“Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” Elon said in his interview with Rolling Stone. “I keep telling people this. I hate to be the Cassandra here, but it’s all fun and games until somebody loses [an] eye.”165
During the spring of 2018, Elon took to Twitter to convince people to watch a new documentary about artificial intelligence, Do You Trust This Computer? It was produced by Chris Paine. This wasn’t Chris’s first documentary. In 2006, the filmmaker produced a documentary about GM’s EV1 debacle. (Remember the car that was leased to owners, then taken back and crushed? The funeral held by sad drivers? The candlelight vigils?) He then followed it up with Revenge of the Electric Car, which included part of Tesla’s story.
In this new documentary about artificial intelligence, Elon outlined his concerns. “We are rapidly headed towards digital superintelligence that far exceeds any human, and I think it’s very obvious,”166 he said. And to Elon, the threat to humans is obvious too.
“AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity,” Elon further explained. “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course, without even thinking about it. No hard feelings. It’s just like if we are building a road and an anthill happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants. We are just building a road. And so, good-bye anthill.”167
Elon is not the only one who has expressed concerns of this kind. One of the world’s greatest minds, the late Stephen Hawking, laid it out in plain language. In an interview with the BBC in 2014, the theoretical physicist said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”168
There is no question that AI will soon touch almost everything humans do. Artificial intelligence is already present in cell phones and e-mail functions like predictive text and navigation. Google Translate underwent mind-blowing overnight improvements when it switched to machine learning instead of humans sitting there programming the service with grammar rules, vocabulary, etc. Examples are endless and growing. Google Assistant announced an AI-based feature that will make actual real-life phone calls on your behalf to schedule things like hair appointments and restaurant reservations. In a 2018 demo, when the computer called a hair salon, the receptionist who picked up didn’t even realize a computer was calling—that’s how good the computer was at sounding human.
So there are seriously helpful applications for AI. It can even be used to sift through massive amounts of scientific data and make important discoveries (such as previously unknown exoplanets in the galaxy). And that’s before you get to medical applications of the lifesaving variety, like cancer detection.
But this technology also comes with ethical and moral dilemmas, including, Will this technology kill us?
Part of the problem, as Elon sees it, is that we don’t generally think things through. We invent. We discover problems with our invention, and then we try to fix them—which usually takes years. Cars are a great example. At first they didn’t have seat belts. In crashes, people died regularly. Having not thought through how to keep bodies safe in a crash, car companies had to figure it out later and came up with seat belts. But it took years for a law to actually make seat belts mandatory and set a universal safety standard.
Elon’s point is, Why not think it all the way through first? Why not start with regulations and ethics and a clear idea of what the problems could be—so we can avoid them.
Elon even took his concerns directly to President Barack Obama and to a meeting of all fifty governors. “I met with Obama for one reason”—to talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence.169
In 2015, Elon cofounded a nonprofit called OpenAI to research the development of AI and how can AI be used to benefit humanity instead of … um … to annihilate us.
“It’s going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon. In fact, it will be used as a weapon. The on-ramp to serious AI, the danger is going to be more humans using it against each other, I think, most likely. That will be the danger,”171 he explained in a podcast with Joe Rogan.
As of this writing, OpenAI has a team of sixty researchers and engineers working on the project, and they conduct their research without the pressure of having to make money. Sponsors include Elon, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Infosys, and Amazon.
In 2018, to avoid a conflict of interest, Elon resigned from the board because Tesla is using AI in its development of self-driving technology. That being said, Elon remains an adviser.
“I think it’s incredibly important that AI not be ‘other.’ It must be us,” Elon explained. “But I think we are really going to have to merge with AI or be left behind.”172
And in fact, Elon has another company called Neuralink that’s attempting to do just that.
Forget hybrid cars. What if you could have a hybrid brain? Part natural brain with a huge assist from a tiny supercomputer. Access to the world’s knowledge? The capacity to communicate without speaking? Or typing?
“We have a bandwidth problem,” Elon said. “You just can’t communicate through your fingers. They are just too slow.”173
There is still not a lot known about the scope of Neuralink’s work. The company’s simple website says, “Neuralink is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.”174
It’s a type of brain-computer interface that could give you superhuman intelligence. It’s possible the interface may involve what’s called neural lace, an ultrathin mesh of electrodes implanted directly in your skull.
Elon believes that people already have “some sort of merger with biological intelligence and machine intelligence. To some degree we are already a cyborg, if you think of the digital tools you have—your phone, your computer, the applications,”175 he said in 2017 at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
“Over time I think we’ll probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence, and it’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital extension of yourself.”
As Elon sees it, the bottleneck is output. Our poor thumbs can’t keep up with expressing what’s happening in our brains. “So some high bandwidth interface to the brain, I think, will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence,”176 Elon said. In other words, if our typing thumbs, fingers, and verbal communication is holding back our output, what would we be able to communicate or investigate if a computer in our brains could open the floodgates?
There are huge questions about the whole idea. Is it possible? Is it ethical? Is it a matter of survival? All of those remain to be seen. Stay tuned.
Ad Astra isn’t Elon’s only interest in education. Elon provided $15 million for the Global Learning XPRIZE, dedicated to solving one of education’s biggest challenges. The idea is for children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing, and math—with the support of technology. Four thousand children in Tanzania received tablet computers to test five teams’ teaching software over fifteen months. The five finalists were selected from 198 teams around the world and given $1 million each to develop their technology. The team that achieves the best results with the students will win a grand prize of $10 million.