“It’s important for us to die because more often than not people don’t change their minds, they just die.”
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has strong feelings when it comes to our fate as a civilization.
During an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Leadership Council summit on Monday, Musk warned that letting people live longer – or presumably forever – with new technology could be a really bad idea.
“It’s important for us to die because most of the time people don’t change their minds, they just die,” Musk said at the event. “If you live forever, we can become a very incarcerated society in which new ideas can’t succeed.”
Musk also added that he “doesn’t know of any secret anti-aging technology.”
His ideas shouldn’t shock anyone. Musk is a man of ideas who has benefited enormously from promoting innovation and change – for better or worse. There is no place in his world for rigid and outdated thinking.
This also explains his constant attempts to stand up to U.S. regulators, who are increasingly scrutinizing his activities. The news also comes after he called earlier this month for “age limits” for U.S. government executives.
Musk, a 50-year-old father of six, also said at the event that the “rapid decline in the birth rate” on a global scale is “one of the biggest risks to civilization.”
In other words, allowing people to live longer will lead to a rapidly aging population, which will lead to a further decline in the birth rate as fewer and fewer people will be able to have children.
This is not the first time Musk has warned that population decline will eventually cause our decline. Earlier this year, he took a jab at fellow space company billionaire Jeff Bezos for investing millions in a mysterious research startup in Silicon Valley.
“And if that doesn’t work, he’ll sue to death!” Musk mockingly added at the time, referring to Bezos’ penchant for litigation.
Despite all the facetiousness and frivolous comments in the past, Musk’s warnings are not entirely wrong. Birth rates are indeed declining all over the world – and COVID-19 has only exacerbated the trend.
Even China, the most populous country in the world, has seen its birth rate plummet, causing leaders to sound the alarm.
Given that demographics in most of the world tend to be aging, humanity may indeed be on the verge of decline, which experts believe may begin even before 2100.
But whether this is so bad remains to be seen. The economic consequences of a shrinking workforce may be obvious, but given the enormous damage our species is doing to our planet, it may not be such a bad thing.
