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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 it will have on humanity in the future.
Elon Musk’s crucial statement on future AI effect
The tech magnate stated that the percentage of biological intelligence “grows smaller with each passing month,” and “eventually the percentage of intelligence that is biological will be less than one percent.”
In the future, Musk believes, biological intelligence is likely to serve as a “backstop or buffer of intelligence,” and he expects that the majority of intelligence that will dominate the earth will be of a digital nature. Musk does not know exactly what people will be left to do when that happens. He is, obviously, certain 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 to make AI foster humanity, per Musk
Humanity does not want AI that is “brutal,” Musk said, and therefore it is also very important, he emphasized, that AI be taught to be maximally truth-seeking and curious. To be truth-seeking, it must be trained to tell the truth, the entrepreneur pointed out, even if the truth is not politically correct. Only in that case, Musk believes, AI will 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 sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke. In that movie, the AI on the spaceship called Hal killed the entire crew of astronauts; 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 the AI lie.”
This was not the first statement made by Musk over the last two years about the necessity of making a truthful AI, not a “woke” one; he believes the current trend in AI creation (OpenAI’s ChatGPT, etc.) to be the latter.
To oppose that trend, Musk has created his own AI start-up, xAI, and an AI chatbot called Grok, which is already integrated on X.
