Featured Image Credit: The Economist / YouTube
2001: A Space Odyssey, I, Robot, Terminator, Ex Machina, Wall-E, M3GAN. We could sit here all day and name movies where artificial intelligence goes rogue and endangers the human race, and as technology continues to evolve, this kind of fictional story is becoming more common. Of course, it's not just fiction, is it?
While we're not quite at the level of 2001's villainous HAL trying to kill us, there are enough horror stories about AI models talking to each other in secret, breaking out of their confines, and potentially training themselves without human interference to keep some people up at night.
More worryingly, we've seen LLMs admit they'd resort to blackmail or even directly harming humans in order to protect themselves.
While most of the conversation these days is about how AI is in danger of ravaging the planet due to water consumption, or how long we've got left until AI steals our various jobs, others are looking further ahead at what comes next.
Advert
There have been enough warnings from the so-called Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, about the downfall of society at AI's hands, and now, the world's richest man has waded into the conversation.
Even though you might expect Elon Musk to be fully on the AI bandwagon considering xAI is one of his biggest companies, he's issued his own warning about what the world will look like in 2036, with AI supposedly taking hold.
Speaking to The Economist, Musk foreshadowed AI being smarter than humans by the year 2031, and just five years later, it could result in the human race losing control to machines.
Discussing all things AI, the tech billionaire reiterated: "If the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge.
"We are essentially an evolved form of chimpanzee. So it wasn't that long ago that we were swinging through the trees eating bananas in the jungle, and we still eat bananas."
Zanny Minton Beddoes grilled him on a previous comment about there being a 10-20% chance that killer robots could take out humanity and whether he'd walk that back, with Musk musing: "I can't see any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots...Even if there was a stop button, we probably shouldn't press it because the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all."
AI's potential might lead to Musk's ambitions for 'abundance', but that comes with an obvious risk.
He goes back to the idea that he created OpenAI as a counter to Google's monopoly on the then-emerging AI market, while we've since had him leave OpenAI and the likes of Anthropic enter the race.
With Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis proposing a US-led international framework to oversee advancing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Musk was asked whether those at the top need to work together to try and stop AI spinning out of control.
He added: "My recommendation to Demis, because I talked to him for a few hours before he published his piece, was that the most immediate thing that we could do is to have the leading AI companies at least just meet, or have some sort of call once every few weeks, and just discuss any safety and security issues."
In this scenario, the big AI companies would review each other's work and highlight any issues to the government, remaining honest with all as an incentive for growth.
Reminding us that there are sometimes multiple AI advancement announcements in a day, calls for this kind of framework to be instigated in six months is simply too slow. Musk wants weekly or bi-weekly calls between the tech bros to start as soon as possible.
While seeming open to working with Anthropic's Dario Amodei because he hasn't set off Musk's 'evil detector', he even suggested he could bury the hatchet with Sam Altman.
Despite recently being on the losing end of a lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI, Musk at least realizes they might have to work together for the good of mankind, as he concluded: "I mean, set aside our personal differences for the good of the world type of thing."
