Artificial Intelligence is the future of this world and a perfect example of technological development. But the tech billionaire Elon Musk warns the world about the dark side of it as there is a strong possibility that AI will take over humans within the next five years.
The CEO of SpaceX and the co-founder of the AI research lab OpemAI has been sounding the alarm bells against the rising threat of advanced AI over the past few years.
As reported by The New York Times, Musk said: "My assessment about why AI is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are. And this is hubris and obviously false."
The billionaire technology entrepreneur claimed that the experience he gathered while working with different types of AI at Tesla, has given him the confidence to claim that the world is heading toward a situation where AI is "vastly smarter than humans." Musk said that the time frame is probably less than five years now, but it doesn't mean that "everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird."
'Top Concern'
Almost four years ago the Tesla CEO sounded an alarm saying that humans could become the equivalent of "house cats" considering the rise of the AI rulers. Now it looks like his point of view about AI has not changed at all, as recently he said that the highly secretive London research lab DeepMind—run by Demis Hassabis—is Musk's "top concern" when it comes to AI technology. It was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported $600 million.
"Just the nature of the AI that they're building is one that crushes all humans at all games," Musk said adding that "I mean, it's basically the plotline in 'WarGames'"—a 1983 movie, in which a teenager unintentionally connects to an AI-controlled government supercomputer that used to run war simulations. Going with the background of the movie, after starting a game called "Global Thermonuclear War," the teen leads the computer to activate the country's nuclear arsenal in response to his simulated threat as the Soviet Union.
In 2017, at the Beneficial AI conference, Musk and Hassabis sat on a panel—"Superintelligence: Science or Fiction?" -- along with Oxford professor and Superintelligence author Nick Bostrom, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn, Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil and many other experts from the tech industry. At the start of the panel, everyone agreed that some form of superintelligence is possible. When Musk was asked whether it will actually happen, he said 'yes.'
The 49-year-old South African tech billionaire is currently busy bringing out new advancements via Neuralink—a startup founded in 2016 to develop "ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interface." But his stand on AI remains the same.
