The Meaning of Life 63
about electric cars?” he asked a date when they just met.^363
Several years later, one of the dates recalled that dating
Elon was memorable.^322
Elon came up with three things that in the future will
most affect the future of humanity. “The three things that I
thought would be the most effective were the Internet, the
transition to a sustainable energy economy, and space ex-
ploration, particularly extension of life to multiple planets,”
Elon said.^57
These three things were not the only ideas he thought
about. He also thought artificial intelligence and biology
would affect the future of humanity. “Rapid, low-cost,
perfect DNA sequencing will have a huge effect on human-
ity,” Elon said. “Human DNA has not yet been completely
decoded. The most that anyone has gotten is about 91
or 92 percent, and that has been with a huge number of
errors. Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand
software code - with only 90 percent of the code riddled
with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand
and predict what the software code is going to do. That’s a
touchy subject.”^370
In an interview from the 1980s, Asimov talked about
something that seemed silly. “In the old days, very few
people could read and write,” he said. “Literacy was a
very novel sort of thing, and it was felt that most people
just didn’t have it in them. But with mass education, it
turned out that most people could be taught to read and