IF, like me, youre half propeller-head, half social-justice warrior, it can be hard to get a handle on the various works of Elon Musk.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder can display equally as idiot plutocrat, and civilisation visionary, across any given weeks news cycle.

The last seven days have seen Musks name taken in vain at the Johnny Depp/Amber Rudd trial (aaargh). His endorsement of Kanye West for president has been retracted (Kanye doesnt like vaccines, or even abortion). And we have reports that Musks $2.7 billion performance bonus is about to be triggered.

So far, so 0.0000271846% (the percentage of the worlds population that are billionaires). Why should we care a jot about Elon Musk?

Yet theres another news strand. We are apparently very close to a level-5 self-driving electric Tesla car (meaning no human input). Next month, there will be a major announcement on Musks Neurolink, a brain-implant tech that offers to blend humans with artificial intelligence.

Elsewhere on the wires, Musk is launching thousands of small satellites to provide internet access to every point on the Earth. As well as refining his plans for a rocket to Mars the first stage in his plan to spread human civilisation into the cosmos.

The last report is usually the first blanket rejection of this awkward, blinking mogul. Rather than colonial dreams of Martian cities (Id like to die on Mars just not on impact, Musk has quipped), how about attending to beautiful blue Planet A first, not desiccated and dangerous Planet B?

And how typical of blinkered Silicon Valley elitists to look for their interplanetary escape clause rather than deal with the inequalities and externalities their technology and business models often produce, on this old rock? Musks defenders roll their eyes here: were really not seeing his full picture.

The Scots-born techno-visionary and blockchain entrepreneur Vinay Gupta is trenchant on this subject. Musks passion, Gupta says, is to do something practical indeed, commercial to help minimise what is called existential risk (or x-risk). Basically, these are threats to the very existence of humanity.

Tick them off, suggests Vinay in his tweets. Musks electric cars, but also his investment in both battery manufacturing and cheap solar panels, is raising the sustainable standard of living inside capitalism. (Like Greta Thunberg, Musk is oriented to action, not warm words from establishments).

We should even regard Musks off-planet ambitions as laying the ground for a new wave of what the leftist commentator Aaron Bastani calls extreme supply. By this, Bastani means the abundance of vital minerals and metals available in asteroidal form in our solar system.

This could easily overturn Earth-based economics systems, usually founded on managing scarce resources. (Theres another x-risk here. Given were due another devastating asteroid strike this century, it might be wise to get a grasp of this realm).

So Musks pursuit of sustainable abundance answers the x-risk of a collapsing biosphere. He also seems to genuinely believe that humanity may need a back-up on another planet, if we dont make it through the great filter down here. (The great filter is Enrico Fermis thesis that few civilisations in the universe make it past the stage of terminating themselves which is why we dont know of any other than ourselves, as we teeter on our own brink ).

But Musks brain-machine interface tries to answer what could be regarded as another x-risk: the surpassing of human intelligence by machine intelligence.

While trailing his Neurolink announcement, Musk tweeted: If you cant beat em, join em. Musk is also notoriously a great fan of the Scottish author Iain M Bankss science-fiction Culture novels (If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist, he tweeted, of the kind best described by Iain Banks).

And in Iains Culture novels, its never quite clear: do the vast and powerful AI Minds (encased in cosmos-traversing spaceships) regard humans as their equals, or as charming and trivial diversions? In talking about his own cyborg product, Musk has regularly used Bankss terminology for the humans link with these AIs the beautiful phrase neural lace. We dont just join them, we intertwine with them.

However, is AI supremacy really such an existential risk? Googles DeepMind programs might be able to teach themselves to beat any human (including grandmasters) on a board game like Chess or Go. But install that software in a clanky robot body, then ask it to display the same self-possession of a five-year-old human child the sheer, stumbling failure is embarrassing to see.

One suspects the singularity Ray Kurzweils prediction that computers would simulate human intelligence by 2029, and vastly surpass it thereafter is a kind of stretch-goal for Musk and the Valleyists.

Something that pulls their more mundane R&D and engineering efforts forward into the future (ensuring, for example, that grannies arent flattened by an ill-natured Tesla robo-car).

My head-propeller spins with genuine curiosity on this one: lets see what transpires. Musk suggests that, eventually, the filaments that link neurons with transmitters four times thinner than hair will be installed by boring laser holes into the skull. The discomfort will be comparable to Lasik surgery on the eyes.

Thats great. But eh, you go first, Elon.

So yes, hes quite a blend the ability to scale of Henry Ford, the imagineering verve of Walt Disney, the integrated vision of Steve Jobs. But hes still an American

capitalist mogul with some pretty familiar traits.

For example, Musks programming has hit a glitch point when it comes to responding to Covid-19. This anarchist utopian really didnt like the oncoming dystopia of coronavirus. He doubted its infectiousness, and its status beyond a standard flu, in the early months.

THE coronavirus panic is dumb, he tweeted. But Musk also reacted extremely poorly online when the states of California and New York asked him to close down his Tesla manufactories, for pandemic reasons (this is fascism FREE AMERICA NOW). Reports of poor enforcement of mask wearing at his factories are rife. And for all the futurism on display, Musks attitudes to labour relations are predictably 19th-century.

Vox magazine reports a legal judgment from California authorities in 2019 that Tesla had broken US labour laws in 12 ways. This included threatening employees with the loss of various conditions if unions were set up, as well as harassing employees on distributing leaflets and wearing union badges.

(All other major US motor manufacturers are fully unionised).

Its a bug on the windscreen of their gleaming vehicles (though that mess might actually improve Teslas ghastly Cybertruck). But tech supermoguls must accept or be forced to that they live in societies, among fellow citizens, to whom they are accountable.

We the people can enjoy, and benefit, from the pioneering ambitions of entrepreneurs.

The ideal rhythm should be that private innovation and market-making eventually settles, to become infrastructural and public service.

Yet I will concede to Musk in particular, and his defenders, their urgent point. To rely on standard political and democratic progress after decades of knowledge about global warming and climate crisis as an existential threat is a tough square to put all your chips on.

Leaving it to the engineers and investors could go mightily wrong. There are quite a few freelance geo-engineering schemes for anti-warming going around. Some involve pumping substances into the atmosphere that might rob us of blue skies for ever.

But boundary-crossing, pro-human innovators and designers are definitely required. Can their products and services make it easy for us to do the planet-saving thing? We seem to find it difficult to take any harder road.

I give 1.5 cheers for Musk but more for the sapient, planetary and cosmic ambitions he represents.

We need thousands more like him, with many different conceptions of the big problems (and not too many hims either). Because the big clock is loudly ticking.

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Elon Musk: Is he our interplanetary visionary or just another mogul? - The National