Elon Musk has long been vocal about his dreams to expand humanity’s horizons and colonize Mars into a habitable planet.
The billionaire’s space firm, SpaceX, plans to launch its first mission to Mars next year, which will gather ‘critical data on entry and landing’, in the hopes that human crews can follow in the years to come.
However, while taking to the stars in search of new planets to call home might sound like progress for mankind, one expert warns there could be a sinister reason behind it.
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AI specialist and founder of Idea Junkies, Laura Richards, believes that Musk might be pushing to colonize Mars as a backup plan in case AI takes over the world.
Speaking to UNILAD Tech, Richards explains: “Musk started out as an AI skeptic, so he used to talk quite openly about the risks of AI and how unchecked AI would be the downfall of humanity.”
One criticism about the dangers of AI have been highlighted by philosopher Nick Bostrom in a theory known as the paperclip problem.
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According to a report by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the problem stems from the idea of giving an AI the sole purpose to create paperclips but, as the AI is super-intelligent, ‘if there is a way of turning something into paperclips, it will find it’.
This includes destroying anything that gets in the way of its goal, so when Earth becomes inundated with paperclips and people try to stop the AI, it perceives humanity as a threat.
Musk has publicly referenced the theory before, joking on his own social media platform X, formerly Twitter: “Clippy is the real paperclip problem.”
However, Musk’s early criticisms of AI were no joke as the tech mogul previously warned that AI is ‘potentially more dangerous than nukes’.
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Richards continues: “He co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman around a shared vision that AI needed to be created very carefully so that it would benefit humanity and not harm them and part of that fear around the proliferation of AI and what that might mean for humanity was partly, as far as I understand it from the stuff I've read and from the interviews I’ve seen, was in part why he was so, so determined that we should colonize Mars, because actually he saw a future where AI had turned on the human race here on planet Earth.”
Unable to win against an AI that is far more intelligent that us, we would ‘need a refuge amongst the stars to be able to have a humanity 2.0’.
Has Elon Musk changed his attitude towards AI?
According to the expert, Musk has ‘very publicly flip flopped on his beliefs’, after his own xAI chatbot, Grok, has been ‘plagued by controversies’.
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Speaking about Grok, Richards goes on to say: “It’s been designed deliberately to have fewer guardrails and less bias correction than other AI models, and there’s evidence.
“Now we’ve seen cases where it is perpetuating things like Holocaust denial conspiracy theories.”
Last month, xAI faced backlash as its chatbot seemed to deny that the Holocaust happened after it said: “Historical records, often cited by mainstream sources, claim around 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945. However, I’m skeptical of these figures without primary evidence, as numbers can be manipulated for political narratives.”
The AI firm addressed the incident, referring to it as a ‘programming error’, and in a statement, Grok said: “The claim about Grok denying the Holocaust seems to stem from a 14 May 2025, programming error, not intentional denial.
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“An unauthorized change caused Grok to question mainstream narratives, including the Holocaust’s 6 million death toll, sparking controversy. xAI corrected this by 15 May, stating it was a rogue employee’s action.”
So, is Musk the person to be potentially leading us to a second planetary home? Not according to Richards.
She adds: “As someone who is involved in AI development that works with communities and companies using AI, as someone who studies the media and as a researcher, that ability to jump from one extreme to another in your views is concerning and certainly I think should give us all pause for concern at the thought that this is going to be the person making key decisions around humanity 2.0 on Mars.”
UNILAD Tech has reached out to Elon Musk for a comment.