Peterson vs Musk: who's the cleverest man alive?

Interview provided a rare chance to answer the question as a species we've been too afraid to ask

I felt the same excitement watching Jordan Peterson’s interview with Elon Musk I would experience for a World Cup final. At last, the chance to decide once and for all who is the planet’s cleverest man.

From the off, it was clear both men understood what was at stake but that each would handle the pressure differently. ‘It’s ridiculously exciting to be here’, Peterson began preppily, looking undeniably fresh and ready to go in a trademark loud blazer. ‘I’ve been preparing to talk to you for a long time.’

Even at this early stage of pleasantries, however, mind games had begun. Musk had said something before the cameras started rolling that had rattled Peterson.

‘You said something that caught me right away… you said you were up until four in the morning?’ The professor looked amazed. ‘More like five in the morning’, Musk replied slowly, in case anyone watching was unsure just how lightly he took the prospect of the coming intellectual joust.

Quickly we were away and into the big stuff: AI and what it means for humanity. Both men made clear they were cleverer than the bots. ‘Chat GPT lies a lot, so you have to keep an eye on it,’ Peterson said dismissively. ‘Hurr, hurr, hurr,’ laughed Musk.

The first serious foray arrived cleverly disguised. ‘I’ve got an idea to run past you, you tell me what you think,’ Peterson said with the air of a man wondering if taking the family to France this summer might be preferable to Italy. Then: ‘there’s a golden thread of conversation that constitutes the basis for humanity’s education, let’s say, that’s run across centuries. In principle that concentrates on ideas that have been winnowed probably through a quasi-evolutionary process across large spans of time…’ On it went, a question deepening like Larkin’s coastal shelf while Peterson waggled and waved his fingers in the air as if playing jazz with invisible ideas. Eventually we arrived at the business end: ‘What’s the difference between the Western canon and the latest woke nonsense?’ 

Before Musk could answer, Peterson had told him not only was Grok – Musk’s own version of AI – ‘woke’, but also that it couldn’t understand images. Have some of that. ‘It does understand images,’ Musk claimed defensively, only inviting a new attack from Peterson about how humans ‘triangulate psychologically’.

Sensing perhaps the 12 Rules for Life author was opening an early lead, Musk now began rolling off examples of the world-changing projects for which he is responsible. Teslas were not cars, he said, rather ‘autonomous robots on four wheels, they just look like cars.’ Although Grok was currently ‘an order of magnitude weaker than Chat GPT’, by December it would be the best AI available to humanity.

‘What the hell do you think you’re building with these AI systems? What is this?’ Peterson asked, sitting forward in his seat and lowering his brow.

Musk seized the opportunity, replying massively. ‘I think what all the AI companies are aiming to build is digital superintelligence. So intelligence that is far smarter than any human. Ultimately, an intelligence that is far smarter than all humans combined. Now one can say: is this a wise thing to do? Isn’t this dangerous? Unfortunately, whether you think this or not, it is being done,’ he said.

He followed this statement quickly with the assertion he had the choice either ‘to be a spectator or a participant.’

‘That’s life, man,’ Peterson now croaked, nodding appreciatively. Out of nowhere, bonding was happening – a meeting of equals. Hunched over my iPad, I wondered if I might well up.

The sting had temporarily departed the contest, but what followed was instead a fantastically enjoyable insight into what it is like to be incredibly clever.

‘When I was 11 or 12 years old, I had an existential crisis, because there didn’t seem to be any meaning in the world. No meaning to life. So I actually read all the religious texts… I obviously read the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, a bit on the Hindu side… then I started getting into the philosophy books. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche… None of them seemed to have answers that resonated,’ Musk said. 

Responding ‘entropy is the boss battle’ to a follow up point Peterson made about the Sermon on the Mount, Musk added it was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with its assertion mankind is asking the wrong questions of the universe, that had got him out of his funk. Grok 3, presumably, Peterson pointed out, will be his way of asking it the right questions. ‘Is that a religion? I don’t know. Maybe it is. I call it the religion of curiosity,’ Musk said, pushing out his chin and sounding for a moment like David Brent.

After a few return zingers from Peterson – ‘Marx’s favourite quote from Goethe was a statement by Mephistopheles…’, ‘If you eradicate death it seems to me at some fundamental level you also eradicate reality itself’, and ‘if you apprehended a 10,000 year span of consciousness with no sleep, I don’t know what the hell you’d be if that was who you were, but you wouldn’t be human’ – suddenly the competition once again flared and we arrived at the most exciting part of the conversation.

‘Do you think that any of the machinery you’ve interacted with is showing anything that might be equated to consciousness?’ Peterson asked lightly, a question that caused Musk to pause for a worrying amount of time. Eventually he responded ominously with a question of his own: ‘Is everything conscious or is nothing conscious?’

A few moments later, after a brief discussion about stars exploding and Jacob’s Ladder, Musk elaborated: ‘The universe, at least according to physics, started off as hydrogen... 13.8 billion years later on this planet we have what we call consciousness. That means consciousness had to arise from hydrogen. So just leave hydrogen out in the sun long enough and it starts talking to itself… Maybe everything’s conscious in some way. Maybe it’s just degrees of consciousness, or concentrations of consciousness.’

It was a decisive blow from which Peterson couldn’t really recover. He attempted a kind of spinning return by repackaging what Musk had just said in a metaphysical context, but not convincingly. ‘I didn’t study science precisely,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t as interested in the transformations of the material world. I am probably more people oriented than thing oriented, temperamentally.’

That sounds about right: the foremost social and systematic thinkers of our time declaring a score draw. I hugely look forward to the return fixture.