Elon Musk regularly makes headlines and people want his views on everything. He may be blunt at times, like all the time but that is what he is known for. Musk recently gave an interview to Rolling Stone and the main question was “What is the biggest threat to humanity?”
Musk gave a two-fold answer to that saying the two biggest threats to humanity are climate change and Artificial Intelligence.
Climate Change:
To say Elon Musk understands climate change would be an understatement. Nobody has invested so much in solar panels as this guy. He took hold of SolarCity panels last year and developed the Tesla Powerwall System side by side to store that solar energy. He even powered a whole island with that system.
All of his companies are energy efficient and are creating smarter ways to power up the world. He is really passionate about the environment and has called the people who deny environment science as “real fraud” in 2016. This time he was passionate in his answer as well.
“Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” Musk said in the interview “I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a f****** eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone who’s not crazy in the scientific community.”
Artificial Intelligence:
Elon Musk himself started Neuralink to merge the human brain with artificial intelligence and he is not against the technology itself. He is against hoarding it and using it for unethical means. Machine learning can be used to program robots to differentiate between different stereotypes. He is working with OpenAI to develop conscientious AI but he is a firm believer that is should only be used in an ethical manner.
“Between Facebook, Google and Amazon – and arguably Apple, but they seem to care about privacy – they have more information about you than you can remember,” Musk explained, “There’s a lot of risk in concentration of power. So if AGI [artificial general intelligence] represents an extreme level of power, should that be controlled by a few people at Google with no oversight?”
