A Comment About Artificial Intelligence Left Elon Musk Frozen On Stage

Artificial intelligence really spooks out Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

He's afraid, without proper regulation in place, it could be the "biggest existential threat" to humans.

Musk was asked about AI at MIT's annual AeroAstra Centennial Symposium last week. He spooked himself out so badly answering the question, he was unable to concentrate for a few minutes after.

"Do you have any plans to enter the field of artificial intelligence?" an audience member asked.

"I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence," Musk replied. "If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence. 'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.

With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.

You know those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he's like - Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out."

According to Musk, AI humans are capable of building would make Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 look like "a puppy dog."

The next question came from a female audience member. She asked how SpaceX plans to utilize telecommunications - something totally unrelated to AI.

But Musk was too distracted to listen.

"I'm sorry could you repeat the question?" he said. "I was just sort of thinking about the AI thing for a second."

Here's the clip (start watching at the 1 hour 7 minute mark):