Grimes and Elon Musk at the Met Gala in May 2018
Elon Musk is an eccentric dude and has his hand in many things, including Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City, The Boring Company and Open AI. His biography by Ashlee Vance is a great read: Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fanastic Future. He also might have gotten himself into trouble with the SEC with a tweet a few days ago. The Boring Company (which is going to build highways in tunnels under cities) also sold some flamethrowers.
Elon has been married twice, to Canadian Author Justine Wilson and then British actress Talulah Riley who recently was in the HBO series Westworld
Most recently Elon Musk has been dating Canadian indie pop artist Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher. Her music is pretty great IMO:
Here’s how the pair met (it’s pretty nerdy): Elon was going to tweet a joke about an AI thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk but found that Grimes had already made the same joke about three years prior. He thought that was pretty cool and reached out to her.
What the hell is Roko’s Basilisk? It’s pretty interesting. According to futurism.com it is an Artificial Intelligence thought experiment that was posted on a blog in 2010 by user who went by the name Roko. The concept is that if at some point in the future powerful AI lords over the world, it might want to seek out and destroy humans who did not help bring the AI into existence. Note that a Basilisk is a mythical serpent creature with a lethal gaze.
If you think about it, Roko’s Basilisk is a pretty terrifying concept. If you think an AI will be developed that will rule over and/or destroy humans, you need to weigh the possibility that you will be killed by the AI if you don’t support it’s creation. WOW. More on Roko’s Basilisk: Roko’s Basilisk Wiki
So, Elon Musk wanted to tweet out something about Rococo’s Basilisk which is a mash-up of Rococo (18th century European style) and Roko’s Basilisk. In researching “Rococo’s Basilisk” he found that Grimes had already made this joke as reported by Page Six:
In 2015, she created a character named “Rococo Basilisk” for a video of her song “Flesh Without Blood.” “I don’t know if you’ve heard of Roko’s Basilisk,” she told Fuse. “[This character] is doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she’s also kind of like Marie Antoinette.
Grimes said that Elon is the first person in three years to have understood her joke. Adorable. Now they are dating. Here’s the Flesh Without Blood video with the Rococo’s Basilisk character:
It’s actually a perfect match! Their both a little “out there” so to speak:)