The electric car manufacturer Tesla plans two to three more large factories in the USA alone in the coming years. Tesla boss Elon Musk made the announcement on the weekend at the US National Governors Association summer meeting – many of whom would be interested in the fact that the works in their federal states arise.
Tesla’s first so-called “gigafactory” in the desert state of Nevada is currently being expanded and produces batteries and components that are installed in Fremont, California. In the end, it will be able to produce enough batteries for one million vehicles a year. Musks vision for the billion dollar “gigafactories” with thousands of employees is that both batteries and the finished cars are to be built there. Up to now, Tesla had planned such a plant in Asia and Europe.
Tesla only produced 84,000 vehicles last year – but plans to bolster the production with the launch of the more favorable model 3 to 500,000 cars in the coming year and is targeting the million mark for 2020.
Musk also used the performance before the governors to warn again of the dangers of an unbridled development of artificial intelligence. He reminded that it was “the greatest risk to our civilization.”
For example, an artificial intelligence that exists in networks could start a war: “Through fake news, fake email accounts, false press releases and the manipulation of information.” Or they could divert a passenger aircraft into a conflict area and alert troops on the ground to give an attack. The motivation for this could be something as predictable as share benefits with a bet on armament companies and against consumer goods manufacturers. For this reason, laws were necessary to regulate the development of artificial intelligence, Musk stressed.
The Tesla chief also spoke about the risk of hacker attacks on networked and driverless vehicles. “If someone were able to chop up all the autonomous Teslas, they could send the cars to Rhode Island, for example, as a joke. And that would be the end of Tesla – and you’d have a lot of acidic people in Rhode Island. “Tesla is building a series of defenses against attacks – systems like drive and brakes would have their own encryption levels.”
