Last night, Tucker Carlson aired the first part of a two part interview with Elon Musk. The conversation in part one was sparkling, fascinating and entertaining. It was not in general “newsworthy”. Musk didn’t break any news about buying another company or finding aliens writing code for Twitter. Elon did say something interesting about Larry Page, the Google co-founder. When Elon Musk expressed fears of the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Page called him a “specist”. It was interesting given the lack of humanity we saw during the pandemic from Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Are people like Page and Gates real humans?

For background, Elon Musk and Larry Page used to be engineering genius besties. This article from Vice is eight years old:

Friendship is not a black-and-white thing. You might not like how your friend sometimes kinda sorta cheats on his girlfriend. Or you might not like how he or she acts when plastered. Rarely do you or I worry that one of our best friends in the world might destroy humanity.
But we are normals, not CEOs running some of the world’s most important companies. SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk and Google cofounder Larry Page are bros. They play video games together, Musk crashes at Page’s house all the time. They dream up weird and awesome-sounding ideas while they shoot the shit. This is a photo of them I wanted to use, but couldn’t, because it’s copyrighted. They like each other.

And yet, Musk thinks that Google, which is investing heavily into artificial intelligence, might eventually cause the downfall of humanity by eventually creating a breed of super intelligent robots that will exterminate us.

Here is the opening from Tucker’s show last night. This will shiver your timbers:

I watched Twilight Zone reruns (still do) growing up. I saw those episodes with evil geniuses and out of control robots. I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s 2023. We know how this story ends. I did not know that Elon started Open AI (no longer) with Larry Page. But, with Tesla, Space X, Starlink and Twitter, Elon Musk lost control of Open AI and now it is for profit and going in a way different direction. He has been warning us for quite a while about the dangers of AI:

Twitter boss Elon Musk warned Wednesday that unrestrained development of artificial intelligence poses a potential existential threat to humanity as ChatGPT explodes in popularity.
The billionaire mogul called on governments to develop clear safety guardrails for AI technology while discussing the rise of ChatGPT and other advancements during a virtual appearance at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
“One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI. But AI is both positive or negative – it has great promise, great capability but also, with that comes great danger,” said Musk, who co-founded the OpenAI firm behind the development of ChatGPT.
“I mean, you look at say, the discovery of nuclear physics. You had nuclear power generation but also nuclear bombs,” he added.

Scary extinction stuff, right. At least the people in charge have our best interests at heart. They believe in humanity, right? Here is the pertinent part of the conversation from Real Clear Politics:

MUSK: Yes. Um, I mean, the reason Open AI exists at all is that [Google co-founder] Larry Page and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto and I would talk to him late in the night about AI safety. At least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. And —
CARLSON: What did he say about it?
MUSK: He really seemed to be — wanted sort of digital superintelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.
CARLSON: Hey wanted that?
MUSK: Yes. He’s made many public statements ever the years, the whole goal of Google is what’s called AGI, artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence. I agree there’s great potential for good, but there’s also potential for bad. If you’ve got some radical new technology you want to try to take a set of actions, maximize the probability it will do good, minimize probably it will do bad things.
CARLSON: Yes.
MUSK: It can’t just be barreling forwarding and you know, hope for the best. And then at one point, I said what about, you know, we gonna make sure humanity’s okay here. [Laughter] And, um, and then he called me a specist.
CARLSON: Did he use that term?
MUSK: Yes. And there were witnesses. I wasn’t the only one there when he called me a specist. And so, I was like okay, that’s it. Yes, I’m a specist, okay. You got me. What are you? Yeah, I’m fully a specist. Busted.

Here is the definition of specist:

✒️ Word of the Week: SPECIST. Larry Page called Elon Musk a SPECIST when he suggested caution in developing AI. pic.twitter.com/CY4qzKezWj

— ♠️ ACE of Spades™ (@HanyaToderoff) April 18, 2023

Oh my goodness, Elon Musk cares about people. Bill Gates is creeptacular and we find out that the Google guy is too. Well, Google is creepy as all get out.

Featured Image: Herkko Hietenan/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons/NASA Kennedy/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons