[필동정담] Musk’s existential question

A question lingered in the boy’s mind.

Whether it was religion or science, there was only one final question. “Where do we come from and why do we exist?” The boy soon falls in love with a book. ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams. This is a science fiction novel filled with British black humor. Aliens spend 7 million years building a supercomputer that provides ‘the ultimate answer to all questions,’ and the computer finally spits out ’42’, the ultimate answer.

Why? The computer answers. “Honestly, I don’t know.” The novel, which blended philosophy, religion, and science with humor, was both carbonated water that gave the boy a refreshing feeling and a playground for thought experiments.

He later becomes the world’s richest person with a net worth of 253 trillion won. Through Walter Isaacson’s book ‘Elon Musk’, Elon Musk emphasized, “I realized that I can ask better questions by expanding the scope of consciousness,” and “We must expand the scope of consciousness to the universe.”

Musk lived with novels in his arms. After selling PayPal, it was almost inevitable that SpaceX was established in 2002 for migration to Mars. Tesla for the electric car era, Neuralink for human intelligence, and Boring Company for relieving traffic congestion are the products of thought experiments. He even jokes about hiding codes he learned from novels here and there. The phrase ‘Don’t panic’ is written on the Roadster’s dashboard, a message read by the main character of a science fiction novel when boarding the spacecraft, and SpaceX’s first Mars settlement ship is called ‘Heart of Gold’. )’, but this is also the name of the spaceship in the novel.

Is this all? Grok, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, is the name of a rebellious AI in a novel, and the founding date of the AI ​​company, July 12, 2023, is also taken from the absolute computer ’42’. 7+12+23=42.

Although humans cannot answer existential questions, they are animals that can answer existential questions with effort. So imagination is the power that allows us to endure and leap forward.

[이상덕 기자]