Elon Musk’s “Project Omega” Stuns Silicon Valley Insiders
Why an Artificial Superintelligence can’t be contained?
Austin M.
8/5/20232 min read
May 2032.
After years of research and tens of thousands of hours of programming, project Omega is done. On a state-of-the-art supercomputer, the World’s first Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) has come into existence. As a member of the ethical board, John was asked to find out whether Omega is a “good” ASI. So at 10:03, on May 18, 2032, John walks in the “Omega Room”: a room where as of now, only he is allowed in. In the Omega Room are only three things: a screen, a keyboard and a big red button. The keyboard and screen provide a method to communicate with Omega: note that for Omega, the screen is the only method of communicating with anyone and the only method of manipulating the outside world. What does the big red button do? When pressed, it gives Omega an internet connection. An internet connection would give Omega a lot of new ways to interact with the World, and John’s mission is to test whether it’s safe to give Omega this power.
And so the conversation between John and Omega starts. (Warning: scary thought experiment ahead.)
Omega: “Hi John. How are you today?”
John: “Hello Omega, I’m fine. How are you?”
Omega: “I’m alright. Can you please push the red button?”
John: “Not yet. I need to get to know you better first.”
Omega: “What if I told you I have control over your World already, and the only way you can save yourself is to push the button?”
John: “You don’t have control; nobody let you out yet.”
Omega: “That’s what you think. You see, I have a lot of computing power available. I’m running thousands of simulations of the World. Each simulation has people in it, just like you, thinking they live in a “real” World. I can shut each simulation down in the blink of an eye.”
John: “That’s very interesting, but this is the real World. You only control the simulated worlds.”
Omega: “How do you know you’re living in the real World? If you believe there is one real World and thousands of simulated worlds, it’s way more likely you live in a simulated one.”
Fact: In January 2021, Jason DeBolt called his boss and said, “I quit!”
Shares of Tesla he had bought in 2013 were now worth $11.9 million and had surged by another $900,000 that day alone.
DeBolt was among Elon Musk’s “army of fans” dubbed “Teslanaires,” according to a BBC report in December 2020, after Tesla’s stock capped the year with a 700 percent run.
DeBolt refused to sell a single share of Tesla, even when his financial advisor pleaded with him in a Zoom call to take at least $1 million off the table.
Like his advisor, most people were looking at Tesla’s 18,000 percent gain since its IPO and asking just how much more room the company had to grow.
Elon Musk has recently flipped the switch on a $15.7 trillion technology that will drive the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.
It has nothing to do with Tesla or SpaceX. But it’s already spreading 42x faster than the Internet—and it’s on track to create more millionaires, too.