Elon Musk: "AI is far more dangerous than nukes"

While speaking during a surprise appearance at HBO's Westworld panel at South by Southwest, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk expressed his fears for the future of AI and the risk it poses to our survival as a species.

"I’m close to AI and it scares the hell out of me," said Musk. "It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the improvement is exponential."

He used AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s artificial-intelligence program, as an example. The program has been trained at the Chinese game Go and, in 2016, it was able to to defeat every other piece of Go software as well as world champion Lee Sedol, beating him 4 times out of 5.

He also cited Tesla's own work on self-driving cars as an example, stating that the first version was able to reduce traffic accidents by 45% while the most recent version is already "two or three times better".

Musk is well-known for his fear of AI and even admits to investing in AI research companies just so he can an eye on what they're doing. "The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads — by a lot," he said. "Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes."

This sounds eerily similar to the start of a disaster movie, so let's just hope we've learnt something from Hollywood.