Elon Musk called on Thursday for the United States to “delete entire agencies” from the federal government as part of his push under President Donald Trump to radically cut spending and restructure its priorities.
Musk offered a wide-ranging survey via a videocall to the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, of what he described as the priorities of the Trump administration interspersed with multiple references to “thermonuclear warfare” and the possible dangers of artificial intelligence.
Musk offered a wide-ranging survey via a videocall to the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, of what he described as the priorities of the Trump administration interspersed with multiple references to “thermonuclear warfare” and the possible dangers of artificial intelligence.
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00:00We do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave part of them behind because if you leave
00:08part of them behind, it's easy. It's kind of like leaving a weed. If you don't remove the roots of
00:15the weed, then it's easy for the weed to grow back. But if you remove the roots of the weed,
00:20it doesn't stop weeds from ever growing back, but it makes it harder.
00:23So we have to really delete entire agencies, many of them. We really have here
00:30rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people democracy. So
00:38we want to restore rule of the people. And so what that means is reducing the size of the
00:43federal government, basically reducing regulation. There's a tremendous amount of
00:52over-regulation that's happened over time. And this is an inevitable consequence of a long
00:59period of prosperity is that you're going to get more and more rules and regulations, more laws
01:05accumulate over time. And the normal forcing function for getting rid of rules and regulations
01:11is war. So it needs some kind of existential war where you have to do a reset in order to
01:20avoid being defeated in a war. This is literally, throughout history, it's been the main forcing
01:24function for clearing out an accumulation of laws and regulation. In the absence of that,
01:31every year you get more laws and regulations until eventually everything is illegal
01:35and nothing is permitted. I think some of the things we're doing also will be
01:38helpful to hopefully helpful to other countries because with the new administration, there's
01:46less interest in interfering with the affairs of other countries. I think
01:54the times the United States has been kind of like pushy in international affairs,
02:00which may resonate with a number of the audience. And I think we should, in general,
02:07leave other countries to their own business. And basically, America should mind its own business,
02:14you know, rather than push for regime change all over the place. But human intelligence,
02:19I think, will be dwarfed by machine intelligence. I'm not sure how to feel about that, except that
02:26it is inevitable that at some point, human intelligence will be a very small fraction
02:35of total intelligence. Digital intelligence will be more than 99% of all intelligence in the future.