As we enter into 2024, wanted to express my views based on a few things that Elon Musk has been doing.
This is based on the following facts around Elon Musk’s businesses:
- SpaceX MARS mission is becoming better and better with every test of the Starship, aimed to carry humans to Mars one day. As an initial step here, we can expect Moon to be used as the test bed for carrying out some of the exercises that SpaceX would want to carry out on Mars.
- Optimus Gen2 robot has been released which has shown significant progress and is ready to take on dangerous tasks that humans cannot do. Also, Optimus Gen2 has self learning capability. Which means that without any code change, with additional data feeding, Optimus Gen2 can become better day by day.
- Neuralink has made significant progress and with AGI maturing day by day, we can expect humans to be able to harness the power of AI using Neuralink, without depending on an external AI engine.
- Self driving cars will mature in 2024.
With AI and robots, there is always the topic of the known suspects such as ethics (morality, duty, accountability) and society (jobs, discrimination etc). I am sure the leaders in AI today (Elon Musk / Sam Altman / Sundar Pichai) will focus on addressing that topic also. Hence keeping it outside of scope of the topic for this article.
Based on the above four facts, the best case scenario shows the first SpaceX flight carrying robots to moon to land on the moon and start building the first colony by driving around in self driven cars on the moon in 2025. They will be controlled by humans in SpaceX command centres using VR. This will get a colony ready for humans on the moon – not as a permanent base but as a test bed to understand the difficulties that we can expect when we go to Mars.
When you see the progress of AI/SpaceX/Optimus/Neuralink in 2024, I am sure you will be reminded of this prediction made for 2025.
Wish all humans and robots a very happy new year 2024.