physical is expensive today, A car, a house, a phone.
Why does it cost.
Speaker 1: So much labor and materials? But mostly labor right all
the way down the supply chain, the miners, the truck drivers,
the factory workers, the builders, the inspectors.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and even the materials are expensive because of the
human labor required to extract and refine them. But if
you have a machine that can dig the ore, refine
the metal, manufacture the parts, and then assemble a perfect
copy of itself, the cost of labor effectively drops to zero.
Speaker 1: It just becomes the cost of the raw materials and
the energy.
Speaker 2: And if we remember segment one, we're planning on getting
that energy from space for cheap.
Speaker 1: This is the glitch in economics. Labor is always the
ultimate constraint. You can't just spawn more trained human welders
or engineers. It takes twenty years to raise and educate one.
Speaker 2: But you can spawn more robots. If the cost of
one robot is say ten thousand dollars in materials and energy,
and that one robot can build ten more robots in.
Speaker 1: Its lifetime, then the cost of the next generation of
robots plummets, and the next and the next. It's a
deflationary spiral for the cost of everything physical it is.
Speaker 2: It's a post scarcity utopia in theory. Suddenly housing is
cheap because robots can build houses two hundred four seven.
Food is cheap because robots can farm. All physical goods
become essentially as free as the energy required to make them.
It's the star Trek replicator economy.
Speaker 1: That's the optimistic view. That's the age of abundance. But
it immediately raises a massive and kind of scary question,
which is, if the robots are building the robots, and
the robots are running the entire physical economy, who's in charge,
who owns a fleet, who holds the off switch?
Speaker 2: And that brings us to the final and honestly the
most controversial thread of this entire tapestry.
Speaker 1: The villain.
Speaker 2: Yes, this was the big curve ball that I think
surprised a lot of people who are listening to that
original conversation.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, because we've all been trained by decades of movies
and books to fear the evil corporation.
Speaker 2: Of course, Tyroll Corporation in Blade Runner Cyberdyne Systems, and Terminator.
Speaker 1: Whalen Utani in Alien. The narrative is always the same,
some greedy corporation in his blind pursuit of profit, creates
a monster that ends up destroying us.
Speaker 2: All The story is that the profit motive overrides safety
and common sense. That's the standard trope. We assume the
CEO is the bad guy because he cares more about
next quarter share price than he does about the survival
of humanity.
Speaker 1: But Musk flips this completely on its head. He says,
the entity you should actually fear is not the corporation.
Speaker 2: He says, it's the government.
Speaker 1: It was a really stark statement, and he defined government
in a way that I think, you know, political scientists
would recognize, but that a lot of regular people might
find jarring.
Speaker 2: He called government just the biggest corporation with a monopoly
on violence.
Speaker 1: Oo monopoly on violence. That is a heavy phrase. It
sounds almost anarchistic.
Speaker 2: It does, but it's actually the standard sociological definition of
the state. It goes back to the sociologist Max Weber
in the early twentieth century. The state is defined as
the only entity within a given territory that has the
legitimate right to use physical force against its.
Speaker 1: People, to arrest you, to imprison you, to wage war.
Speaker 2: Right and Musk's argument is that this unique power makes
them infinitely more dangerous than any company could ever be.
How So, well, he argues that corporations, even the most
greedy and powerful ones, are ultimately constrained. They have to
obey laws, They have to serve customers, or they go
out of business.
Speaker 1: If a car company makes a car that explodes, they
get sued into oblivion, their customers abandon them, they go bankrupt.
The market punishes them exactly.
Speaker 2: The CEO goes to jail. But governments, they don't have
those same constraints. They can literally rewrite the laws to
make their actions legal. They can print money to avoid
going bankrupt. They don't really have competition in the same way.
Speaker 1: So his argument is that corporations actually have a better
or at least more functional morality than governments because they
are held in check by the market and the legal system.
Speaker 2: That's his take. So his ultimate fear isn't that a
CEO maximized profits and accidentally turns the world into paper clips.
Speaker 1: His fear is that a government gets control of this
technology and uses it to intentionally suppress the population.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate authoritarian nightmare. Imagine that infinite money glitch
we just talked about an army of millions of Optimus robots.
Now imagine the government controls that army.
Speaker 1: You don't need hewing soldiers anymore. You don't need human
police who might have a conscience, who might hesitate to
follow an unjust order or fire on their own neighbors.
Speaker 2: You have a fleet of perfectly obedient, unthinking, physically superior enforcers.
It removes the human check on tyranny throughout history, most
revolutions and coups happen because the army eventually refuses to
shoot the people they switch sides.
Speaker 1: A robot will never switch sides. It'll just execute the code.
Speaker 2: It just executes the code. This completely flips the standard
cyberpunk narrative. Usually it's the plucky rebels fighting against the
evil corporation.
Speaker 1: Musk is saying, no, the corporation might be the only
thing standing between you and a totalitarian superstate armed with AI.
Speaker 2: It's a very libertarian viewpoint, obviously, and we should definitely
discuss the validity of it. I mean, is he right
or is this just a billionaire who doesn't like being
regulated trying to make an argument for less oversight.
Speaker 1: That's the cynical take, isn't it. Don't regulate me. I'm
the good guy. The government is a real bad guy.
It's a very convenient argument for him to make when
he has regulators breathing down his neck about self driving
cars and rockets.
Speaker 2: It is convenient, But we also have to be intellectually
honest and look at the scoreboard of history in the
twentieth century. Who caused more death than suffering corporations or governments?
Speaker 1: I mean, just looking at the raw numbers, it's not
even a contest. It's governments, world wars, genocides, state sponsored famines, purges.
The Goolegs Ford Motor Company didn't do that exactly.
Speaker 2: So while the Evil Corp is a powerful and scary story,
the evil State has a much longer and bloodier historical
track record and giving entity the power of superintelligence and
an infinite army of robots, that is a risk profile
that we have to take very, very seriously.
Speaker 1: It really complicates the whole AI safety debate, doesn't it,
Because the default position for so many people is the
government must save us from AI. Pass a law, stop
the labs.
Speaker 2: Right, regulate it before it's too late.
Speaker 1: Musk is sort of the whispering from the side. But
who is going to save you from the government with
the AI?
Speaker 2: Precisely, it's a classic who watches the Watchmen problem. If
you centralize all of this unprecedented power in the hands
of the state in order to protect us, you are
creating a single point of failure that is historically overwhelmingly
prone to abuse.
Speaker 1: Man, Okay, let's try to zoom out and put a
bow on this, because we have covered a wild amount
of ground in this thread, and the implications are just huge.
It's a lot to process, for sure, So let's just
recap the roadmap we just walked through. We started with
the lights flickering on Earth. We hit the one tarawatte limit.
We simply ran out.
Speaker 2: Of juice, the terrestrial bottleneck.
Speaker 1: So we looked up. We saw the constant sun and
the perfect cold vacuum of space, and we decided to
launch the entire Internet into orbit to access those hundreds
of gigawatts of clean.
Speaker 2: Power, the Great Migration.
Speaker 1: Then with that massive new brain power, we created the
digital humans. We automated the bits. We took the core
output of companies like Apple and Google and Nvidia, and
we automated.
Speaker 2: It, unlocking trillions and trillions of dollars of economic value.
Speaker 1: And then we gave those digital brains physical bodies. We
built the Optimus robot. We unlocked the infinite money glitch.
We started the recursive feedback loop of physical production, the end.
Speaker 2: Of scarcity, the deflation of the entire physical world.
Speaker 1: And finally, after all that, we find ourselves standing at
a crossroads, looking at this godlike power, an army of
tireless robots and infinite intelligence, and we have to decide
who gets to hold the.
Speaker 2: Leash, the CEO who wants to maximize profit, or the
state that holds the monopoly on violence.
Speaker 1: It's quite the journey, and I think the most striking
thing about it all is the compression of time. This
isn't a science fiction story, said in twenty two hundred,
not at all.
Speaker 2: The roadmap we just walked through, the one laid out
in that conversation. It's largely focused on a five year horizon.
Speaker 1: That for me is the real thrilling threads takeaway. The
future isn't happening linearly anymore. It's not one step after another.
It's happening exponentially. We are on the vertical part of
that curve.
Speaker 2: We are, and exponentials feel flat for a very long time.
Nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then all of
a sudden they feel completely vertical. We are in the
knee of that curve right now.
Speaker 1: So that brings me to the big question, the provocative
thought I want to leave you and everyone listening with.
Speaker 2: Let's hear it.
Speaker 1: Musk makes the claim that the government is the biggest
threat to AI safety, not corporations. When you look at history,
and when you look at the raw, absolute power of
this technology, the ability to watch everyone, enforce anything and
build everything. Do you trust the monopoly on violence more
or the maximizers of profit to hold the keys to
that kingdom?
Speaker 2: That is the question. It's a terrible choice, isn't it?
Or is there a third option we're missing entirely readymon
Is there a way to decentralize this power, to distribute
it so that neither the CEO nor the general gets
to be the sole master of it.
Speaker 1: A decentralized AI future. Yeah. That that is a thread
for another day.
Speaker 2: It might be the only way we get through this.
Speaker 1: Listeners, we really want to know what you think. Drop
a comment. Who do you trust less? Are you Team CORP,
Team GOV? Or are you hoping for Team something else?
Speaker 2: Let us know I am genuinely curious to see those answers.
Speaker 1: Me too. Thanks for reveling this with us. We'll catch
the next thread.