Elon Musk Must read books I read all the BOOKS recommended by Elon musk
Elon Reeve Musk FRS is a business magnate, industrial designer, and engineer. He is the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI
The Lord of the Rings’ by J. R. R. Tolkien
Musk had a nickname when he was a shrimpy, smart-mouthed kid growing up in South Africa: Muskrat.
in his loneliness, he read a lot of fantasy and science fiction.”
Those books — notably “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien — shaped Musk’s vision of his future self. The heroes of the books I read always felt a duty to save the world
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams
this comedic sci-fi book, a supercomputer finds the “answer” to a meaningful life who read this book as a young teenager in South Africa, the book was instrumental to his thinking.
guess when I was around 12 or 15 … I had an existential crisis, and I was reading various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean? It all
“God’s Final Message to His Creation:
‘We apologize for the inconvenience.”
“Life… is like a grapefruit. Well, it’s sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”
“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
“In the beginning, the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
“Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.”
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life’ by Walter Isaacson
Musk has called Benjamin Franklin “one of his heroes,” in multiple interviews
Franklin was one of the US’ founding fathers and an accomplished inventor.
“Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.”
“When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.”
“History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.”
“progress, the concept that individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based on a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity.”
“He wished to please everybody,” Franklin later said of Keith, “and having little to give, he gave expectations.”
“he was more comfortable exploring practical thoughts and real-life situations than metaphysical abstractions or deductive proofs.
‘Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down’ by J.E. Gordon
When Musk decided to start SpaceX, he was coming from a coding background. But he took it upon himself to learn the fundamentals of rocket science.
One of the books that helped him was “Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down,” a popular take on structural engineering by J.E. Gordon, a British material scientist.
“It is really, really good if you want a primer on structural design,
explains the basic forces that hold together the ordinary and essential things of this world — from buildings and bodies to flying aircraft and eggshells.
Musk intimately got involved with the planning and design of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. He has served as the chief designer at SpaceX along with his CEO duties.
“When you climb the tower of a cathedral it becomes shorter, as a result of your added weight, by a very, very tiny amount, but it really does become shorter.”
Mathematics is to the scientist and the engineer a tool, to the professional mathematician a religion, but to the ordinary person a stumbling-block.”
“Survival became a matter of chasing and being chased, eating and being eaten.”
“to get anywhere worth while without the higher mathematics is not only impossible but that it would be vaguely immoral if you could.”
“pressure acts in all three directions within a fluid while the stress in a solid is often a directional or one-dimensional affair.”
‘Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down’ by J.E. Gordon
Musk has repeatedly warned against the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence
“We need to be super careful with AI,” he tweeted in 2014, saying it’s “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”
He added: “We are rapidly heading towards digital superintelligence that far exceeds any human. I think it’s very obvious.”
To find out why these risks are so scary, Musk says it’s worth reading Nick Bostrom’s “Superintelligence.” The book makes the daring inquiry into what would happen if computational intelligence surpassed human intelligence.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is a 2014 book by the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom from the University of Oxford. It argues that if machine brains surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could replace humans as the dominant lifeform on Earth.
“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization — a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”
“The computer scientist Donald Knuth was struck that “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’ — that, somehow, is much harder!”
“(On one estimate, the adult human brain stores about one billion bits — a couple of orders of magnitude less than a low-end smartphone.”
“Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.”
“The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.”
“Human working memory is able to hold no more than some four or five chunks of information at any given time.”
Our Final Invention’ by James Barrat
Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, James Barrat’s Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own?
“AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity — if AI has a goal and humanity just happens in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings,” he said in a documentary about artificial intelligence.
“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. — Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute”
“The strongest argument for why advanced AI needs a body may come from its learning and development phase — scientists may discover it’s not possible to “grow” AGI without some kind of body.”
“Is knowledge the same thing as intelligence? No, but knowledge is an intelligence amplifier, if intelligence is, among other things, the ability to act nimbly and powerfully in your environment.”
“Unlike our intelligence, machine-based superintelligence will not evolve in an ecosystem in which empathy is rewarded and passed on to subsequent generations.”
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’ by Max Tegmark
Life 3.0 discusses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on the future of life on Earth and beyond. The book discusses a variety of societal implications, what can be done to maximize the chances of a positive outcome, and potential futures for humanity, technology and combinations thereof.
book begins with a fictitious story of how a team (Omega) took over the world using Prometheus, an ultra-intelligent AI that could learn anything and even design other machines. In a matter of years, Prometheus had developed breakthrough systems and inventions, managed global resources optimally, shared a fraction of this wealth to improve the lives of billions of people, and created a new world order. All these were achieved without anyone realizing AI was behind it, and Omega also managed to prevent Prometheus from “breaking out” and taking control of its own destiny.
3 major camps that have different views on if/when Life 3.0 will happen and what it means for mankind:
(i) Digital Utopians,
(ii) Techno-Skeptics and
(iii) The Beneficial-AI movement.
“computer scientists call validation: whereas verification asks “Did I build the system right?,” validation asks “Did I build the right system?”
when people ask about the meaning of life as if it were the job of our cosmos to give meaning to our existence, they’re getting it backward: It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”
“We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.”
“let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.”
“It’s not our universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our universe”
“Since there can be no meaning without consciousness, it’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”
