Elon Musk is a South African born, Canadian-American billionaire that heads as the CEO of some very high-tech companies. He is the CEO of SpaceX, a private space transportation company, and Tesla Motors which make electric cars. He also presides as the chairman for SolarCity, a solar energy company. So it is safe to say that Elon Musk is well versed with technology, however he is afraid of it as well… in the sense that machines will rise up and put us into the matrix (mild sarcasm).
In a recent interview at MIT, Elon Musk has expressed his warning with companies attempting to create artificial intelligence. While often considered a topic of science fiction films, we are closer to this sort of thing than one would expect. Technology progresses at an incredible rate and it will just be a matter of time until artificial intelligence is a real thing. Musk is concerned as to what will happen when those machines become self-aware and start making their own decisions. That is essentially the origin stores for films like The Terminator and The Matrix.
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that”, Musk said during the interview. “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like — yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”, he goes on.
Musk also talked about how most people do not realize how fast we are to achieving artificial intelligence at a Vanity Fair summit earlier this October. He also expressed concerns for machines that might make an error and use it to harm humans. He uses a spam machine as an example: “If its function is just something like getting rid of email spam and it determines the best way of getting rid of spam is getting rid of humans” he said as his voice trailed off. When considering that, it is probably not such a bad idea to have some oversight into this inevitable technological advance.
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