世界首富对宇宙的未来有着一种愿景——人类在其中几乎没有角色，而他正急于让自己的AI公司去实现这一愿景。埃隆·马斯克在周日的一条X帖子中表示，特斯拉和SpaceX计划在德克萨斯州建造的一座巨型半导体工厂将拥有至少1万亿美元的产值——这可以与世界上一些较大经济体的GDP相媲美。
The world’s richest man has a vision of the universe’s future with little role for humanity—and is rushing ahead to have his AI company build it Elon Musk said in an X post on Sunday that a huge semiconductor factory planned by Tesla and SpaceX in Texas will have an output of at least $1 trillion—rivaling the GDP of some of the world’s larger economies.
马斯克曾多次发表类似的宏大预测，这些预测根据不同的解读，介于雄心勃勃与荒唐之间。他有着长期夸大其词的记录。事实上，在最近的美国证券交易委员会诉讼中，特斯拉的法律团队不得不辩称他的夸张属于“企业吹嘘”。Terafab项目最近在休斯顿西北70英里处动工，计划为特斯拉汽车和人形机器人，以及新近合并的SpaceX和xAI生产芯片。目前，先进AI芯片的设计主要由英伟达主导，而其制造则由台积电（台湾半导体制造公司）负责。
Musk has made similarly grandiose projections that are, depending on one’s interpretation, somewhere between ambitious and absurd. He has a long track record overpromising In recent SEC litigation, in fact, Tesla’s legal team resorted to arguing that his exaggerations are “corporate puffery.”The Terafab project, which recently broke ground 70 miles northwest of Houston, is planned to build chips for Tesla cars and humanoid robots, and for the newly-merged SpaceX and xAI. Currently, the design of advanced AI chips is dominated by Nvidia, and their fabrication by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
马斯克众所周知的反复无常的言论应该带着一大勺盐来听。但他的公司确实制造的电动汽车比任何国内竞争对手都多，并且在近年来负责了大多数进入轨道的发射任务。因此，值得思考的是：马斯克希望他的德克萨斯州芯片厂帮助建造怎样的未来？
Musk’s famously erratic statements should be taken with a heaping of salt. But his companies do build more electric vehicles than any domestic competitors, and are responsible for the majority of launches into orbit in recent years. So it’s worth wondering: what vision of the future does Musk want his Texas chip plant to help build?
Terafab的网站写道：“我们渴望成为一个星系文明，”并“利用星系中的所有能量。”但马斯克最近的言论引发了一个问题——“我们”到底指的是谁？包括他上周的一条帖子：“将超级智能传播到星空是生物引导器的一个巨大成功条件。”他似乎想表达的大意是：人类将通过在马斯克领导下构建AI——这种AI在殖民宇宙的过程中会践踏我们所有人——来实现其宇宙使命。
“We aspire to be a galactic civilization,” Terafab’s site says, and “harness all the energy in a galaxy.”But Musk’s recent statements raise a question about who, exactly, the “we” is—including a post he made last week that “Propagating super intelligence to the stars is a great success condition for a biological bootloader.”A rough translation of what he seems to mean: humanity would fulfill its cosmic purpose by building AI—under Musk’s leadership—that tramples us all on its way to colonizing the universe.
马斯克曾宣称反对此类观点，包括在他帮助创立OpenAI时，其公开使命是“以最有可能惠及全人类的方式推动数字智能的发展”。但AI继承论——即人类只是宇宙演化过程中通往“值得继承者”的垫脚石——如今正成为一股日益壮大的运动，获得了一位拥有难以想象的财富和权力的人物的更多支持。xAI未能立即回应关于AI继承论是否代表公司政策的查询。
Musk once professed to oppose such ideas, including when he helped found OpenAI with the stated mission to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.”But AI successionism—the belief that humans are merely a stepping-stone in cosmic evolution on the way to a “worthy successor”—is a growing movement now with more support from a man with unimaginable wealth and power. xAI did not immediately respond to a query on whether AI successionism represents company policy.
目前，吞噬其创造者并殖民星辰的机器神的到来仍只是一个预言，被一些人所恐惧，也被另一些人所热切期待。这种对人类的愿景，对于估计在DOGE削减对外援助的第一年内死亡的78万真实、有呼吸的人而言，恐怕也只能提供寥寥无几的安慰。
For now, the coming of a machine-god that devours its creators and colonizes the stars is still just a prophecy, feared by some and much anticipated by others. That vision of humanity would probably have served as little consolation to the 780,000 real, breathing people estimated to have died in the first year of DOGE’s cuts to foreign aid