Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a rare public appearance at Italian Tech Week in Turin on Friday. He used the opportunity to predict that millions of people will be living in space within the next couple of decades. Speaking with John Elkann, a scion of Italy’s Agnelli dynasty, Bezos insisted people will live in space mostly because they want to. He stated that robots will handle the grunt work while vast AI data centers float overhead.
This pronouncement sounds a little like Bezos trying to one-up his space rival, Elon Musk. Musk has spent years predicting humans will colonize Mars and suggested a million people could live there by 2050. Perhaps both billionaires are losing touch, or else they know something the rest of us do not.
Bezos was equally bullish on other fronts, defending the AI investment boom as a good kind of bubble. He described it as industrial rather than financial. He reportedly declared that there has never been a better time to be excited about the future, as audience members exchanged uncertain glances across the Turin auditorium.