The rise of general-purpose AI has raised a lot of existential debates over the past couple of months, but some people in the tech industry, like Elon Musk, would like you to take this threat more seriously.
Gone are the days when Musk built electric cars and occasionally did something eccentric like sending his personal car to space. Now, the billionaire traps himself in his Twitter office, ruminating over the state of politics and sharing “dank memes” with his legions of fans — when he isn’t busy trolling the entire online community by changing the social media’s official logo to that image of the Shiba Inu dog.
Recently, Musk signed a petition to stop the unmitigated advance of AI models like ChatGPT, and it looks like the business magnate and part-time engineer isn’t done by a long shot in his crusade against artificial intelligence.
In a chat with Fox’s Tucker Carlson (because of course Elon would sit down for an interview with Fox), he expressed his worries about AI having the potential to wipe out civilization itself, claiming that advanced AI is even more dangerous than “bad car production.”
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production. In the sense that it has the potential, however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial, it has the potential of civilization destruction.”
The irony is not lost on us, this coming from the CEO of a car company whose products are increasingly gaining notoriety for catching on fire and putting passengers’ lives at risk.
Courtesy of decades of genre storytelling, especially on the sci-fi front, we have no difficulty imagining a future where AIs turn on humans, even if they haven’t necessarily achieved sentience. But “bad car production,” as Elon puts it, is a problem for today. So how about we go fixing humanity one problem at a time, starting with, say, the motor vehicle industry?