During a recent public talk, SpaceX boss Elon Musk answered many questions on various topics. Among these topics was artificial intelligence and Musk’s vision for the impact he will have on humanity in the future.
During a recent public talk, SpaceX boss Elon Musk answered many questions on various topics. Among these topics was artificial intelligence and Musk’s vision for the impact he will have on humanity in the future.
Elon Musk’s crucial statement on the future effect of AI
The technology mogul stated that the percentage of biological intelligence “reduces with each passing month” and “eventually the percentage of biological intelligence will be less than one percent.”
In the future, Musk believes, biological intelligence is likely to serve as a “backup or buffer to intelligence” and he expects that most of the intelligence that will dominate the Earth will be digital in nature. Musk doesn’t know exactly what people will have to do when that happens. Obviously, he is sure that we need AI that will be beneficial to humanity. He also shared that he has thought about AI safety for a long time.
What needs to be done for AI to promote humanity, according to Musk?
Humanity does not want an AI that is “brutal,” Musk said, and therefore it is also very important, he emphasized, that AI be taught to seek the truth and be maximally curious. To seek the truth you must be able to tell the truth, said the businessman, even if the truth is not politically correct. Only in that case, Musk believes, will AI be able to foster human civilization in the future.
Musk referred to the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” based on a script written by renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. In that movie, the spaceship AI named Hal killed the entire astronaut crew; It happened because Hal was forced to lie, Elon Musk believes.
“That’s what Arthur C. Clarke was trying to say,” the SpaceX boss said, “Don’t make AI lie.”
This was not the first statement made by Musk in the last two years about the need to create a true AI, not a “woke” one; he believes that the current trend in creating AI (OpenAI’s ChatGPT, etc.) is the latter.
To buck that trend, Musk has created his own AI startup, xAI, and an AI chatbot called Grok, which is already built into X.
