Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman proposed postponing mind uploading and self-replicating von Neumann probes for many centuries to prioritize the eight billion people alive today, and recounted Larry Page’s plan to explore galaxies at the helm of such a probe

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman proposed postponing mind uploading and self-replicating von Neumann probes for many centuries to prioritize the eight billion people alive today, and recounted Larry Page’s plan to explore galaxies at the helm of such a probe

On October 12, Suleyman spoke with Elon Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson; the interview was released on October 29 on The Builders podcast. He questioned whether humanity’s transition from biological bodies to computers was inevitable and recalled a lunch with Google co-founder Larry Page.

According to Suleyman, proponents of this transition expect human experience and ideas, “our soul, perhaps, or some representation in our minds,” to take form in silicon chips.

“There is an inevitability and a determinism to this trajectory, and I think that is the default mindset in Silicon Valley. I am very skeptical of it and very wary.”

Isaacson asked whether his skepticism reflected a belief in something uniquely human, such as a soul. Suleyman said his motivation was the eight billion people whose rights and well-being must come first. He described himself as an unequivocal supporter of accelerating technology for human benefit. Funding and attention, he said, should go toward medicine, energy, nutrition, and education.

Isaacson recalled how Page had accused Musk of “speciesism,” meaning a bias toward his own species, in the Musk biography, and asked whether he and Suleyman were guilty of it too. Suleyman responded with a memory: in 2015, the AI lab DeepMind held the first meeting of its ethics and safety board, whose members included Musk, in the SpaceX cafeteria. Over lunch, Page, who also suspected Suleyman of “speciesism,” said:

“I think you are missing the point, Mustafa: by the end of the century, I will be exploring galaxies at the helm of a von Neumann probe.”

A von Neumann probe is, by definition, a spacecraft capable of making copies of itself. According to Suleyman, taking the helm of such a probe would mean Page moving from the human species to a successor species that would come after humans. Isaacson completed this thought for Suleyman, who confirmed: “Yes, exactly.” Page defended a similar idea in a 2015 argument with Musk, physicist Max Tegmark writes in Life 3.0: life should populate the galaxy, and it could do so only in digital form.

The conversation then turned to two meanings of “living forever”: extending life in a biological body and uploading the mind to a computer. Isaacson asked whether the second idea was absurd.

“I do not think we can say it is impossible. These things deserve serious consideration because many people… really do see them as a serious possibility, regardless of whether I want them myself.”

Many people are working toward mind uploading or believe it could happen within a few decades, he added.

On the day the interview was released, Musk quoted a clip of Suleyman’s account of Page: “It would be a wonderful success for our civilization if we were exploring the galaxy with von Neumann probes by 2100! Larry Page may be right. He has correctly predicted many things.” On October 5, Musk had already called spreading superintelligence to the stars “a great success condition for the biological bootloader”, referring to humanity as the biological system that brings digital intelligence into existence.

In his final answer, Suleyman said:

“Our biology evolved the intelligence that created this remarkable world around us. And I think we should care for and respect that world, above all for the sake of the eight billion people living on the planet today. That should be our priority. Then, many centuries from now, we can work out what to do about von Neumann probes and mind uploading.”