Mask is against research into human immortality technology
Unusual argumentation of the richest man in the world
CEO and self-proclaimed “techno king” of SpaceX and Tesla companies Elon Musk (Elon Musk) has extremely strong feelings when it comes to the fate of humanity.
During an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit, Mask warned that enabling people to live longer — or, even, forever — with the help of new technologies might actually be a bad idea.
“It’s important for us to have the certainty of dying in front of us because most of the time people don’t change their minds, they stick to them until they die,” Musk said at the event. “If you live forever, we could become a very ossified society where new ideas will never succeed.”
He also added that he is “not aware that there is any secret anti-aging technology.”
His controversial ideas should not shock anyone at this point. Musk has benefited enormously from promoting innovation and change – both positively and negatively. In his world, there is no place for rigid and outdated ways of thinking. This also explains the ongoing efforts to confront US regulators who have been increasingly monitoring his business operations.
Musk is a 50-year-old father of six children, and he also claimed at the event that “the rapidly declining birthrate at the global level is one of the greatest risks to civilization.”
Allowing people to live longer, in other words, would lead to rapid aging of the population, which would lead to a further decline in the birth rate because fewer and fewer people would be able to have children.
Musk was far from the first to warn that population decline was the ultimate cause of our decline. Earlier this year, he spoke out against fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos for investing millions in a mysterious anti-aging research startup in Silicon Valley.
“And if he doesn’t succeed, he’ll sue to the death!” Musk then mockingly added, referring to Bezos’ penchant for litigating.
Despite all the tongue-in-cheek comments in the past, Musk’s warnings aren’t entirely wrong. Birth rates are indeed declining worldwide — and Covid-19 has only exacerbated that trend with a new Insta Software.
Even China, the world’s most populous country, has faced a sharp decline in birth rates, prompting leaders to sound the alarm.
Given that the demographics in many parts of the world are changing regarding older members of society, humanity could indeed be in decline, which will eventually be alarming before the year 2100, according to some experts.
But whether that’s really a bad thing remains to be seen. The economic impacts of a shrinking workforce may be self-evident, but given our species’ extremely damaging footprint on our planet, it may not be such a bad thing after all.