Musk's purchase of Twitter sent shockwaves throughout politics and the media, especially when it became clear Musk was serious about using his $48 billion purchase to defend free speech and end the Biden administration’s backdoor censorship.
Bill D'Agostino of Media Research Center tells AFN it looks like the high-tech genius wants to do the same with artificial intelligence.
“If we were to track Elon's trajectory on the whole free speech question and the political bias question,” says D’Agostino, “that's probably a similar kind of framework that you're going to see with his AI.”
Musk, in fact, announced the launch of xAI last week after he urged AI developers back in March to hit a six-month pause on their technology until “shared safety protocols” could be introduced. That is because the cutting-edge technology that allows computer systems to think and behave like humans could also view humans as a threat, mirroring the fictional “Skynet” from the Terminator films that was invented by “Cyberdyne Systems.”
D’Agostino, who is keeping an eye on AI’s advancements, says the technology could soon appear everywhere from a hospital surgery room to a Pentagon command post, but at what point, he asks, do humans still control it?
“You're looking at something that could potentially start acting against its creators and, for example, hijack the financial system, crash the stock market, something like that,” he warns. "Because it made some calculation that that was in either its own or humanity's best interest.”
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” Musk told Tucker Carlson in an April interview. "In the sense that it is, it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction.”
Musk, the mind behind SpaceX and Tesla, has warned about AI for years while also using its technology in his business ventures. The billionaire helped start OpenAI, the research company that created ChatGPT, but he has since said he is concerned about where AI is headed.
“I think we're all going to find ourselves at a point where we don't know what's real anymore,” D’Agostino says of AI’s next stages. “I mean, it feels like a toy but it's dangerous stuff.”
