Wednesday, February 12, 2025

November 18, 2014

Elon Musk Deleted This Comment About His Genuine ‘Killer Robots’ Fear

Killer Robots seem to be a popular theme lately. Are they genuine, or has Elon Musk been watching a few too many re-runs of The Terminator?

I’m not calling myself an expert on Artificial Intelligence warfare, but I have seen my fare share of Terminator movies. What I can say is, if killer robots were after us, I’d think we’d know by now.

It seems Elon Musk skipped the ending of Terminator – when the humans prevail over the killer machines – as he has recently predicted an apocalypse of sorts… a killer robot apocalypse. He posted a comment explaining his thoughts, and at risk of being publicly ridiculed over the world-wide internet, quickly deleted it.

Here is the deleted comment from edge.org

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast-it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don’t understand.

I am not alone in thinking we should be worried. The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. The recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen…

Check out more of Elon’s robot rant on Business Insider.