There’s a rift emerging among the members of the tech super-geniuses club. It’s not about matters of human intelligence, though. Physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla /SpaceX founder Elon Musk have both recently warned that our sci-fi nightmares about artificial intelligence could actually come true in our lifetimes.
Here’s what Musk, for instance, said during a recent stop at MIT:
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. Our biggest existential threat is probably that … There should be some regulatory oversight at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.