Musk: There’s a chance AI ‘goes wrong and destroys humanity’

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is warning that it’s possible emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology “goes wrong and destroys humanity.”

“There’s a strong probability that it will make life much better and that we’ll have an age of abundance. And there’s some chance that it goes wrong and destroys humanity,” Musk told CNBC anchor David Faber.

“Hopefully, that chance is small, but it’s not zero. And so I think we want to take whatever actions we can think of to minimize the probability that AI goes wrong.”

Musk called the tech a “double-edged sword” and stressed it’s hard to predict what happens next with the new tools.

The Tesla CEO was an initial supporter of AI tech and was a co-founder of OpenAI, one of the leading artificial intelligence firms — but has since joined with technology experts to call for a pause on the development, warning it could put “society and humanity” at risk.

Musk has recently founded a new artificial intelligence company, X.AI. 

Asked about how this new venture will differ from OpenAI or Alphabet, Musk said, “This is not the time to … we don’t have enough time and nor is this the moment to really talk about it. We will have a launch event, and we’ll explore the issues in more detail.”

Leading AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton left Alphabet earlier this month, sounding alarms about the dangers of the tech he helped create, and he has warned AI could pose an existential threat to humanity and that “we should worry seriously about how we stop these things getting control over us.”  

Microsoft chief economist Michael Schwarz has cautioned AI will likely “be used by bad actors” and could “cause real damage.”