Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, has strong feelings about the future of humanity.
Using new technology to enable humans to live longer – or maybe forever – may be a terrible idea, Musk said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Council Summit on Monday.
“It’s critical for us to die because, in most instances, people don’t change their minds; they just die,” Musk said during the event.
“If you live forever, we may become an obsessive society where new ideas will fail.”
“I am not aware of any hidden anti-aging technologies,” Musk said.
His views should not come as a surprise to anybody. Musk is a visionary who has garnered great rewards from promoting innovation and change, for better or worse. In his cosmos, rigid, out-of-date thinking has no place.
This explains his continued attempts to circumvent American authorities, who are investigating his behavior more closely. This comes after he advocated a “age limit” for US government officials earlier this month.
Musk, a 50-year-old father of six, also warned during the event that “one of the biggest challenges to civilization” is the world’s “rapid drop in reproduction.”
To put it another way, allowing people to live longer lives would result in a rapidly aging population, which would further reduce infertility since fewer people would be able to produce children.
This isn’t the first time Musk has predicted human extinction as a result of population decline. He slammed fellow space business billionaire Jeff Bezos earlier this year for investing millions in a mysterious Silicon Valley research venture.
Musk’s concerns are not entirely inaccurate, notwithstanding earlier disputes and dismissive words. Fertility rates are declining over the globe, and COVID-19 has further exacerbated this trend.
Even China, the most populous nation on the planet, has experienced a dip in birth rates, forcing officials to issue a caution.
Given that most countries’ populations are aging, humanity may be on the verge of collapsing, which experts predict would occur as early as 2100.
But whether this is a bad thing or not remains to be seen. The economic consequences of a shrinking workforce are obvious, but considering the immense damage our species is wreaking to our planet, they may not be so bad.
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