Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a rare public appearance at Italian Tech Week in Turin on Friday and used the opportunity to predict that millions of people will be living in space “in the next couple of decades,” the Financial Times reports.
Speaking with John Elkann, a scion of Italy’s Agnelli dynasty, Bezos, who also founded rocket company Blue Origin, insisted people will be living in space “mostly because they want to,” and that robots will handle the grunt work, while vast AI data centers float overhead.
The pronouncement sounds a little like Bezos trying to one-up his space rival. Elon Musk has spent years predicting humans will colonize Mars and suggested a million people could live there by 2050, which is right around the corner, basically. Maybe both gazillionaires are losing touch, or else they know something the rest of us refreshing Zillow do not.
Bezos was equally bullish on other fronts, defending the AI investment boom as a “good” kind of bubble given that it’s “industrial” rather than “financial.”
“There has never been a better time to be excited about the future,” he reportedly declared, as audience members (in our imagination) exchanged uncertain glances across the Turin auditorium.
