Elon Musk’s Grok: An Homage to Science Fiction Legend Robert A. Heinlein

On April 28th, Elon Musk asked his artificial intelligence (AI), Grok, to define itself. The Tesla CEO’s communication can be cryptic, a fact well-known. His posts on X, and even the names of his children, some might say, present formidable enigmas for those unfamiliar with the codes. This self-definition offers an opportunity for the uninitiated to learn that the name Grok is a tribute to the novelist Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988).

Heinlein is considered, along with Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) and Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), one of the “big three” of the Golden Age of American science fiction, from the late 1930s to the 1960s. In his classic Stranger in a Strange Land, a bestseller published in 1961, a native of Mars refers to everything on Earth as “grok.” Musk provided the meaning of the neologism in a February post on X, consistent with the spirit of Heinlein’s novel: “Grok means to understand something fully and deeply.”

Heinlein was trained as an engineer and a military officer. While he is a faithful representative of hard science fiction, a genre that favors authors like him who are passionate about science and technology, he is also concerned with psychology, as he explained in a 1947 conference: “Too many so-called science fiction stories forget human beings and their problems.” Stranger in a Strange Land tells the story of a human, born on Mars and raised in the culture of that planet, upon his return to Earth. The book is a philosophical tale in the style of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), notes Gérard Klein, a historical science fiction editor in France. Confronted with political intrigues that overwhelm him, Valentine Michael Smith, the hero, is greatly bewildered by Earthlings’ thirst for power and property.

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