Elon Musk on first principles & engineering
Musk's method is to reason from first principles and think in the limit, trusting only what has predictive value and testing every conclusion against physics, which he calls the law while everything else is a recommendation. In practice that means finding the physical floor on cost, as with a rocket's raw materials or a tunnel's cross-section, and attacking each cost driver, and insisting that reusability only counts if it is rapid and complete.
10 points · 6 appearances · 2017–2025
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2017–2026
“And I would say that is, that forms the basis of my philosophy, which is that we don't know the meaning of life, but the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, digital and biological, the more we're able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. So I have a philosophy of curiosity.”
2017–2026 · changed view
“I think it's important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if we're not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multiplanet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have.”
2020–2026 · changed view
“If an AI cannot figure out new physics, it's clearly not equal to humans, let alone nor has surpassed humans, 'cause humans have figured out new physics.”
2024–2026
“Well, you can really think of the economy as digital and physical intelligence. So what we have right now advancing very rapidly is digital intelligence. Obviously with AI, that is, it seems almost with every passing week there are more AI breakthroughs. It can do something amazing that it couldn't do before. But it's still somewhat confined to the digital realm. It doesn't have end effectors. You need the end effectors in the form of humanoid robotics. Human, you need a basically a lots of bots, in a nutshell. You need lots of bots. And then you can go from intelligence manifesting itself only digitally to shaping atoms. And you say, what is an economy? An economy is the production of goods and provision of services. And if you have vast numbers of robots with vast amounts of digital intelligence, you have a sort of a quasi infinite economy. So this is really, the future is going to be very, very different from the past. There's no analogy or metaphor that I think illustrates the magnitude of change that we're going to experience here.”