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Notes -
There are some "mutual kill" scenarios where we kill Skynet but Skynet unleashes something that kills all Earthbound humans (e.g. Operation Dark Storm, or an alga that isn't digestible, doesn't need phosphate and has a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO). Not high-probability, though.
There's also the AI-pessimist view: "neural-net alignment is impossible, so if neural-net AGI happens we're all doomed". No point planning for worlds where you're dead anyway; you want to play to 1) stop near-term AGI, 2) succeed in an AGI-less world. This a) negates your point, but also b) means you probably want to have "building things" projects that aren't AI, in order to pull the smart, driven people out of the AI field (where their talents are an outright detriment to humanity).
Plus Elon poured blood, sweat and tears into his rocketry well before near-term AI looked likely. How could he think about it rationally, SpaceX is his baby! It's got X in its name.
Even if the purest rational move is to go all in on AI and drop the Mars mission, he's already invested so much into the latter it's too hard to give up.
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