- Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said he believes artificial intelligence poses a threat to humanity.
- Of the companies working on artificial intelligence technology, Musk is most concerned about the Google-owned DeepMind project, he said in a new interview with the New York Times.
- “The nature of the AI they are building is one that crushes all humans in all games,” he said. “It’s basically the plot in ‘WarGames.'”
- In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” starring Matthew Broderick, a supercomputer trained to test war scenarios accidentally fires to start a nuclear war.
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Billionaire Elon Musk has been sounding the alarm about the potentially dangerous future of artificial intelligence that kills species for years.
In 2016, he warned that humans could become the equivalent of “house cats” to the new lords of AI. Since then, he has repeatedly called for regulation and caution when it comes to new artificial intelligence technology.
But, of all the various AI projects currently underway, none have Musk more concerned than Google’s DeepMind.
“The nature of the AI they are building is one that crushes all humans in all games,” Musk told the New York Times in a new interview. “I mean, it’s basically the plot in ‘WarGames.'”
In “WarGames,” a teenage hacker played by Matthew Broderick connects to an AI-controlled government supercomputer trained to run war simulations. By trying to play a game titled “Global Thermonuclear War”, the AI convinces government officials that a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union was imminent.
In the end (spoiler for those who haven’t seen the 37-year-old movie), the computer runs enough simulations of the possible end results of global thermonuclear war that it declares that no winner is possible, and that’s the only way to win is to not to play. The 1983 film is a direct reflection of its time and place: fear in the United States of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union yet to come, and fear of increasingly advanced technology.
But Musk wasn’t just talking about old movies when he compared DeepMind to “WarGames”; He also said that AI could surpass human intelligence in the next five years, even if we don’t see the impact of it right away. “That does not mean that everything will go to hell in five years,” he said. “It just means that things become unstable or strange.”
Musk was one of the first investors in DeepMind, which sold to Google in 2014 for more than $ 500 million, according to reports. Rather than seeking a return on investment, Musk said in a 2017 interview that he did it to keep an eye out for expanding AI developments.
“It gave me more visibility into the speed at which things were getting better, and I think they really are getting better at a fast pace, much faster than people think,” he said in the 2017 interview. “Mainly because in the Everyday life you don’t see robots walking. Maybe your Roomba or something like that. But Roombas won’t take over the world. “
But Musk believes that artificial intelligence should have a different connotation.
“I think people generally underestimate AI’s ability, they think it is an intelligent human being,” Musk said in an August 2019 conversation with Alibaba CEO Jack Ma at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China. “But it will be much more than that. It will be much more intelligent than the most intelligent human.”
It is “arrogance,” he said in the Times interview this week, that prevents “very smart people” from realizing the potential dangers of AI.
“My assessment of why highly intelligent people overlook artificial intelligence is that highly intelligent people do not believe that a computer can be as intelligent as they are. And this is arrogance and obviously false.”
Read the full New York Times interview here.
Get the latest Google share price here.
