One of the defining technological changes in recent months has been the rise of artificial intelligence, which is growingly worryingly smart.
From ChatGPT potentially putting people out of jobs, AI is changing and not necessarily for the better, which is something Elon Musk is now frightened he's facilitated.
The Tesla founder and Twitter CEO made the revelation during a presentation to Tesla investors at their 2023 Investor Day, and he admitted that AI generally 'stresses me out'.
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"I am a little worried about the AI stuff," he said, before explaining that its development should overseen by a regulatory body that ensure that it is 'operating in the public interest.'
"It's quite dangerous technology. I fear I may have done some things to accelerate it," he said.
"Some of the AI stuff is obviously useful, like what [Tesla] is doing with self driving," Musk went on, stressing that Tesla is doing 'good things' when it comes to its development.
He was then asked if AI could be used to help literally build cars, but he shut down this question.
"I don't see AI helping us make cars any time soon," he said. "At that point... there's no point in any of us working."
Outside of the recent investor's event, Musk has been a vocal critic of certain AI technologies including ChatGPT, which he described as 'too woke'.
This is because the software refused to use a racial slur even when it was told that doing so would save humanity from the threat of a nuclear bomb.
"The danger of training AI to be woke - in other words, lie - is deadly," he asserted on Twitter.
In case your memory needs refreshing, Musk helped to found OpenAI, ChatGPT's parent company, but he left when conflict arose about the direction in which it was being taken.
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The bigger problem with AI which Musk is alluding to was summarised by Os Keyes, who is a design and engineering PhD candidate at the University of Washington.
He said: "If you look at the actual politics that ChatGPT and other projects advance, you see a world in which vast, monolithic hubs of centralised computing power replace a vast number of jobs.
"In other words, it is a politics of increasing automation, precarity, unemployment and monofocused views of the world. That the system won’t yell racial slurs does not indicate that it is ‘woke’, or 'left-wing’'- it simply indicates that it’s disenfranchisement with a smile."
Topics: Elon Musk, Technology, Artificial Intelligence
Emma Guinness