ELON MUSK, in his telling, is a modern-day Cassandra(希腊神话中特洛伊公主，能预知未来但不被相信)—better than most at predicting the future, but doomed to be disbelieved. “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass(发生，实现),” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing(展望未来，预测未来) ranges from the unsettling to the downright(彻头彻尾地，完全地) weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in(开启，迎来) an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless. And within 20 years, Britain—a country that he has not visited for years—will be engulfed(吞没，淹没) in civil war.
埃隆·马斯克自称是现代版的卡珊德拉——比大多数人更擅长预测未来，却注定不被相信。“人们没有意识到我说的话将会成真，”他在得克萨斯州一座巨大的特斯拉工厂里接受《经济学人》旗下节目《内幕》长达90分钟的采访时这样说道。这座工厂里，电动汽车正自动驾驶着驶下装配线。这可能是因为他对未来的展望从令人不安到彻底怪异不等。马斯克预测，五年内人工智能系统可能超越全人类智能的总和；十年内，工作场所的机器人将帮助迎来一个“惊人富足”的时代，金钱将变得毫无意义；而二十年内，他已多年未踏足的英国将陷入内战。
Believe them or not, the predictions of Mr Musk, who last month briefly became the world’s first trillionaire(万亿富翁), are worth taking seriously. The driving force(推动力，驱动因素) behind Tesla and SpaceX, a rocket-maker turned AI conglomerate(大型综合企业集团), is doing more than any entrepreneur to shape the future. His influence—powered by money and feats(壮举，功绩) of engineering genius—stretches from the White House to global trouble spots such as Ukraine. With 240m followers on X, his social-media platform, Mr Musk’s views, especially those that are divisive(引起分歧的，分裂的), have significant repercussions(反响，后果).
信不信由你，马斯克的预测——他上个月曾短暂成为全球首位万亿富翁——值得认真对待。作为特斯拉和SpaceX（一家由火箭制造商转型为AI综合企业）背后的推动力，他在塑造未来方面比任何企业家都做得更多。他的影响力——由金钱和工程天才的壮举驱动——从白宫延伸到乌克兰等全球热点地区。在他的社交媒体平台X上拥有2.4亿粉丝，马斯克的观点，尤其是那些引发分歧的观点，会产生重大反响。
Dressed in black boots and a leather jacket with the logo of Grok, his chatbot, on the back, he showed flashes of the steely(钢铁般的，坚硬的) single-mindedness(一心一意，专注) that helped him pioneer the mass-production of electric vehicles and send reusable rockets into space against all odds(克服重重困难，尽管希望渺茫). He also showed how bent on(决心，一心想) shaping his own reality he is, to the point of intransigence(不妥协，固执) on matters outside his sphere of expertise(专业领域).
他穿着黑色靴子和一件背后印有他的聊天机器人Grok标志的皮夹克，不时展现出那种钢铁般的专注——正是这种专注帮助他克服重重困难，率先实现了电动汽车的大规模生产，并将可重复使用的火箭送入太空。他还表现出他是多么执着于塑造自己的现实，以至于在自己专业领域之外的问题上毫不妥协。