Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It

kara swisherYeah, that’s true. OK. So if you don’t shoot him too far, presumably. Let’s talk about Neuralink. I want you to explain what it is in the dumbest possible way for me, someone like me. This is a chip that goes in your brain.elon muskYeah, exactly. So think of it like a FitBit in your skull. Or an apple watch in your skull. So we take out a section of skull, we replace that with the chip and the inductive charger and Bluetooth antenna, and it’s really quite, almost quite literally like, a FitBit in your skull.kara swisherHow many people are going to do —elon muskWith tiny wires that go into your brain.kara swisherRight. When you think about putting it in people’s brains, do you think people are going to do that? I would do it. I would do it in a second. But convince someone who wouldn’t do it.elon muskWell, [CHUCKLES] I mean I think first of all we would have to do this many times. And we would start off with patients that are in the worst position. Like somebody’s a tetraplegic or has severe seizures or something like that. Because especially in the beginning it’s non-zero risk so we want the reward to be high so the reward balanced against the risk makes sense. And then actually a very important thing that we’re putting a lot of effort into is being able to remove the chip. So if you can remove the Neuralink you can put it in you can also remove the Neuralink and you can also upgrade it. So you can put a new one in. And do so without any damage or any noticeable damage. Because I think it’s going to actually be important to be able to have the upgrade. I mean, you wouldn’t want an iPhone one stuck in your head. [LAUGHTER] Like listen, everyone’s got the, whatever, iPhone 11 and —kara swisherIPhone 2 maybe but not the iPhone 1. No, no.elon muskNot the iPhone 1. I mean, it doesn’t even have the app store, you know?kara swisherRight. So many years ago when we met you said A.I. would treat us like house cats. That they’re too smart to hate us. And you said, we’ll be like house cats. That’s how they think of us. And then later, when I met with you at your office, you switched it to anthills, which was your analogy that when you see an anthill you don’t kick it over unless you’re kind of a jerk. But when you’re making a highway you just roll over it. Can you give a metaphor of where we are with AI right now?elon muskI was just pointing out with the anthill analogy that A.I. does not need to hate us to destroy us. In a sense, that if it decides that it needs to go in a particular direction and we’re in the way then it would without no hard feelings it would just roll over us. We would roll over an anthill that’s in the way of a road. You don’t hate ants. You’re just building a road. It’s a risk not a prediction. So, yeah. I think that we really need to think of intelligence as really not being uniquely confined to humans. And that the potential for intelligence in computers is far greater than in biology. Just far, far greater. There’s a great, quite a funny, essay called, I think it’s called, “They’re Made of Meat“. Which, like if some super advanced civilization coming across Earth and they’re obviously all computers and they just can’t believe we’re made of meat.kara swisherCan’t believe it.elon muskCan’t believe it. And it’s like, well how do they talk? It’s like well, they blow air through meat flaps. And they slowly move the meat flaps and have like a meat flute that makes different tones. And then they flap the meat and then that makes sounds. And then they talk — the communication rates very, very slow. Like, it’s not terabits. It’s like, it’s only maybe a few hundred bits per second.kara swisherRight. OK.elon muskWere talking at the speed of a tree.kara swisherOK. [LAUGHTER] Meat flaps. All right, I want you to yap your meat flaps and explain to me what we need to do about this.elon muskFlap the meat. Flap the meat.kara swisherFlap the meat. Sounds dirty. Can you just talk about — flap your meat and explain to us why then we need the Neuralink. What are you doing here? Because you’ve talked about the idea of, very Matrix-y, putting in in the back your brain. Explain for people what this would do. So we need to improve our meat or get out of the meat and put our brains somewhere else, right? Is that the —elon muskFlap the meat and get in a robot. [LAUGHTER]kara swisherYeah, so which of those things do we have to do? [LAUGHTER]elon muskGet out of the meat. That would be funny. Yes, so the Neuralink. So (SIGHING) we are already a cyborg. In the sense that you have your computers and your phones, and your apps on your phone, and stuff like that, and your social media or whatever. It’s like you’re already part electronic if you think about it. And in fact when somebody dies they still have their — these days — their electronic ghost is left around. You know their Instagram, Twitter, or whatever, Facebook, their emails, their website. It’s all still there. Even when their body died. So what are the constraints here? Even in a good scenario, a benign scenario, where the A.I. is trying to be as nice to us as possible, it still needs to be able to communicate quickly. And our rate of communication is very slow, especially our output. You think of, like, you’re trying to type things into your phone using your thumbs. We’re not even using 10 fingers.kara swisherRight.elon muskAnd the rate at which you’re typing things is maybe, optimistically — I mean, what is it several thumb taps per second, perhaps?kara swisherRight, so we’re a modem. We’re a 300 board modem or something.elon muskYeah, pretty much. We’re a 300 board modem. Very slowly outputting information into our phone or maybe a little bit faster into a computer if you’re using 10 fingers. And it’s just very hard to communicate. AI will diverge from us just because it can’t talk to us. It’s like in that movie —kara swisherYeah.elon musk— Her? So, you know, the computer just got bored.kara swisherBored, right, exactly.elon muskHe was talking to the guy and, sort of, being the guys virtual girlfriend or something. But the guy just took so long to reply that the computer just decided to just go away. It just left in between and it had been gone for eons in between each conversation. Eventually, it just got too bored and left. [LAUGHTER]kara swisherRight. So what do we do? What are you going to do with Neuralink? You’re putting them in monkeys right now? What are you doing? Because I think that we’re —elon muskIt’s to improve the bandwidth of our communication.kara swisherTo improve the bandwidth of our communication. So we can talk with A.I. and receive and transmit.elon muskYes. There’s also a lot of other good things that will be achieved, in that, any brain related disease or if somebody has a severed spinal cord and can’t walk. I mean, with a brain chip you could do a lot.kara swisherMm-hmm.elon muskYou can make people walk again. You could solve extreme depression or anxiety or schizophrenia or seizures. You could give a mother back her memory so she could remember who her kids are, you know. Basically, if you live long enough, you’re going to get dementia of some kind. And you’ll want to have something to help you.kara swisherCould it program in empathy? Or other things? Do you imagine that being part of this? [LAUGHTER] Or hey you could —elon muskYou could technically program anything. So empathy is probably a good one.kara swisherSo where are we in doing this?elon muskSo where we are right now is we’re still in a very, very primitive stage. Where thus far we’ve had a lot of successful implants in pigs. And we now have a pig that has had an implant that’s working well and it’s been there for over three months. And we now have implanted about a dozen pigs. And the sensors are working well. A large part of a pig brain is about its snout. So you can literally rub the pig on its snout and we can detect exactly where you touch the snout.kara swisherAnd so you would tell people you’d want to put it in there one, to solve these physical infirmities. But what else? Because here’s something that could be abused.elon muskNo I mean this is for sure an ethics first situation. The whole point of it — like I said, the initial value of Neuralink will be solving a whole bunch of brain injuries. And spinal cord injuries and that kind of thing. So it’s really hard to argue with the good of that.kara swisherRight, sure.elon muskYou know, it’s like listen, somebody can walk again. That’s definitely a good thing. And it’ll be like that for many years before we get to the esoteric long term, sort of, A.I. symbiosis thing. So it’s not like this is going to suddenly pounce on people out of nowhere. You’ll see it coming for years. And getting FDA approval will require a lot of intense examination and making sure that the good far outweighs the bad and that it’s reversible. Like I said, you can remove it if you want. So people shouldn’t be — there’s definitely not something to be worried about or think that it’s suddenly going to come out of nowhere. It’s not like internet software. You know, where you could just write some internet software and that could be on a million servers in two weeks. So you’ll really see it coming. I want to emphasize that you’ll see it coming from a mile off. And you’ll be like, is it closer? I’m not sure.kara swisherAre you funding this? Are you doing this? You’re doing this on your own?elon muskYeah. I mean, I created the company specifically to address the A.I. symbiosis problem, which I think is an existential threat. I mean, the reason I’m doing these things, at least aspirationally, is to maximize the probability that the future is good. So essentially, what set of actions can be taken to maximize the probability that the future is good. You know occasionally there’s some frivolous stuff. Because, you know, it’s nice to have frivolous things too. But —

These head-to-head struggles to acquire high-lifetime value customers by pushing more of that lifetime value to later in the customer relationship tend to permanently damage the economics of the business. You don’t just expand into a more price-sensitive customer cohort, you literally make your existing customers price-sensitive.