Elon Musk Thinks Mars' First Settlers Won't Be Human, But An Artificial Intelligence Entity

With SpaceX, CEO Elon Musk has been pushing hard to be one of the first manned missions to Mars. He wants to see the red planet conquered by humans and colonized.

However, he thinks there's a chance its first settler won't be human at all.

Last week, the billionaire responded to a Twitter question, as he oft does, this one asking him if there was a possibility of a sophisticated artificial intelligence touching down on Mars before humans. His answer was pretty succinct.

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¡ª Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 27, 2018

Now, this answer is pretty big for Musk. He's in the past expressed his views of the massive danger AI proposes to humanity, even helping found the group Open AI to be a sort of watch dog for irresponsible AI development.

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Of course, he's not ignorant of the good AI can do, he's just in the past chosen to focus on the drawbacks of its potential if abused. So for him to be so cavalier about AI helping Martian colonists could mean one of two things:

He's either resigned himself to the fact that AI and automated robots would be far too invaluable to an early colony on an alien planet to worry about the danger. Either that, or he's already had the idea to develop an AI through SpaceX for the task, in such a way that he can keep an eye on it for potential red flags.

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Frankly, either of those is a good outcome, and it wouldn't be strange for SpaceX to once again diversify into other non-space research as well. Heck, maybe we'll even see a future SpaceX Starship piloted solely by an AI. Maybe it'll be a retrained version of Open AI's insanely smart Dota 2 neural network.