A.I. “is our biggest existential threat” — Elon Musk

“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. So we need to be very careful,” said Musk. “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 are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out,” said Musk, in comments to MIT students at the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium (Oct. 22-24, 2014).

Musk, whose original fortune came as founder of PayPal, was an early investor in the AI firm DeepMind (later acquired by Google), and in March made an investment in San Francisco-based Vicarious, another company working to improve machine intelligence and whose ultimate aim is to build a “computer that thinks like a person,” according to the company’s co-founder Scott Phoenix says, “except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep.”

Speaking to US news channel CNBC, Musk explained that his investments were, “not from the standpoint of actually trying to make any investment return… I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there. There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator. There are some scary outcomes. And we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad.”

— Compiled from a 18 June 2014 article by Alex Hern and an 27 October 2014 article by Samuel Gibbs, both in The Guardian. [see]