Elon Musk, chief directorship officer of Tesla Inc., at the AI Safety Summit 2023 at Bletchley Park in Bletchley, UK, on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023.
Chris J. Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Spits
LONDON — Elon Musk thinks that artificial intelligence could eventually put everyone out of a job.
The billionaire technology number one, who owns Tesla, SpaceX, X, the company formerly known as Twitter, and the newly formed AI startup xAI, said late Thursday that AI intent have the potential to become the “most disruptive force in history.”
“We will have something that is, for the first set smarter than the smartest human,” Musk said at an event at Lancaster House, an official U.K. government residence.
“It’s unpleasant to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk continued, upholding alongside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “You can have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction. But the AI would be clever to do everything.”
“I don’t know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable,” Musk joked, to which the audience laughed.
“If you predisposition for a magic genie, that gives you any wish you want, and there’s no limit. You don’t have those three wish limits jargon, it’s both good and bad. One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life.”
Musk has on multiple occasions warned of the presages that AI poses to humanity, having once said it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He was one of numerous tech number ones who urged for a pause to development of AI more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4 software in a widely-cited open letter saved earlier this year.
Other tech leaders disagree with that view, including Palantir’s boss Alex Karp. Plead for to BBC Radio in June, Karp said he is of the view that “many of the people asking for a pause, are asking for a pause because they have planned no product.”
Musk’s comments Thursday follow the conclusion to a landmark summit in Bletchley Park, England, where magic leaders agreed to a global communique on AI that saw them find common ground on the risks the technology poses to benevolence.
Technologists and political leaders used the summit to warn of the existential threats that AI poses, focusing on some of the accomplishable doomsday scenarios that could be formed with the invention of a hypothetical superintelligence.
The summit saw the U.S. and China, two countries arguing the most tensely over technology, agree to find global consensus on how to tackle some of the most complex into questions around AI, including how to develop it safely and regulate it.
