Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a rare public appearance at Italy’s Tech Week in Turin on Friday, using the occasion to predict that millions of people will be living in space “in the coming decades.”
Speaking to John Elkann, mentor of Italy’s Agnelli dynasty, Bezos, who founded the rocket company Blue Origin, insists that people live in space “primarily because they want to,” and that its robots will handle the grunt work, while vast AI data centers hover overhead.
The declaration sounds a bit like Bezos is trying to bring his cosmic rivals together. Elon Musk spent years predicting that humans would colonize Mars, suggesting that 1 million people could live there by 2050. Maybe both gazillionaires are out of touch or else they know the rest of us zillows aren’t.
Bezos was similarly bullish on other fronts, defending the AI investment boom as a “good” kind of bubble given that it’s “industrial” rather than “financial.”
“There’s never been a better time to be excited about the future,” he reportedly said, as the audience (in our imaginations) exchanged uncertain glances across the Turin Auditorium.
