Elon Musk called artificial intelligence a double-edged sword, telling US senators Wednesday that the technology can be a tremendous source for good but warning about risks to civilization, according to a person in the closed-door session.
The billionaire owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, was among more than 20 tech and civil society leaders attending the summit focused on AI.
Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., told senators they shouldn’t be worried about self-driving cars, for instance, but instead should focus their concerns on what he called deeper AI, the person in the room said. Deep AI is an apparent reference to deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process data in a way that imitates the human brain.
Musk, who spoke off-the-cuff, particularly raised concerns about data centers so powerful and big that they could be seen from space, with a level of intelligence that is currently hard to comprehend, the person said.
Among projects started by Musk, the world’s richest person, is an AI company, xAI.
On China, Musk recounted his earlier trip to the nation and said he raised the risks of deep AI and super intelligence with senior officials there.