Elon Musk says he's terrified of AI taking over the world

While we're all having fun watching people play with GPT-3 right now, I'm feeling the same itch on the back of my head I felt back in the mid-2000's when ordinary people started piling into social media and carrying the Internet around in their pocket. The nagging thought that this toylike tech could end up having an unpredictable effect on the world. What is the "Cambridge Analytica" moment of neural network tech going to look like?

I think people generally give a lot of undue clout to what Elon says, just because they pattern match "Elon Musk" with "smart guy". Granted, I think the hate bandwagon against him is just as silly.

I just think he's a fallible human like the rest of us, as unrelatable as he may be for various reasons. And he clearly has trouble keeping it together sometimes if his twitter is any indication. Him being terrified of something is all the more reason to be skeptical, because fear indicates a heightened emotional state, which is something he has a problem acting rational under.

That said, I firmly believe AI is gonna be a big fucking problem. Not necessarily because they'll gain sentience and enslave us, but because of how humans will use them. I trust that I don't need to go into detail about the utterly terrifying, civilization destroying disaster associated with anybody being able to create entirely fabricated, fake video, indistinguishable from reality, on a whim.

A synthetic, autonomous agent as generally intelligent as human, or an order of magnitude moreso, could indeed be terrifying.

But who's going to give such an intelligence any degree of autonomy?

Next he'll accuse Watson of being a pederast.