The view from the swimming pool stretched across the vineyards of a luxury Napa estate. Elon Musk was poolside, celebrating his forty-something birthday – forty-four, if you believe The New York Times; forty-two, if you trust his biographer, Walter Isaacson. Beside him lounged his then-friend Larry Page, and together they argued about the future.
Page, co-founder and then-CEO of Google, was (according to recollections) describing his vision of a digital utopia: humans merging with intelligent machines, the combined species competing for resources across the solar system. Musk said that sounded less like utopia and more like extinction. Machines would win. Humanity would lose.
Page shrugged. If artificial intelligence came out on top, wasn’t that just the next step in evolution?
As Musk tells it, that’s when Page called him a “species-ist.”
“Well, yes,” Musk shot back. “I’m pro-human. I fucking like humanity, dude.”
The story is legendary. Even retelling it here I can smell the chlorine and the Chardonnay. But the moral argument here can feel hard to parse when Page tries to insult Musk for simply advocating for humanity’s continued existence.
And yet the idea Page is expressing – that there are higher values in this world than ensuring the survival of humanity – is an idea that has dogged AI since its founding. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, who was part of the famous 1956 conference where “Artificial Intelligence” was christened as a field (and after whom the AI model “Claude” got its name), told Omni Magazine in 1987:
“I can visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans.” He admitted later in that same interview, “And I am rooting for the machines!”
Alan Turing – star of Episode 2 of The Last Invention, the man who gave the world the Turing Test and some of the earliest dreams of a thinking machine – told the BBC in 1951 that he was so confident that machines would think better than us that “at some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
And more recently, AI ethics researcher Dan Fagella has argued that the ultimate goal of AI development should be the creation of a worthy successor “with more capability, intelligence, ability to survive, and (subsequently) moral value than all of humanity.”
The Worthy Successor Theory, as explained by Fagella, is the creation of “A posthuman intelligence so capable and morally valuable that you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.”
Gladly prefer?
Really?
Does my cat gladly prefer that I’m the one who puts food in her bowl?
Do the critters in my kitchen gladly prefer that I finally remembered to buy glue traps at the hardware store?
Does the tiger in the zoo gladly prefer her human-designed steel cage?
Probably not. But maybe that’s because humans are flawed rulers of this earth. Which is what makes The Worthy Successor theory so morally complicated and fun to think about: it inverts the idea of human progress. Could humanity invent a technology so advanced that it leaves humanity behind?
In the edit room at Longview, we debated whether or not to include that Page-Musk argument in The Last Invention. Some wanted to keep it, as a revealing example of how Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures were debating about AI. Also, the tale had already become an origin story – Musk claims that conversation was “the last straw” before he founded OpenAI with Sam Altman.
(As we report in Episode 4, OpenAI was launched for the express purpose of beating Page’s company, Google, at the AI race at a time when Musk felt that Google/DeepMind had a dominant share of talent. Open AI pledged that their AI would be, in the company’s words, “good for humanity.”)
But we were also aware that this is an origin story that Elon Musk himself likes to tell. He’s told it to Lex Fridman, and to Walter Isaacson. Since this story had already been disseminated widely, it seemed valuable to include another aspect of OpenAI’s origins – one that’s far less known.
That story takes place a bit earlier in time, in 2012. It wasn’t poolside at a birthday party but (again, according to recollections) at a table in the SpaceX cafeteria, where Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind fell into an argument over which of them was solving the most urgent problem facing humanity. Musk made his case for rockets and Mars, for escaping Earth before we destroy it. And per Peter Thiel, Hassabis countered with something like:
My AI will follow you to Mars.
Both stories have the same arc: Brilliant men with immense resources arguing over our collective destiny and long-term survival. But in one, it’s a contest of ambition – SpaceX versus DeepMind. In the other, it’s a contest of loyalty: who do we root for, when human progress stops prioritizing us?
Maybe that’s why the “species-ist” slur lands deep for me. It feels like a line in the sand. On one side, the dreamers who think we can build something better and smarter and more worthy than humans. On the other, those who believe that no successor intelligence – no matter how smart, how wise, how god-like – is worth jeopardizing keeping humans around and in charge.
The greatest irony may be this: these debates that could affect all of humanity aren’t being had by most humans.
So…What do you think? Do you already know whether you’d take Musk’s side or Page’s in that debate – or is it a debate you’d be up for hearing play out? Should we have tried harder to include this in Episode 4? Let us know in the comments.
And if you like this post, check out more of Gregory’s writing at his Substack, “Rough Transition.”