You might think that Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, would be all gung-ho for artificial intelligence. But he's not; he's worried about where it might lead.
"We should be very careful about artificial intelligence," he said told an audience at MIT,
CNNMoney reports.
"[It might be] our biggest existential threat. With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon."
This isn't the first time Musk has warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence. He took
to Twitter in August to pronounce that it's "potentially more dangerous than nukes."
Musk recently told CNN that he has invested in artificial intelligence companies "to keep an eye on them." Musk said he wants to make sure that companies have adopted proper safety precautions.
In another surprise for a techie, Musk expressed approval for stronger regulation of artificial intelligence Friday.
"I'm increasingly inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish."
Others see potential trouble too. Michael Jordan, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, told
IEEE Spectrum that an over-reliance on big data will probably spark analytical crises similar to a nationwide collapse of bridges.
"If I have no principles, and I build thousands of bridges without any actual science, lots of them will fall down, and great disasters will occur," he explained.
"Civil engineers eventually learned to build bridges that were guaranteed to stand up. So with big data, it will take decades, I suspect, to get a real engineering approach, so that you can say with some assurance that you are giving out reasonable answers and are quantifying the likelihood of errors."
He also said the idea of making chips based on the human brain are likely doomed to failure.