Elon Musk: prediction

Transcript context

…With a small number of Optimi? Yeah. So you close the recursive loop to help the robots build the robots. Then we can try to get to tens of millions of units a year. Maybe. If you start getting to hundreds of millions of units a year, you’re going to be the most competitive country by far. We definitely can’t win with just humans, because China has four times our population. Frankly, America has been winning for so long that… A pro sports team that’s been winning for a very long time tends to get complacent and entitled. That’s why they stop winning, because they don’t work as hard anymore. So frankly my observation is just that the average work ethic in China is higher than in the US. It’s not just that there’s four times the population, but the amount of work that people put in is higher. So you can try to rearrange the humans, but you’re still one quarter of the—assuming that productivity is the same, which I think actually it might not be, I think China might have an advantage on productivity per person—we will do one quarter of the amount of things as China. So we can’t win on the human front. Our birth rate has been low for a long time. The US birth rate’s been below replacement since roughly 1971. We’ve got a lot of people retiring, we’re close to more people domestically dying than being born. So we definitely can’t win on the human front, but we might have a shot at the robot front. Are there other things that you have wanted to manufacture in the past, but they’ve been too labor intensive or too expensive that now you can come back to and say, “oh, we can finally do the whatever, because we have Optimus?”…

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