Why Elon Musk is sounding the alarm on artificial intelligence
Elon Musk is a household name. The South African-born billionaire can seemingly pioneer anything: PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and (maybe) the Hyperloop. He’s an engineer and a marketer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak rolled into one. And he’s always great for a quote because he’s photogenic, telegenic, and technogenic.
But there’s one technology he’s deeply scared of: artificial intelligence. “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” he warned a meeting of the nation’s governors earlier this year. “I have access to the very most cutting-edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it.” He has also warned that Google is creating “a fleet of artificial-intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind.”
Musk is not alone. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and various AI experts have also sounded the alarm.
Why are pillars of the tech community so concerned? Consider: If you truly believe that human-level AI is coming soon—as Musk does, and as you should, too—it’s pretty obvious what comes next: above human-level AI. After all, why should progress stop just because we achieve that arbitrary goal? It won’t. Once AI hits human level, it will develop new improvements all on its own.
How would this work? Well, suppose we build a computer that plays chess—not just any old computer, but a superintelligent AI computer that learns as it plays and gets better and better. What would it do? At its most extreme, this scenario devolves into what futurists call “the singularity.” Because computers are fundamentally faster than human brains, every new increase in AI capability will happen in less and less time, leading very quickly to AI that’s fantastically more intelligent than humans. At that point, AI will be as incomprehensible to us as an adult is to a one-year-old—and if it decides to do something that harms us, we’ll have as little chance of fighting back.
It would play chess, and its sole motivation would be improving its chess game. It wouldn’t hate humans. But neither would it love humans or feel any loyalty to them. It just wouldn’t care about us.
