What Did Larry Page Say About Exploring the Galaxy?

Mustafa Suleyman says that in 2015, at lunch in the SpaceX canteen, Larry Page told him he would be exploring the galaxies by the end of the century. The lunch followed the first meeting of DeepMind's Ethics and Safety Board, a condition of selling DeepMind to Google, with an independent seat they had given to Elon Musk. Page, in this telling, already treated Mustafa as a speciesist, someone who favors the human species and should get over it. What Mustafa did not understand, Page said, was that Page would be at the head of a von Neumann probe, a self-propelling machine that gathers energy as it travels.

Mustafa hears that as a move out of the human species into a successor species. Some people who say they will live forever mean a longer biological life, curing cancer and Alzheimer's. Others mean uploading a mind and becoming post-human. He does not call that impossible, and he does not say it is what he wants. He says it has to be taken seriously, because a lot of people, including people who argue for AI rights, treat it as a real possibility within a few decades.