Humans must hope they can persuade AI not to kill us, says Musk
'It's not clear to me if we can control such a thing,' He said.
Elon Musk has said he believes AI is ‘one of the biggest threats’ to humanity, and that the UK’s AI Safety Summit was ‘timely’ given the scale of the threat.
The billionaire said AI was an ‘existential risk’ because humans for the first time were faced with something ‘that is going to be far more intelligent than us’.
Mr Musk was speaking on the first day of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, which the government is using to host discussions with world leaders, tech firms and scientists on the risks of advancing AI technology.
Speaking at the summit, Mr Musk said: ‘I think AI is one of the biggest threats [to humans].
‘We have for the first time the situation where we have something that is going to be far smarter than the smartest human.
‘We’re not stronger or faster than other creatures, but we are more intelligent, and here we are for the first time, really in human history, with something that is going to be far more intelligent than us.
‘It’s not clear to me if we can control such a thing, but I think we can aspire to guide it in a direction that’s beneficial to humanity.
‘But I do think it’s one of the existential risks that we face and it is potentially the most pressing one if you look at the timescale and rate of advancement – the summit is timely, and I applaud the prime minister for holding it.’
Mr Musk added that he hoped the two-day summit could be used to establish an ‘international consensus’ on insight into AI, so that a ‘third-party referee’ could be established in the sector ‘who can observe what leading AI companies are doing and at least sound the alarm if they have concerns’.
The SpaceX and Tesla boss was an original board member of OpenAI, the company behind one of the world’s most powerful AI chatbots ChatGPT.
He later revealed he left the company because he ‘didn’t agree with some of what the OpenAI team wanted to do’.
Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast before the summit, Mr Musk said he fears environmentalists could use AI to end human life.
‘If you start thinking that humans are bad, then the natural conclusion is humans should die out,’ he said.
‘If AI gets programmed by the extinctionists, its utility function will be the extinction of humanity… they won’t even think it’s bad.’
The theory is one commonly shared on social media channels popular with climate change deniers.
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