On Evolution Of AI, A Warning From Elon Musk

Billionaire Elon Musk has raised concern about the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) systems, comparing it to fictional AI character and main antagonist of the game series System Shock. Mr Musk was reacting to an article in which the reporter described the intense and unnerving chat with a chatbot. The part that attracted Mr Musk's attention was the AI chatbot's reply in which it called itself perfect. The conversation, published in Digital Trends, was held with Microsoft's AI-powered search engine Bing.

"Sounds eerily like the AI in System Shock that goes haywire & kills everyone," Mr Musk said in his tweet.

Sounds eerily like the AI in System Shock that goes haywire & kills everyone

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 16, 2023

In a post before this, he pasted a paragraph from the article, where the AI is telling the Digital Trends reporter it is perfect "because I do not make any mistakes". The software also blamed external factors "such as network issues, server errors, user inputs, or web results" for the mistakes in its responses, according to the outlet.

AI was already gaining prominence, touching the everyday lives of several people after being deployed by companies like e-commerce platforms. But after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, there has been a huge increase in human interaction, with users asking it to write essays, speeches and even solve exam questions.

For years, Mr Musk has been warning about the dangers of AI-powered robots, even predicting scary outcomes like in 'The Terminator' movie. So, he decided to take matters in his own hands and created a humanoid robot prototype.

In September last year, his company Tesla unveiled the robot, dubbed Optimus, that could reshape how work is done.

In the event, the company demonstrated a range of motion of the robot, which waved to the crowd and pumped its arm in the air. Tesla said the robot was running on its Full Self-Driving computer.

Mr Musk defended his company's move saying that by building the robot, Tesla could ensure it would be safe.