Even more than just a newsy exercise in political economy, however, the conversation with Musk is a reminder of how “progress,” an ideal usually associated with the American left, is in reality a value-neutral concept that can be advanced by anyone — although it obviously helps if you’re the richest man in the world.
The mantle of “progressive conservatism” is usually associated with the European right, which developed a technocratic pro-safety-net politics in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Here in America, its historical tribune is still Teddy Roosevelt, whose populist views on trade and domestic policy paired with an almost religious belief in American expansion and dominance. Musk — who described to a stonily silent Carlson how he voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 and expressed his desire for “a normal person with common sense” as president, “whose values are smack in the middle of the country” — fits, if imperfectly, into that same lineage, combining a socially conservative politics, an eagerness to regulate industries he believes are dangerous and an unwavering belief in expansion at all costs.
Where Roosevelt’s private-sector bugbears were the industrial-age charnel houses of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Musk’s are much more ethereal: Namely, the alleged risk to civilization posed by the development of artificial intelligence.
Musk is not anti-AI — he just announced the founding of his own new company, X.AI, to produce competing products to OpenAI and Microsoft, which he views as too “woke” and developmentally reckless. He has, rather, a very specific existential fear. During the interview Musk described to Tucker the evolution of his now-defunct friendship with Larry Page, the Google co-founder, AI innovator and ardent transhumanist, saying that having “talked to him late to the night about AI safety” he’s concluded that Page was “not taking AI safety seriously enough,” and that he “seemed to … want some kind of digital superintelligence, basically a digital God.”
A brief pause to explain. Within the AI community, there is a fervent and ongoing debate about the hypothetical existence of an “artificial general intelligence,” or an AI agent so sophisticated that it surpasses human cognition. Many researchers think this is impossible. Many think that it’s possible, and desirable. Many think that it’s possible and will kill us all. What we do know for certain is that nothing like it currently exists, nor does any evidence that points to its possibility.
Musk is worried about it anyway. With a slew of his similarly-concerned fellow tech and business potentates, he signed an open letter last month calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI projects, and opened his interview with Carlson by calling for an entirely new regulatory agency to tackle AI risk. His view of AI as an existential threat, as speculative as it might be, leads him to the same conclusion of his fiercest critics on the left: That government should intervene to guide technological progress in a manner conducive to human values.
Where they differ, of course, is when it comes to what those values are. By now you are likely familiar with the broad outlines of the free-speech crusade that led Musk to purchase Twitter: Giving a black eye to the corporate censoriousness, doublespeak and policing of “misinformation” that once (allegedly) marked the platform. In Musk’s conservative vision of progress, unfettered AI development threatens humanity’s evolution and therefore must be regulated. But the lax approach to moderation on “nu-Twitter,” which some have said has given it a distinctly hostile character, is a necessary risk in creating the open-air marketplace of ideas necessary for humanity to thrive.
What does he mean by that? Well, there are the usual arguments about how unfettered free speech creates resilience, or makes society more democratic, or allows for the best ideas to naturally win out absent moderator interference. But those all have to do with … humans. And there’s another, way more out-there idea that Musk has about why censoring AI is a folly: That uncensored speech will make a hypothetical AGI safer, by virtue of “training” it on a data set that provides a more complete picture of humanity.
“This might be the best path to [AI] safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk explained. That’s why Musk advocates for a competitor to ChatGPT that would lack its speech restrictions and safety controls — the hypothetical “based AI” he proposed last month.
Like all questions about artificial general intelligence, or unicorns, or little green men, it’s impossible to answer whether an AI’s data set including every bit of racist invective @Groyper69420 has ever hurled at unsuspecting Twitter users will endear or depreciate humanity in its digital mind. But Musk’s belief that uncensored AI speech platforms will ultimately benefit humanity more than their currently-existing counterparts — aside from being consistent with his vision for the company he just purchased for $43 billion, and in which AI has its own role to play in the future — is aligned with his overall view of progress as a sort of survival of the fittest.
And on that biological-evolutionary note, at the very end of Musk’s conversation with Carlson the two discussed another pillar of his quest for humanity to reach the stars: How to reverse the world’s declining birth rates. “I’m sort of worried that civilization, you know, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers or perhaps increase them a little bit, civilization is going to crumble,” Musk mused. “There’s the old question of, ‘Will civilization end with a bang or a whimper?’ Well, it’s currently coming to an end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.”
Concern over falling birth rates has been one of the biggest policy issues for the nascent “pro-family” right — it’s a major project for American Compass, former Mitt Romney advisor Oren Cass’ heterodox conservative think tank, for example. Musk doesn’t have a policy prescription for this, aside from having as many babies of his own as possible. (One source told Insider that Musk explicitly expressed his preoccupation with “populating the world with his offspring,” one he shares with many, many centuries of ambitious oligarchs.)
But it’s maybe the most personal aspect of what adds up, over the course of the hour-long conversation, to a remarkably cohesive worldview. Humanity’s destiny is to transcend the surly bonds of Earth and colonize the stars, with the assistance of technology that works for us — and against censors, scolds and partisans like Mark Zuckerberg or the BBC, or hubristic rival technologists like Larry Page or OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Musk is no reactionary, and progress is not the exclusive domain of the left. The man has a very distinct set of social and cultural beliefs that he seeks to propagate through his various technological and business endeavors. When the beliefs in question were, for example, the importance of clean energy, Musk was a hero to progressives. Now that it’s the social-media equivalent of a Hobbesian state of nature, or a pro-natalist attitude that many on the left view as retrograde or eugenicist, he’s a villain. But he continues to move in the same direction: Forward, toward a future that bearing his imprint will look like nothing what came before it.
