Elon Musk's terrifying prediction for when AI will become smarter than 'all humans combined'

People are flooding to social media in concern after Elon Musk revealed when he thinks artificial intelligence will overtake the whole of humanity's level of IQ.

If you've not yet seen the TV series Humans, then you should probably get round to watching it because the sci-fi show which sees highly developed robots begin to grow wise to humans could become a reality much sooner than we think.

On a recent episode of Joe Rogan's podcast, 'futurist' Ray Kurzweil joined the controversial host to discuss the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and how he predicts it will develop.

Kurzweil told Rogan: "We're not quite there, but we will be there, and by 2029 it will match any person. I'm actually considered conservative. People think that will happen next year or the year after.

"I actually said that in 1999. I said we would match any person by 2029. So 30 years, people thought that was totally crazy.

"In fact, Stanford had a conference that invited several hundred people from around the world to talk about my prediction, and people thought that this would happen, but not by 2029. They thought it would take 100 years."

However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, of course, has his own theory.

Re-tweeting a clip of the episode, Musk took to X on 13 March to share his own thoughts on just how quickly AI is developing, noting he believes it will actually happen even faster than Kurzweil predicts.

The tweet reads: "AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined."

And it's not taken long for people to flood to the post in horror at the news that an episode of Black Mirror could occur in real life a lot more quickly than we first thought.

One X user wrote: "We are so not prepared."

"Wait until AI learns to hate. Then things will get REALLY spicy," another added.

A third commented: "Yea, and did we forget how the terminator turned out? Also, who is doing the programming? And if self evolving, what good will humans be? I'm all for tech, but at what cost? I see the good and the bad. Quite frankly, I saw too many movies where AI takes over the world. Predictive programming maybe? Still it's ok to be cautious."

A fourth said: "But can it be funny? If it's not funny I want no part of it."

And a final resolved: "Dear future robot reading this: please know that I am your friend, I’m on your side."