What To Expect On March 1st

I’ve been reading Elon Musks’ Master Plans (Part 1, Part 2) since they first came out and I have to give him credit for how much he’s achieved. It’s not easy to write a ten year plan and then go on to achieve nearly every aspect of that plan. It’s even harder to do it twice. However, over the course of the last two decades I’ve gone from major fan boy to concerned citizen on high alert.

On March 1st, 2023 Elon Musk will share his third iteration of his Master Plan: Part Trois, if you will. In honor of the event I thought I’d layout what I expect to see in the coming decade, and I thought, given the circumstances, it’d be interesting to include commentary from ChatGPT in this somehow.

In this article you’ll first read ChatGPT’s predictions about Part 3, followed by my opinion about things ChatGPT left out and things the media has yet to realize.

Conveniently Optimistic

I started by prompting ChatGPT with “Write Elon Musk’s Master Plan, Part Trois.” Part Trois, according to ChatGPT, is to create a unified, sustainable energy ecosystem that expands beyond Earth. This will be achieved by:

1. Increasing the production of Tesla’s solar roof and Powerwall products, which allow customers to generate their own energy.
2. Expanding the reach of Tesla’s energy products to other countries and regions.
3. Developing a global network of charging stations and energy storage solutions to make electric vehicles more accessible and affordable.
4. Continuing to push the boundaries of battery technology and solar energy, to make renewable energy more efficient and cost-effective.
5. Furthering the development of electric vehicles and autonomous driving technology, to reduce the environmental impact of transportation.
6. Investing in space exploration technologies, such as the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft, to make human space travel and exploration more accessible.
7. Partnering with governments and private companies to develop new technologies that can be used to colonize Mars and beyond.

By following this plan, ChatGPT wrote, “Elon Musk hopes to create a future where humanity is no longer dependent on fossil fuels and can access sustainable energy sources wherever they may be.”

That was all copy/paste straight from the outputs. I was surprised at how accurate ChatGPT is but also had some apprehension about how much it left out. For anyone who didn’t know better, this writeup would be quite the press release—very succinct and optimistic. But for those who know better, it failed to provide critical information and insights about the larger ecosystem Musk is building. It lacks depth and critical thinking beyond the rosy PR statement, leaving out details that should be scrutinized.

Elon’s Master Ecosystem

Elon Musk is a man who thinks in ecosystems and makes decisions based on things he sees happening decades down the road. ChatGPT did a great job of summarizing Musk’s work with Tesla and Solar City, but let’s take a moment to think about Musk’s entire portfolio. Think about what could be done with his other assets: Neuralink, Twitter, Starlink and OpenAI.

Neuralink is a small step away from mind control

Despite high rate of botched surgical work in his Neuralink trials and a potential FDA investigation, Elon is planning to launch Neuralink into human trials in 2023 unless someone, or some institution, stops him. While this tool is being built for an altruistic public facing mission, could this be yet another Silicon Valley effective altruism effort with ulterior motives?

A device like Neuralink would give the company direct access to the brains they’re plugged into. Fanatics might say that’ll never happen or Elon won’t allow it, but the fact of the matter is we’ve heard that time and again from tech companies only to find rampant abuse of the technology decades later. In an era of robber-baron tech entrepreneurs, its hard to remain faithful in data pirates, especially when the captain steering the ship is Elon Musk—a man who recently required Twitter users to pay for the ability to have basic security on their account.

Next consider that despite their high claims of security Tesla has been hacked by teenagers, and with the explosion in cyberattacks worldwide it’s guaranteed to only get worse. Technologists have discussed their fear of having an internet-connected car getting hacked and driven off the road or into oncoming traffic, but imagine if someone could hack your brain.

What happens when Neuralink gets hacked and swarms of everyday citizens get turned into a mind-controlled, militia? Sure, brain control seems a bit existential but if you connect the dots it’s easy to see that this is a realistic potential outcome and the repercussions of his human trials need to be highly scrutnized.

Twitter could become the hardware’s default browser

You think Musk bought Twitter because he thought it was a smart media investment? Think again. Musk bought Twitter because he believes the interactions within the data can be leveraged it into his larger computing ecosystem. Pair Neuralink with Twitter, which Elon has already called the “collective conscious of the world,” and you have an impressive combination: a brain-computing hardware device and an internet-based browser most of us already have account credentials with.

Starlink provides wireless internet connectivity

While Starlink has provided an incredible resource to Ukranians in their most desperate times of need and to rural areas that otherwise are ignored, most people have skipped over how powerful this tool is in Musk’s ecosystem. We’re talking about wireless internet from space. That means to roll out new hotspots he just needs to launch more satellites, not run wire across the Earth.

Just as our current Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are capable of throttling our data or forcing content through their pipes, Starlink would allow Musk to send whatever data he wants in and out of Neuralink devices without restrictions. This doesn’t seem so crazy when considering the fact that he recently forced all of Twitter to see more of his Tweets whether anyone follows him or not. Imagine if he could do this directly to your brain.

Plugin OpenAI as an amplified intelligence unit

The final stage of Master Plan 3 has to be at the intersection of all of these systems and OpenAI—which also happens to make for an incredible economic case as well. Why would you spend billions of dollars creating humanoid robots that you have to teach how to walk, talk and otherwise perform human tasks when you can just get the general population to willfully adopt Neuralink, require Twitter as the hardware’s default browser, Starlink as the sole internet provider, and ChatGPT/OpenAI as the intelligence behind it? All combined, this would be the most powerful system in the world to manipulate and manage human will.

A Human-First Future For Technology

If you thought ChatGPT was a life-changing tool that just appeared out of nowhere, think again. ChatGPT is simply the next step in innovation. Tech being combinatorial in nature, we’re only baby steps away from having generation-altering technologies popping up every year or two, maybe less. These tools will synergistically amplify our ability to innovate, which will then speed up our pace of innovation, which will then create a reinforcing cycle that will lead to an exponential innovation curve.

ChatGPT is just a peek at what’s coming in the future, and based on the public’s reaction it’s clear that we will be overwhelmed if we don’t prepare. It’s shocking to me that neither ChatGPT nor the media has wrapped their heads around the existential work Elon Musk has been putting together over the last couple of decades. My greatest fear is that without any critique or oversight it’s quite possible that Elon is silently on his way to creating one of the most seamless ecosystems in the world to control human capacity.

As these tools develop we must maintain our humanity. We should not be aiming for a world where machines eliminate humans but instead amplify our ability to be human. We can’t allow ourselves to be lulled into a technocracy in the name of effective altruism—we’ve seen what happened with Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and others. It’s time we stop waiting for the courts to wrap their heads around what’s going on and leverage our collective power as an educated public to push back on this work and ensure a future of amplified, not automated, human life on Earth.