Elon Musk said AI — Artificial Intelligence — is probably the "scariest problem" facing human civilization, repeating himself while speaking to the nation's governors as part of his current technology goodwill tour.
The Tesla CEO was speaking at the National Governors Association in Rhode Island on Saturday, and he told the state CEOs that AI was “a fundamental existential risk for human civilization,” per NPR.
“I don't think people fully appreciate that," he said, adding that, based on what he had seen of cutting edge technology, the threat posed by AI was scary."
For years Musk has been vocal about his concerns regarding AI and Saturday’s version of his public message was more forceful.
“AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes faulty, drugs or bad food were not. They were harmful to certain individuals within society but not to society as whole,” he said.
Musk noted there definitely is a role for regulators.
“I’m against over regulation for sure but I think we need to get on that with AI. There will certainly be a lot of job disruption because what is going to happen is that robots will be able to do everything better than all of us.”
Musk said this really was the scariest problem to him, stressing there is a need to ensure regulation over AI was enforced.
“The first order of business would be to try to learn as much as possible, to understand the nature of the issues.”
Musk started Neuralink in an attempt to develop AI that would positively affect humanity.
The company strives to connect humans and computers through “ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces”.