Tech billionaire Elon Musk waxed poetic about his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency in Washington, D.C., describing the experience as significant but secondary to a more pressing challenge: preparing society for the rapid rise of disruptive artificial intelligence.
“Fixing the government is like, say, the beach is dirty and there’s some needles and feces and trash,” Musk begin in an interview with Garry Tan of Y Combinator. “But then there’s also this thousand-foot wall of water, which is a tsuami of AI.”
“How much does cleaning the beach really matter if you’ve got a thousand-foot tsumai about to hit? Not that much,” the Tesla CEO continued. “Back to the main quest of building technology, which is what I like doing.”
“The signal to noise ratio in politics is terrible,” he added.