Elon Musk: AI is a bigger threat to humanity than North Korea
Kim Jong-un is a pussy cat compared to the horrors that could be conjured up by AI, warns Elon Musk
Elon Musk has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) poses a significantly greater threat to humanity than North Korea.
Serial entrepreneur Musk, whose OpenAI collective is working towards a more cohesive (and supposedly safer) approach to autonomous machines, said that AI poses "vastly more risk" than any nuclear bomb that the rogue state claims to have.
OpenAI aims to develop AI "in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return".
Musk has been a long time doomsayer on AI, but rather than sit around moaning about it, has been creating a working group of companies with standards specifically aimed at keeping it under control, ethical and generally a good thing.
The news comes as his own AI engine successfully beat professional players of online video online mass multiplayer action strategy combat dungeons role-play ninja knight warrior ballet game Dota 2.
The Musk Machine of Might won all its one-on-one battles taking huge potential chunks of the £19m prize fund. Because people get paid for this stuff, for realsies.
Musk warned that regulation would be vital to stop a potential Skynet situation, and that even though it sucked, the public danger made it a necessity.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, which has its own AI thing going on, has previously dismissed Musk's concerns over AI as "irresponsible", but Musk countered on Twitter saying that Zuck's understanding of the concept was "limited".
The Guardian reports that the AI that easily won a Dota 2 bout against one its best human players could "predict where human players would deploy forces and improvise on the spot".
Google Deepmind, which has already won at the fiendish board game Go, has its eyes set on its own attack on strategy games, with Starcraft II set in its sights.
How long before AI is deployed to predict what might happen in real battles?