Elon Musk Reveals ‘One of the Biggest Risks’ to Human Civilization

Tesla CEO tells audience that AI could pose an existential threat

Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a file photo in 2019. (Reuters/Aly Song

Elon Musk said that ChatGPT and other recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) could pose a significant risk to civilization itself and that people should be on their guard.

“One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI,” the Tesla and Twitter owner said at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Wednesday. Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, which made the popular service ChatGPT.

“It’s both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability,” Musk said in reference to artificial intelligence and ChatGPT.  Then, he argued that “with that comes great danger.”

In recent weeks, ChatGPT has drawn headlines for its ability to pass university examinations, write essays, and perform other functions. That has drawn warnings from professors and researchers that some professions may become obsolete in the near future.

Released a to the public a few months ago, ChatGPT is an advanced form of AI that uses a language model known as GPT-3. Its programming allows it to understand human language and come up with responses.

While Musk was involved in OpenAI, he left the company’s board in 2018. He also no longer holds a stake in the firm, which recently received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

“Initially it was created as an open-source nonprofit. Now it is closed-source and for profit,“ Musk told the attendees of the summit. ”I don’t have an open stake in OpenAI, nor am I on the board, nor do I control it in any way.”

Musk said that ChatGPT “has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become,“ adding, ”The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people.”

But Musk warned that there needs to be regulation. He noted that laws and rules “may slow down AI a little bit, but I think that that might also be a good thing,” Musk added.

“I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly,” he said, reported CNBC. “It is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine.”

Jobs?

While Musk did not speak about AI’s impact on the job market, others have issued warnings that some jobs could be phased out in the coming years. That includes jobs in publishing, graphic design, simple programming, and even in the financial sector.

Screens displaying the logos of Microsoft and ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence application software developed by OpenAI. Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

“AI is replacing the white-collar workers. I don’t think anyone can stop that,” Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the department of computing and information sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, told the New York Post several weeks ago. “This is not crying wolf,” Shi added of AI’s capacity to take away jobs. “The wolf is at the door.”

The warnings were issued after a researcher found that ChatGPT passed a graduate-level examination at University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School last month. Some professors, meanwhile, have suggested university should overhaul their exam rules, teaching, and curriculum.

“Copy editing is certainly something it does an extremely good job at. Summarizing, making an article concise and things of that nature, it certainly does a really good job,” Chinmay Hegde, a computer science and electrical engineering associate professor at New York University, told the New York Post last month.

But Hegde noted that the chatbot has some significant limitations in its current state.

“You can ask it to provide an essay, to produce a story with citations, but more often than not, the citations are just made up,” Hegde said. “That’s a known failure of ChatGPT and, honestly, we do not know how to fix that.”

Google?

With ChatGPT’s improvements, there have been reports suggesting that top executives at Google, which operates the world’s most-used search engine, has prompted the firm to develop its own AI chatbot. Last week, Google rolled out a similar service, Bard, in what appears to be an attempt to compete with OpenAI.

“I think Google was hesitant to productize this because it didn’t think it was really ready for a product yet, but, I think, as a demonstration vehicle, it’s a great piece of technology,” said John Hennessy, the chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, during an event on Monday. Hennessy said he believes that generative artificial intelligence is still one to two years away from being more widely used.