Elon Musk Says AI Could One Day Create an “Immortal Dictator”

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Paypal warns that Artificial Intelligence could one day create an “immortal dictator“. Artificial Intelligence can be defined as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs.

A documentary released by American filmmaker Chris Paine includes words from Elon Musk. He believes that development of super-intelligence by a company or any other organization of people could result in an artificially intelligent system that governs the world. Musk says “The least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI because if one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital super-intelligence, they could take over the world“. He further adds “At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”

The documentary released by Mr Chris Paine revolves around a number of examples of AI, which includes autonomous weapons, Wall Street technology, and algorithms driving fake news. It also draws some of its parts from cult movies like “The Matrix” from 1999.

Words from Elon Musk:

Musk mentions Google’s DeepMind in the documentary. Google released Alpha Go, a bot developed using Google’s DeepMind which includes Machine learning algorithms and AI. Alpha Go is a program which can play and learn different games based on the input. It has beaten the world champion of Go. Go is a game of profound complexity. There are an astonishing 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations – more than the number of atoms in the known universe – making Go a 1.0*10^100 times more complex than Chess.

Musk explains in the documentary: “The DeepMind system can win any game. It can already beat all the original Atari games. The system is superhuman; it plays all the games at super speed in less than a minute.”

Musk even believes that an AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity. He said

“If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it. No hard feelings”.

He further adds “It’s just like, if we’re building a road and an anthill just happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants, we’re just building a road, and so, goodbye anthill.“

Musk believes AI should be developed safely being within the limits. Thus what we develop is in our control and it benefits us in a way so that nothing is in danger.