- Speaking with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, tech billionaire Elon Musk said that artificial intelligence has the potential to become “the most destructive force in history.”
- Musk has warned on several occasions of the threats AI poses to humanity, and recently urged a pause on development of more advanced AI than OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, at the 2023 AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in Bletchley, UK, on Wednesday, November 1, 2023.
Chris J Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
LONDON – Elon Musk believes that artificial intelligence may end up taking everyone’s jobs away.
The billionaire tech pioneer, who owns Tesla, SpaceX,
“We will have, for the first time, something smarter than the smartest human,” Musk said at an event held at Lancaster House, the official residence of the UK government.
“It’s hard to say exactly what that moment will be, but there will come a point where a job is no longer needed,” Musk continued, speaking alongside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “You can have a job if you want to have a job for personal satisfaction. But artificial intelligence will be able to do everything.”
“I don’t know if this makes people comfortable or uncomfortable,” Musk joked, which the audience laughed at.
“If you want to have a magic genie, it grants you any wish you want, and there are no limits. You don’t have these three wishes whose limits are nonsense, they are good and bad at the same time. One of the challenges in the future will be how to achieve that we find meaning in life.” “
Musk has warned on several occasions of the threats AI poses to humanity, having once said it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He was one of several technology leaders who urged a pause on AI development more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4 in a widely cited open letter released earlier this year.
Other technology leaders disagree, including Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Speaking to BBC Radio in June, Karp said he was seeing that “a lot of people asking to pause are asking to pause because they don’t have a product.”
Musk’s comments on Thursday follow the conclusion of a historic summit in Bletchley Park, England, where world leaders agreed to a global statement on artificial intelligence, which saw them find common ground on the risks the technology poses to humanity.
Technology experts and political leaders used the summit to warn about existential threats posed by artificial intelligence, focusing on some of the potential doomsday scenarios that could take shape with the invention of hypothetical superintelligence.
The summit saw the United States and China, the two countries most nervous about the technology, agree to find a global consensus on how to address some of the most complex questions about artificial intelligence, including how to develop it safely and regulate it.