Musk also predicted that there will be another ‘dark age’ particularly if there is a third world war
On many occasions in the past, technocrat Elon Musk has expressed his reservations on the unregulated advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He reiterated his stance in an appearance at the South by Southwest conference in Texas on Sunday.
The founder of SpaceX said that though he is not a supporter of regulation, in case of AI he could make an exception, as per a report by ZDNet.
"This is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public, therefore there needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely -- this is extremely important," he said.
Musk painted a haunting picture and said that AI experts who think that machine cannot be smarter than them, are fundamentally flawed. "I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me," he added.
He also pointed to the improvement in Google’s AlphaGo algorithm which was able to defeat the world champion of the ancient Chinese board game Go last year. It went from not able to defeat 'good' players to crush the best in a span of 6-9 months.
"No one predicted that rate of improvement," Musk said.
Musk also predicted similar improvement in case of self-driving cars. He pressed that we needed to figure out a way to ensure that the advent of AI is symbiotic with humanity.
"The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads, by a lot and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they want -- that would be insane,” he added.
Musk also predicted that there will be another ‘dark age’ particularly if there is a third world war. "Last century we had two massive world wars, three if you count the Cold War, I think it's unlikely that we'll never have a world war again ... this has been our pattern in the past," he said.