Queues and queues of people, over two floors, eagerly awaited Elon Musk’s return to the Cannes Lions Festival in 2024. For his panel titled: ‘Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation’, Musk took a friendlier approach with advertisers compared to last year when he basically, well… told them to ‘f*** off.’
One fan posted a picture on X of what the middle of the queue to see Musk at Cannes Lions looked like. With heaps of people and no dividers, it was hard to tell where the queue started or ended. However, the tech billionaire did well to answer some of our burning questions for 45 minutes.
‘I think you’ll see radical changes like… next year,’ he stated plainly. The convo around Tesla’s Optimus and the advances of AI was an intriguing one. The interviewer asked where the Tesla CEO was up to with the development of Optimius. As a ‘fully functional humanoid robot,’ Musk described that you can ask it do anything from walking your dog to taking care of the kids or cooking dinner.
‘I think everyone will want one,’ he said. ‘Because why not?’
Musk believes there will be enough robots for every person. With high demand and the industry keeping extras in stock, there could eventually be 20 billion humanoid robots walking among us. Luckily, Musk confirmed no plans to make these robots look like humans, so at least we’ll still be able to distinguish them from us before life turns a little too much like Detroit: Become Human.
‘I think people will start to regard their personal Optimus robot as sort of a friend,’ Musk added. Though we hope there will be no issues with voice copyright like the backlash OpenAI is currently facing with actress Scarlett Johansson.
The SpaceX owner also covered other AI topics and answered questions about our future with AI – especially in the midst of uncertainty. Musk predicted the chance of AI-related disaster at ’10 to 20%’ while doubling down on the importance of free speech over advertiser demands for censorship.
‘I tend to agree with Geoff Hinton – one of the godfathers of AI – and he thinks there’s a 10-20% probability of something terrible happening.’ He didn’t specify what ‘terrible’ means exactly but added: ‘The glass is 80% full. Look on the bright side.’
He continued: ‘I think the most likely outcome is one of abundance, where goods and services are available to anyone. There’s no shortage for any one of us. It would be a universal hike. Work would be optional.’
