Elon Musk is charismatic but also whimsical.
Sometimes it's hard to know if Tesla's (TSLA) chief executive officer is serious when he makes ostentatious claims and thunderous statements on Twitter, his favorite communication channel where he has more than 101.6 million followers as of time of writing.
Is he provocative or simply ambitious when he announces that humans will be living and self-sufficient on Mars twenty to thirty years from now?
"20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential," Musk said on July 15 to a question about the estimated timeframe for creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars.
"Assumes transferring ~100k each rendezvous and ~1M total people needed," the billionaire added.
Does Musk Already Have a Virtual Version of Him?
The history of outlandish claims by the richest man in the world has often shown that he really means what he says. Such was the case when he held a Twitter poll in November asking Twitter users if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock. He added that he will abide by the results of the poll, whichever way it goes.
The poll attracted more than 3.5 million votes, with nearly 58% voting ifor the share sale. A few days later, Musk announced in a filing with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that he had sold $5 billion worth of Tesla stock.
The serial entrepreneur has just made a striking statement. Indeed, Musk indicates that he has already downloaded his memory into a machine. It all started with a conversation initiated on Twitter by Billy Markus, one of the co-creators of the meme coin Dogecoin, with whom Musk regularly interacts on the platform.
"If you could upload your brain to the cloud, and talk to a virtual version of yourself, would you be buddies?" Markus wrote on July 18.
A few minutes later, Markus added a new post saying: "Would be cool to have a competitive game buddy of approximately the same skill level except he would be a computer and have infinite time so i would more just see him get better at everything while i am busy with dumb life things i don’t like this thought exercise anymore."
"Already did it," Musk commented, without much details.
Musk's tweet highlights his recent statements and promises that he was developing, through his companies (Tesla, the premium EV manufacturer, and Neuralink, the artificial intelligence company) a machine into which we can download our brains, our memories and our personalities.
A Humanoid Robot in the Fall
"Could you imagine that one day we would be able to download our human brain capacity into an Optimus?", Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, asked the entrepreneur in an interview published mid-April.
Optimus is a robot Tesla introduced in 2021.
"I think it is possible," Musk responded.
"Which would be a different way of eternal life, because we would download our personalities into a bot," Döpfner continued.
Musk agreed, and then added:
"Yes, we could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique. Now, of course, if you're not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that."
When asked if it's imminent, Musk didn't say no.
"I'm not sure if there is a very sharp boundary. I think it is much smoother," he suggested. "There is already so much compute that we outsource. Our memories are stored in our phones and computers with pictures and video. Computers and phones amplify our ability to communicate, enabling us to do things that would have been considered magical."
In addition "We've already amplified our human brains massively with computers," he said.
"I certainly don't want to have anything that could potentially be harmful to humanity. But humanoid robots are happening," he said. "The rate of advancement of AI is very rapid."
Besides their use in Tesla factories where they will perform repetitive tasks, Musk sees other uses for these robots. "Optimus is a general purpose, sort of worker-droid. The initial role must be in work that is repetitive, boring, or dangerous. Basically, work that people don't want to do," the billionaire explained.
He also believes that Optimus will play a role in our daily lives: Optimus is "a general focused humanoid."
Musk promised last month to present a working prototype of Optimus in the fall.
"Tesla AI Day pushed to Sept 30, as we may have an Optimus prototype working by then," Musk wrote on Twitter on June 2, referring to Tesla Artificial Intelligence day which was initially scheduled for August 19.
The billionaire had said in January that a prototype Optimus would be ready by the end of the year and Tesla planned to market it from 2023.
