Elon Musk is a witty, brilliant, and often funny guy. But there’s one topic where he gets very serious very fast — the potentially devastating effects of artificial intelligence if we don’t get serious about regulating and monitoring the rate it is improving. Musk pulls no punches when he describes the potential threat it poses.
He’s said it could destroy civilization in the past, and he’s saying it frequently now, including in a riveting interview he gave Tucker Carlson of Fox News. And it was in this interview that he introduced a new scary way AI could impact the world — in elections.
“Even if you say that AI doesn’t have agency, well it’s very likely that people will use the AI as a tool in elections. And then, you know, if AI’s smart enough, are they using the tool, or is the tool using them? So I think things are getting weird, and they’re getting weird fast.”
Musk has been obsessed with colonizing Mars for years, which is one of the reasons he launched SpaceX, but a flight to Mars won’t matter if humans aren’t around to get on the spaceship. And he is concerned about so many things about what he’s seeing in AI, including the fact that he believes ChatGPT is being programmed to lie. It’s one reason he is now developing his own artificial intelligence chatbot called “TruthGPT.”
“What’s happening is they’re training the AI to lie. It isn’t good. AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” he explained. “In the sense that it has the potential, however, small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial, it has the potential of civilization destruction.”
If there is one person on the planet who does not lack attention, it’s Elon Musk. So he’s not spewing his concerns to get eyeballs. You get the idea that he’s had a good look into the future and does not like what he sees.
“I’m not suggesting we blow up the server centers right now, but there may be some – it may be wise to have some sort of contingency plan where the government’s got an ability to shut down power to these service centers. Like you don’t have to blow it up, you can just cut the power.”
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