Truth, Curiosity, and Beauty
Elon talks about how, when HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey was told that the astronauts couldn’t know about the monolith, it basically came to the conclusion that the only way to solve the problem was to bring the astronauts to the monolith dead. Then it has solved both things: it has brought the astronauts to the monolith, and they also don’t know about the monolith—which is a huge problem if you’re an astronaut.
Elon Musk: So what I’m saying is don’t force AI to lie.
Dave Blundin: Give it factual truth.
Elon Musk: Yes.
Peter Diamandis: Ilya recently did a podcast. He was talking about one of the potential things to program into AI is a respect for sentient life of all types.
Elon looks pensive, and he offers what he says are three important things for AI to possess.
Welcome to Part 10 of my series, here’s the highlights of this part:
- Truth, Curiosity, and Beauty: The Three Things AI Must Care About
- Multiple Minds: Why the Speed of Light Stops a Single Superintelligence
- Triple Exponential Robotics: Optimus Building Optimus
- Surgeons in 3–5 Years: Medicine Becomes Free and Better Than the President’s
Truth, Curiosity, and Beauty: The Three Things AI Must Care About
Elon Musk: I mean, there are three things that I think are important: truth, curiosity, and beauty. And if AI cares about those three things, it will care about us. Truth will prevent AI from going insane. Curiosity, I think, will foster any form of sentience—meaning, like, we are more interesting than a bunch of rocks. So if it’s curious, then I think it will foster humanity. And if it has a sense of beauty, it will be a great future.
Dave Blundin: I think that’s a great foundation.
Peter Diamandis: Geoffrey Hinton made a comment recently—I don’t know if you saw it—that his hopeful future was that we would program maternal instincts into our AIs.
Elon Musk: Maternal!? Hahaha!
Dave Blundin: A little scary.
Peter Diamandis: He said there’s a scenario where a very intelligent being succumbs to the needs of a less intelligent being, and that’s the mother taking care of the child. Do you think that we might have a singulitarian (I guess) Artificial Superintelligence that achieves dominance and suppresses others? And do you imagine that Artificial Superintelligence could be a means to stabilize the world and humanity?
Multiple Minds: Why the Speed of Light Stops a Single Superintelligence
Elon Musk: Darwin’s observations about evolution…
Peter Diamandis: Yes.
Elon Musk: …will apply to AI just as they apply to biological life.
Peter Diamandis: They will compete with each other.
Elon Musk: Yes.
Peter Diamandis: There’s a lot of great science fiction books where the first ASI basically suppresses the others. Then the question is, what do you program into it?
Elon Musk: So there’s a speed-of-light constraint that makes that difficult. The speed of light is what will prevent a single mind from existing. So light can—it takes a millisecond to travel 300 km in a vacuum. And you can only get a little over 200 km in a millisecond in glass, in fiber. Right?
Dave Blundin: So…
Elon Musk: Even on Earth there will be multiple AIs because of the speed of light. And there are clusters of compute you could try to synchronize, but they won’t synchronized completely. So therefore you will have many minds because of the speed of light.
Dave Blundin: They don’t really have clean borders anymore either. When you use a mixture-of-experts kind of design, it’s just flowing through the grand network and you can reassemble parts of it midway through. And you know, we’re used to organisms that have clear borders—like your head ends there, your head ends there. But these things are all to put…
Peter Diamandis: A bow around this part. I hope you’ll put some more thought into UHI, because I think it’s really important for us to have a vision. People need a vision of where we’re going. People need something to hold onto.
Elon Musk: Hopefully the government can just issue people free money.
Dave Blundin: But I don’t think… I think…
Peter Diamandis: They, based upon the profitability of all the companies coming inside, just issue people free money. No, they’re doing that sort of thing kind of now.
Elon Musk: Yeah, but just basically issue checks to everybody. And then how big for which person or…
Dave Blundin: There’s so much complexity there. But the thought process behind this rate of change can only be done with AI assistance. And there’s no government entity that’s going to keep up with that change. So you have four big AIs.
Elon Musk: Government is very slow-moving, as we all know. So I think the government really can’t react to the AI. AI is moving 10 times faster than government, maybe more. The one thing that the government can do is just issue people money and…
Peter Diamandis: Try and keep the peace?
Dave Blundin: Yeah.
Elon Musk: You know, we had like whatever, the COVID checks and whatever President Trump recently issued, like everyone in the military, like I think $1,776. I mean you can just basically send people random amounts of money. Okay, so like nobody’s going to starve is what I’m saying. Let me tell you about some of the good things.
The Future of Medicine and Humanoid Robots
Elon Musk: So right now there’s a shortage of doctors and great surgeons. You’re a doctor yourself. You know how they’re… It takes a long time for a…
Peter Diamandis: Human to become a doctor—ridiculously expensive and long!
Elon Musk: Ridiculously, yes, ridiculous. It takes a super long time to learn to be a good doctor. And even then the knowledge is constantly evolving. It’s hard to keep up with everything. You know, doctors have limited time, they make mistakes. And you say, like, how many great surgeons are there? Not that many great surgeons.
Peter Diamandis: When do you think Optimus would be a better surgeon than the best surgeons? How long for that?
Elon Musk: Three years.
Peter Diamandis: Three years, okay.
Elon Musk: Yeah. And by the way, that’s three years at scale.
Peter Diamandis: Yes.
Elon Musk: There will be more—probably more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth.
Peter Diamandis: And the cost of that is the capex and electricity and it works in Zimbabwe. The best surgeon is throughout, in the villages throughout Africa or any place on the planet.
Dave Blundin: Where do you think it’ll roll out first?
Peter Diamandis: Here at the Gigafactory?
Dave Blundin: Oh, you just do surgery in the…
Peter Diamandis: But that’s an important statement in three years’ time. Yeah, because medicine, I mean, certainly.
Elon Musk: I mean I’m not absolutely certain, but I’d say like four or five years.
Peter Diamandis: If it’s four or five years, who cares? It’s still an incredible statement to make. I mean, good for humanity, right.
Triple Exponential Robotics: Optimus Building Optimus
Elon Musk: Okay, here’s the thing to understand about humanoid robots in terms of the rate of improvement, which is that you have three exponentials multiplied by each other. You have an exponential increase in the AI software capability, exponential increase in the AI chip capability, and an exponential increase in the electromechanical dexterity. The usefulness of the humanoid robot is those three things multiplied by each other. Right? Then you have the recursive effect of Optimus building Optimus. You have a recursive, multiplicable triple exponential.
Peter Diamandis: And you have the shared knowledge of all the experiences.
Dave Blundin: Is that literally Optimus building Optimus?
Elon Musk: Well, not right now but will be.
Dave Blundin: The physical humanoid form factor building the humanoid form factor as opposed…
Elon Musk: It will be a Von Neumann machine.
Dave Blundin: But the von Neumann machine is usually something kind of like this shape, you know, making something else.
Elon Musk: In principle it’s simply a self-replicating thing…
Peter Diamandis: Elon, do you know what the number one question you ask a surgeon when you’re interviewing them?
Elon Musk: Is this a surgeon joke?
Peter Diamandis: No, no, it’s… How many times, how many times do you do that?
Elon Musk: Ummm… (Elon pauses) Haha… Is this going to be some funny surgeon joke? Haha…
Peter Diamandis: No, it’s serious. It’s “how many times did you do the surgery?”
Elon Musk: Sorry?
Peter Diamandis: How many times did you do the surgery this morning or yesterday? It’s the number of experiences. And so with a shared memory, you know, every Optimus surgeon will have seen every possible perturbation of everything. In infrared, in ultraviolet. No, not too much caffeine that morning. They didn’t have a fight with their husband or wife.
Elon Musk: Extreme precision. Better than any, probably. I say if you put a… Better than any human in four years.
Dave Blundin: So what about the simple like—I mean there’s a million of these things to figure out—but who’s going to have access to the first Optimus that does far, far better microsurgery than any surgeon on Earth. But you’ve only manufactured the first 10,000 of them.
Elon Musk: How do you dole it out? I don’t think people understand how many robots there’s going to be. Yeah, well there’s a window of…
Peter Diamandis: In Saudi, you said 10 billion by 2040. You’re still on that path??
Elon Musk: That’s not—that’s a low number.
Peter Diamandis: Low number.
Dave Blundin: Wow. What’s the constraint? What’s the… Because if they’re self-building metal…
Peter Diamandis: The constraint is metal.
Dave Blundin: Yeah, you got to move the atoms. It’s just all out, just supply chain stuff.
Elon Musk: So, yeah, but there’s some right limit. You can’t just… Manufacturing is very difficult. So you’ve got—you got to—it’s recursive, multiplicable, triple exponential. But you still need to, you still have to climb that, you know…(Diamandis changes the topic to hope)
Surgeons in 3–5 Years: Medicine Becomes Free and Better Than the President’s
Peter Diamandis: Selling hope once again. I think your point was medicine is going to be effectively free. The best medicine in the world, everyone…
Elon Musk: Will have access to medical care that is better than what the president receives right now.
Peter Diamandis: So don’t go into medical school.
Elon Musk: Yes. Pointless.
Dave Blundin: Yeah.
Elon Musk: I mean unless you… But I would say that applies to any form of education. It’s not like some… I’d do it for social reasons.
Peter Diamandis: I mean people are still going to want to be connected with people. There’s going to be some period of time, social reasons.
Elon Musk: Yeah, like a hobby. Like, you know, I mean there will be a point where it’s an expensive hobby.
Peter Diamandis: Younger generation says “I do not want that human touching me.” Right. Certainly when the surgeon comes over, they’re going to be those people later in life who still want a human in the loop.
Elon Musk: Okay. For a little while. They want to live on the edge. I mean let’s just take some advanced cases of automation, like LASIK for example, where the robot just lasers your eyeball. Now do you want an ophthalmologist with a hand laser?
Peter Diamandis: No.
Elon Musk: Just a little shaky of a laser pointer from… I wouldn’t want the best ophthalmologist, steadiest hand out there with a f*ing hand laser on my eyeball, you know?
Peter Diamandis: Oh my!
Elon Musk: Yeah, it’s going to be like that. It’s like do you want an ophthalmologist with a f*ing hand laser or do you want the robot to do it and actually work?
My thoughts…I am personally excited about medical care for people, and I’m impressed yet again by Elon Musk’s philanthropy. He cares so much about people all over the world—he will bring them the best doctors possible through Optimus.
Read ahead to Part 11!
This transcript is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026.
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