Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will live in space within the next two decades, according to the Financial Times.
Bezos made a rare public appearance at Italian Tech Week in Turin on Friday. Speaking with John Elkann, heir to Italy’s Agnelli family, Bezos said people will live in space mainly because they choose to. Robots will carry out the manual labour, while large AI data centres will operate above.
The comment appears to respond to Bezos’s space rival, Elon Musk, who has predicted humans will colonise Mars and suggested that a million people could reside there by 2050. Perhaps both billionaires are overly optimistic, or they possess knowledge unknown to the wider public.
Bezos also defended the surge in AI investment as a positive bubble, describing it as “industrial” rather than “financial”.
He added: “There has never been a better time to be excited about the future,” while the audience, one imagines, exchanged uncertain glances across the Turin auditorium.
