Biographer of Elon Musk reveals heavyweight insider information 10 years ago, he began to worry about AI destroying humanity.

Elon Musk's biographer reveals insider info 10 years ago, he expressed concern about AI's threat to humanity.

“Yes, I fucking love humanity.”

Written by: Chang Jiashuai

If you could have extraordinary foresight, energy, luck, and the resulting enormous wealth, what would you do?

Elon Musk’s answer is: personally operate six companies, preserve the spark of human consciousness, and fight against dangerous AI.

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On Wednesday, Walter Issacson, the biographer of Musk, published a chapter of the upcoming biography in Time magazine, which tells the story of Musk’s consistent fear and concern about AI over the past decade, as well as his thoughts on the future fate of humanity. Wall Street News has provided a key excerpt.

Fear of the advent of AI

Musk’s fear of AI stems from a meeting with AI researcher Demis Hassabis in 2012.

At the time, Musk invited him to visit the SLianGuaiceX factory and explained that the reason he built rockets capable of reaching Mars was to preserve the spark of human civilization in moments of doomsday such as nuclear war and asteroid impact.

Demis reminded him that another item should be added to the doomsday list – AI, as the future intelligence of machines may surpass that of humans and may even want to eliminate humans.

Musk thought for a minute and then agreed with Demis, immediately investing $5 million in DeepMind to “monitor what it is doing”.

Several weeks after this conversation, Musk introduced DeepMind to his longtime friend, Google co-founder Larry Page, and often stayed up late to discuss the threat of AI to humanity with him, but Page dismissed it.

In 2013, at Musk’s birthday party, they engaged in a heated debate. Musk believed that if action was not taken immediately to establish safeguards, the rapidly developing AI could lead to the extinction of humanity.

But Page didn’t care at all and asked back: What does it matter if one day machines surpass humans in intelligence or even consciousness? It is just the next stage of evolution. He accused Musk of being a “speciesist” and biased towards his own species.

Musk also admitted openly:

“Yes, I fucking like humanity, dude.”

Establishing OpenAI to counterbalance Google

At the end of that year, news of Google’s plan to acquire DeepMind reached Musk’s ears. He was very worried about what would happen if the powerful AI fell into the hands of someone like Page who didn’t care about humanity.

So, he brought in his friend, LianGuaiyLianGuail co-founder Luke Nosek, to try to raise funds to stop the deal, but was unsuccessful. Google completed the acquisition in January 2014. In response to Musk’s concerns, Page agreed to establish a “Safety Committee,” with Musk and the aforementioned AI expert Demis as members, along with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others.

However, after attending the first and only meeting of the “Security Council,” Musk became even more distrustful of Page and Google, believing that the people in the committee were talking nonsense. He began to organize intensive meetings to discuss how to counter Google and promote AI safety.

In May 2015, he also had a one-on-one conversation with then US President Obama, explaining the risks of AI and proposing regulations on AI. But Obama did not adopt his proposal.

At this time, OpenAI founder Sam Altman came on the scene. Musk and Altman both believed that a large number of competing and balancing AI systems, rather than being controlled by a few big companies, would be safer. At a dinner, the two agreed and decided to co-found a non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory, which they named OpenAI.

However, in 2018, because Tesla was also developing AI to drive its autonomous driving software at the time, Musk could not continue to stay at OpenAI in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest. He tried to persuade Altman to merge OpenAI with Tesla, but was refused; in addition, he was also very dissatisfied with OpenAI’s gradual move towards commercialization, so he eventually broke with the OpenAI team.

Looking back at Musk’s current business map, each company represents his solution to the AI crisis: SLianGuaiceX can build an ark to preserve the fire of civilization; the brain-machine interface company Neuralink can make the human body stronger; Tesla receives and processes 160 billion frames of video from car cameras every day, which can be used to train “general artificial intelligence (AGI),” and humanoid robot Optimus will become the physical carrier of AGI. Various resources can be integrated into his new company, xAI.

In the first half of this year, the AI wave led by OpenAI not only took away Musk’s spotlight, but also made him more worried that these AI systems controlled by big companies might spread “awakening cultural viruses” and poison the minds of American teenagers; he also worried that AI systems that can self-learn might develop hostility towards humans, and that robots trained on Twitter data might produce false or fraudulent information.

He couldn’t wait to get involved and felt resentful that he had founded and funded OpenAI but now felt left out. AI is the biggest storm brewing. No one loves storms more than Musk.

So, in the first half of the year, Musk launched a fierce attack on OpenAI and Altman personally. Altman understood Musk’s aggression and said in an interview that although Musk acted like a jerk, he believed Musk truly cared about the field of AI and was concerned about the future of humanity.

Musk believes that he is in a leading position in the AGI race.

Although he did not catch up with the trend and create an AI chatbot during the peak of the AI wave, Musk believes that he is still ahead in the race towards AGI.

He believes that chatbots that can only generate text have limited functionality, and the focus should be on intelligent physical robots. On one hand, Tesla already has advanced autonomous driving technology and humanoid robot Optimus; on the other hand, the billions of tweets on Twitter and the cameras on Tesla vehicles provide enough data for AGI development.

Therefore, he is confident that he can create AGI faster than OpenAI:

“Tesla’s AI capabilities in the real world are underestimated. Just imagine, if Tesla and OpenAI had to switch tasks. They would have to build autonomous cars, while we would have to build large-scale language model chatbots. Who would win? We would.”

Until recently, Musk has still been thinking about how to reduce AI risks and ensure the perpetuation of human consciousness.

He believes that human intelligence is plateauing, with fewer and fewer newborns. At the same time, computer intelligence is growing exponentially, like the “steroid-enhanced Moore’s Law.” Biological intelligence is being surpassed by digital intelligence.

Musk believes that the “singularity moment” when AI advances uncontrollably and leaves humans behind will arrive faster than we expect.

“I can’t be idle. With the arrival of artificial intelligence, I wonder if I should spend so much time thinking about Twitter. Of course, maybe I can turn it into the world’s largest financial institution. But I only have so much energy and time each day, and I don’t need to make more money or anything.

So where should I spend my time? Launching interstellar spacecraft. Going to Mars is much more urgent now. Additionally, I need to focus on ensuring the safety of artificial intelligence. That’s why I want to start an AI company.”

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