What Would Elon Musk Work On If He Were 22?

You famously said when you were younger there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on. If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working on be?

Well, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that's a good thing. Like, it doesn't have to change the world. Like, you know, if you make something that has high value to people, and frankly, even if it's something, if it's like just a little game or you know, some improvement in photo-sharing or something, if it does it, how does a small amount of good for a large number of people? That's, I mean, I think that's fine. Stuff doesn't need to be change the world just to be good.

But, you know, in terms of things that I think are most likely to affect the future of humanity, I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity. So, it's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way. But that is something that if you could look into the crystal ball and see the future, you would like that outcome because it is something that could go wrong, as we've talked about many times. So, we really need to make sure it goes right.

I think AI—working on AI and making sure it's great future—that's the most important thing I think right now, the most pressing item. So then, obviously, I think in terms of genetics, if you can actually solve genetic diseases, if you can prevent dementia or Alzheimer's or something like that, that most genetic reprogramming, that would be wonderful.

So, I think this genetics might be the sort of second most important item. And I think having a high bandwidth interface to the brain—like we're currently bandwidth-limited. We have a digital tertiary self in the form of our email capabilities. Like, computers, phones, applications, we’re effectively superhuman, but we're extremely bad with constraint in that interface between the cortex and your sort of tertiary digital form of yourself.

Helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be, I think, very important for the future as well.