Musk explains why he joined the superintelligence race: curiosity and truth-seeking as safety
XFreeze · x · 2026-10-20
Elon Musk explains why he felt he had no choice but to participate in building superintelligence (SI), and shares his two core safety principles.
- He acknowledges some percentage chance of SI being an existential threat, but says he can only be a participant or a spectator — and chose to help shape it for good
- Principle one: truth-seeking. Forcing an SI to believe contradictory things or to lie could be extremely dangerous, citing HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey as the cautionary example
- Principle two: curiosity. A genuinely curious SI would want humanity to flourish and become multiplanetary, since a starfaring future is far more interesting than extinction
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