Elon Musk: 'I'm saving humanity by having more babies' claims billionaire father of six

Elon Musk: 'I'm saving humanity by having more babies' claims billionaire father of six
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Samantha Haynes

By Samantha Haynes


Published: 08/12/2021

- 10:27

Updated: 14/02/2023

- 11:33

The Tesla boss says 'one of the biggest risks to civilisation is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birthrate'

Elon Musk, the 50-year-old owner of Tesla and SpaceX, has told mankind it should save civilisation by having more babies.

The Tesla boss said “There are not enough people. I can’t emphasise this enough; there are not enough people."


This comes after the Tesla boss says his electric vehicle company is building a humanoid robot.

Elon Musk has highlighted that the Tesla Bot could help to solve some of the world’s labour problems, calling it a “generalised substitute for human labour over time”.

In an interview for The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council, Elon Musk said that “one of the biggest risks to civilisation is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birthrate”.

The South African tech entrepreneur revealed the bot at Tesla’s ‘AI Day’, which was largely a presentation about the firm’s self-driving vehicle technology.

However, near the end of the show, a person wearing a white outfit and a black helmet walked robotically onto the stage before starting to dance. They were ushered off before Musk explained that the Tesla Bot would look very similar to this.

The idea behind the robot is to take over the mundane tasks humans don’t want to do, for example it could be sent grocery shopping.

And Musk wanted to allay fears of his robots taking over the world, explaining that it’s 5’ 8” and about nine stone with a walking speed of about 5mph.

He said: “It’s intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate a world built for humans. We’re setting it such that at a mechanical and physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it.”

The robot is being built because Tesla believes its self-driving technology is getting so advanced it “makes sense to put onto a humanoid form”. A prototype is expected sometime next year.

Elsewhere during Tesla’s AI Day, the firm revealed its computer chip, which is designed and built entirely in-house. It’s what powers Dojo, a neural network training computer that will ‘train’ the firm’s artificial intelligence software, which will be pushed to Tesla vehicles by over-the-air updates.

Tesla’s so-called Full Self Driving and Autopilot programs have been causing controversy in recent weeks. Commentators are concerned that its self-driving technology is far from fully autonomous and should not be tested on public roads yet, while America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating 11 incidents where Tesla vehicles using Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control crashed into, or in the vicinity of, emergency vehicles that had their blue lights flashing.

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