Elon Musk, Lex Fridman See Language Evolving With Help Of Artificial Intelligence

Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk said on Monday he believes English will not be the spoken language 7,000 years in the future, responding to a discussion on civilization, technology and artificial intelligence.

What Happened: Musk was responding to Tesla AI lead Andrej Karpathy’s post on Twitter in which he said semiconductor technology is probably the deepest point in the civilization's explored technology tree so far and wondered if there are any more such examples.

A friend yesterday mentioned that semiconductor tech is probably the deepest node in our civilization's explored tech tree. This actually sounds right, but is also a fun concept, any other candidates?

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) August 22, 2021

Karpathy’s post drew a comment from AI researcher and popular podcaster Lex Fridman, who said that language as a technology has been explored deep enough and still has room for more discoveries with some help from AI.

Musk added that there was barely any sign of English about 7,000 years ago and the same is likely true looking 7,000 years into the future. 

My son asked if we would still speak English 7000 years from now. I said probably not. There was not even the faintest hint of English 7000 years ago.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2021

Why It Matters: Musk has been aiming to change the perception surrounding Tesla from an electric vehicle manufacturer to a robotics company.

Tesla last week unveiled a humanoid robot called the Tesla Bot that runs on the same AI used by electric vehicle maker’s fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Tesla is also leading its Autonomous Driving efforts with a pure vision-based system rather than radar-based. Karpathy has in the recent past detailed how the company is developing deep learning systems that only need video input to make sense of the car’s surroundings.

Price Action: Tesla shares closed 1.01% higher at $680.26 on Friday.

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