Summoning The Demon

"I think we should be very careful about AI," the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, said Friday in a talk at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. "If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that."

"With AI we are summoning the demon," he said. "You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and it's like yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn't work out."

This isn't the first time Musk has expressed concerns over AI In an interview with The Huffington Post in January, he said, "I hope the AI is nice to us."

Among those who seem to share Musk's concerns is celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking.

"Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history," Hawking said in a Huffington Post blog post co-written by physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek and computer scientist Stuart Russell. "Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks."

** special thanks to AI-V and AI-XV Champion Bob Paze for his investigative reporting on behalf of the AI media department.