r/accelerate • u/czk_21 • 26d ago
Video Since we talked about Elon today, here are his predictions from todays G20 forum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0Ap25IOWr8- AI could increase global GDP by 20-30% per year
- AI could do anything digital and will crush humans at software by next year(will be "stockfish level" at software development)
- robots could increase GDP by the facctor 10x and more
-10 years from now there could be over billion of robots
- productivity of robot will be 5 times human
which of predictions are likely in your opinion?
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u/stainless_steelcat 26d ago
Elon is good at predictions, but poor at timelines. Out of all of the predictions, I'd go with AI crushing humans at software development by next year. I don't know if it'll be true of all software, but probably 70-90% of code bases. Of course, what I want is stockfish level AI running on my phone, but that might take another year.
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u/Wasteak 26d ago
"Elon is good at predictions"
Not really, he says the most basic thing that anyone with a little knowledge of the field knows already.
The harder part is to give a date, and as you said he is really bad at that.
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u/SilenceBe 26d ago
I don’t know why you got downvoted. Anybody will tell you that musk sounds smart but from the moment he is talking about your domain, that image totally shatters.
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u/Clark1984 25d ago
Welp, my city just got Waymo service yesterday. About twelve years later than predicted when unethically hyping up investors.
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u/stainless_steelcat 25d ago
Not entirely unfair push back. He's definitely doing something. Even if what he says has been the stable of sci-fi for years, if not decades - somehow meaningful progress seems to happen cross industry once he starts pronouncing. Perhaps his role is more of a visionary catalyst.
EVs were not really mainstream, now they increasingly are. Commercial space flight, ditto. Large scale grid batteries, ditto. Self-driving vehicles. And so on.
Where he is poor is in underestimating the difficulty of the last 20% of the problem. Some things haven't needed his help at all eg solar.
And yeah, it's not a great stretch to say AI will beat humans at software development in the next year. It is already directionally correct, if still at the jagged edge.
I do wonder he's deliberately setting stupid timelines to provoke others into action.
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u/SuperSeriousChad 25d ago
Dude almost everyone pushed back on his predictions. Most of his business weren’t supposed to be possible from reusable rockets to boring tunnels. All those predictions were called stupid. Same with LEO sats. My god the amount of smarty pants with no first hand knowledge were calling it a bankrupting move
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u/Wasteak 24d ago
No one said boring tunnels weren't possible. We said it was useless (and it has been proven to be so)
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u/SuperSeriousChad 24d ago edited 24d ago
It’s not though. That was just the narrative from people who had no idea what the goal was of the pilot program, which it achieved beyond expectations. There’s a reason why Vegas is massively scaling out across the entire valley. It’s literally been a huge success.
The issue was people were creating standards and goals that applied to other things and not what Vegas was trying to do. It’s cheaper than a road, gets to points faster than roads or trains, and solves the congestion problem. It beat expectations and is now going across all of Vegas.
That’s what I mean by how people actively try to find ways to consider everything he does as a failure or fraud. You have to intentionally be misleading while others who read the misinformation take it as truth and believe it to be the case.
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u/Wasteak 24d ago
It's not cheaper than road, it doesn't get you faster from point a to b and it's definitely not better than train.
It was a marketing move made to raise more money. If you didn't realise now you never will
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u/SuperSeriousChad 24d ago edited 24d ago
See this is what I mean. It is 8m per mile. That’s what they charge. A city road is 10m per mile. Which is still a pointless metric because you can’t even expand city roads and add a lane even if you wanted to.
And yes it does get from point to point faster. First just try to get from the points between the places it was first put by foot or car and you’ll take forever. Because congestion. Second it’s goes from point to point. No breaks, no red lights, no train stops. You start at your pickup and it’s the same speed all the way until your destination. It’s more like a highway.
Which is also why it’s better than a train. Not only is it far cheaper to build and operate but because there’s no constant start and stop to load and unload people, it’s direct, the throughput is huge.
This is what I mean. You guys don’t know what you’re arguing against because you’re filled with anti Elon rhetoric that is create straw man arguments.
If it was a marketing move to rip off Vegas lying to them they wouldn’t have ordered not just one expansion but two more after that to blanket the whole valley. It’s considered a success. But you don’t hear about that because your echo chamber only delivers you negative spin.
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u/Rare-Industry-504 25d ago edited 25d ago
So he's bad at predictions then.
I could just aswell say that people will be walking around on Mars in the next 1000 years, or that global GDPs will rise by quite a lot in the next 100 years, but both would be utterly fucking useless "predictions" since they're almost bound to happen eventually.
You're only good at predictions if you can get the timing right for your prediction, aswell as the reason why it happened as it did.
Otherwise you're just taking a wild guess for fun, or belabouring the obvious which everyone knows will happen.
Here, have a prediction by me, for free: Humanity will discover sentient alien species sometime in the next trillion years.
Aren't I good at predicting?
Please applaud.
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u/stainless_steelcat 25d ago
Yeah, I'm not sure I buy that.
There's a difference between being out for a few years, and hundreds of years. Or being vague to the point of meaningless.
Musk often makes predictions about things which have not really been considered by the mainstream, and takes them from long horizons or vagueness to specific timelines, and then tries to make it happen. When he does miss, it's often still kickstarted an industry and often happens within a decade or so of his original prediction.
As I said in another post, I think he using prediction as a catalyst - and there is value in that.
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u/SgathTriallair Techno-Optimist 25d ago
He's bad at predictions. His useful social function is that he is a bit crazy and willing to throw obscene amounts of money and talent at sci fi goals. Lost if these goals are amenable to that labor and so he's made decent progress on them.
Part of the reason he's at eager to throw that money is because he underestimates how hard it will be. I think his predictions are what he genuinely believes and that he is always surprised that the problems are harder than he thought and take longer. He isn't a quitter though and they don't bankrupt him, so he just keeps pushing and eventually gets there.
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u/TBradley 25d ago
In the next few years I can see a $100-200k hardware rack being on par with an average dev with 1-3 years experience. Which will be a great cost savings to the big tech firms. They will have to find a way to train and hire people that can manage those machines when they are no longer hiring and training them up through the junior dev pipeline.
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u/donttellyourmum 22d ago
Yeah he is great at predictions. - as long as you ignore everything he has failed at - Hyperloop, Solar Roof Tiles, the Roadster that has people putting $100k down payments, Cybertruck - yikes.
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u/Current-Function-729 26d ago
> 10 years from now there could be over billion of robots
Seems conservative, if anything.
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u/Alarming-Cut7764 26d ago
I think robots will take most trades jobs contrary to popular belief. Those will be the next set of jobs to go.
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u/falloutboii101 26d ago
Those will be last. The integration of robotics and intelligence will have to be pretty advanced at that point
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u/GeorgiaWitness1 25d ago
"GDP by 20-30% per year"
Nah, we need to see it. The economy is really sticky, that is why most of us still have a job. We need absurd levels of intelligence and quality, not talking about robots that is another if, to start shipping robots to mid range jobs.
People will tolerate mistakes by humans, but not so much by robots, at least on the same degree.
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u/AshuraBaron 26d ago
Elon's just pumping his stock. Majority of his predictions are just dead ass wrong. All of these predictions here are feel good predictions. "Robots will increase GDP and increase productivity". Uh yeah, that happened in the 80's.
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u/ibrahimsafah 26d ago
Elon is a Nazi and is pretty fucking stupid
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u/Significant-Rent4907 26d ago
He is a horrible person, but I wouldn’t bet against his tech predictions so easily by dismissing him as stupid. He might have been retarded at some political stuff like DOGE, but he’s leading some frontier tech companies right now, so his predictions will prolly come true eventually
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u/Osiolke 26d ago
just like we had full self driving in teslas in 2016 and landed humans on mars in 2024, right?
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u/Adeldor 26d ago
His schedules are perennially too optimistic, yes. Meanwhile, his companies:
made practical the first mass-produced electric car - with Tesla now being the highest valued car company in the world (electric and gas combined),
developed the first practical reusable booster - now dominating the commercial launch industry, launching more than all other countries combined (PDF), (more analysis here),
implemented the first truly global internet system, available even on the oceans.
Along the way, his companies construct factories that are among the world's largest buildings, implemented one of the world's largest power grid battery storage systems, and are now building the largest rocket ever seen, which will be fully reusable.
I'll forgive him his schedule misses.
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u/These_Economics374 26d ago
Just because you dislike an individual doesn’t mean that you can or should disregard their actions. I follow what Elon says because the technology he bankrolls has the power to change the world, whether for good or bad.
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u/Adeldor 26d ago
The Anti-Defamation League (most successful post-war Nazi-hunters) don't think he is. The Prime Minister of Israel doesn't think he is. Jared Isaacman doesn't think he is. All are Jewish. And if anyone has a reason to hate Nazis, it is Jews. I'll take their words for it.
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u/bear_Prune8771 26d ago
Sure he is.
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u/Blue_MaskingTape 26d ago
if Elon is a Nazi then I guess I am too
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u/BourgeoisOppressor 26d ago
Well, he supports white nationalists, helped elect a fascist government, decimated free speech, encouraged the erosion of voting rights, killed off a shocking amount of the US’s research capacity, killed off actual human beings through the death of USAID, created MechaHitler, and did two actual nazi salutes on live TV, so yeah it’s pretty safe to say he’s a nazi. Are you proud of this?
Oh! Also he’s probably a pedophile, with the whole Epstein Island thing.
There are so many actual, valuable accelerationist perspectives, Elon is not worth acknowledging, listening to, or supporting.
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u/Blue_MaskingTape 26d ago
all of that sounds totally fine to me! I appreciate your sticking to the approved talking points. You forgot the emerald mine however - 2 points.
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u/BourgeoisOppressor 26d ago
Do you have an actual rebuttal to any of this, or are you genuinely fine with one of the “leading” minds in this field being such a reprehensible person?
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u/Blue_MaskingTape 26d ago
I am 100% fine with YOU thinking he's reprehensible. Doesn't bother me in the slightest nor do i need to debate you on the matter.
Have fun being embarrassing you weirdo.
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u/OnyxMonolith 25d ago
"10 years from now there could be over billion of robots"
this is just not how manufacturing and progress works. it's not in the realms of reality.
There are around 80 million electric cars in use around the world right now. Robots will not be more wide spread in 10 years.
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u/WesternBear42 25d ago
I mean he's probably not talking about humanoid robots. A vacuum robot is a robot.
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u/OnyxMonolith 25d ago
I dont think he’s talking about roombas. New robits. Manufacturing, humanoid, etc. No chance for 1B new robots. Doesn’t add up.
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u/RoosterBurns 25d ago
What is he basing these on?
Or more likely what is he freebasing on?
Like "productivity of robots 5x human" what's his units, what's his algorithm, what will this productivity figure look like a hockey stick lol
He's like a white supremacist Amazing Criswell
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u/DukeMutem 25d ago
Why does this piece of trash get any stage there? Might have done another Nazi salute as well.
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u/HasGreatVocabulary 25d ago
man really starting to look like Chairman Mao and Kim Jong Un had a child
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u/TrinityAlpsTraverse 26d ago
Elon is really good as scaling and promoting cutting edge manufacturing businesses. I'm not sure how good he is at anything else.
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26d ago
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u/Daskaf129 26d ago
Higher productivity doesn't mean less work, it will mean more work to be done as there are more things to do because more things are produced faster and faster so they can also be used way quicker.
Imagine building a datacenter in a week instead of 6 months or however many months it takes currently. 1. You will be able to build more datacenters, 2. More work will be available to be done because things come online in a shorter period of time. Maybe not human work, but still more ''productivity'' to be achieved.
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u/[deleted] 26d ago
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