Elon Musk says AIs could potentially be more dangerous than nukes

When a billionaire investor responsible for disrupting credit/payments, automotive, and space travel industries communicates a warning to the world about a trend in new technologies, it’s best just to listen. Case in point, yesterday SpaceX and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk told people to be careful when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), which he said could be “potentially more dangerous” than nuclear weapons, according to a tweet sent yesterday.

Back in June, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told CNBC that he’d invested in a company called Vicarious that is developing products and services based on artificial intelligence. But that wasn’t why Musk got interested. His impetus for backing the firm was instead “to keep an eye on” unforeseen terrifying scenarios where the products began to threaten humanity. He doesn’t appear to have been exaggerating. Bostrom is Nick Bostrom, the founder of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. That group recently partnered with a new group at Cambridge, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, to study how things like nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence and other innovations could someday wipe us all out, according to PCPro: At [a] conference, Bostrom was asked if we should be scared by new technology. “Yes,” he said, “but scared about the right things. There are huge existential threats, these are threats to the very survival of life on Earth, from machine intelligence – not the way it is today, but if we achieve this sort of super-intelligence in the future,” Bostrom said.