Crazy is a loaded word. These days it’s used to praise as often as it’s used to disparage. “Concert was crazy, girl,” comes the good review. In fact, crazy is such an important word it’s been split up and hipped up–when something’s really beyond it’s “cray cray.” Does that describe Elon Musk? Is the billionaire chief of SpaceX and Tesla cray cray? Because Musk is talking about the robot apocalypse again. Musk has spoken before about the demon of Artificial Intelligence, and about killer robots who take over the world.
But he just wrote that we may be just five years away from the robot revolution. (Then again, he just made plans to build a $5 billion highly automated “Gigafactory” that will take longer that five years, so he must not be sure.) On the far-out futurist thinker site Edge.org, Musk wrote: “[AI] 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.” The comment was swiftly deleted. There is no word as to whether robots did the deleting, or Musk himself. Anyway you must visit the Edge conversation which begins with Jaron Lanier–some of the greatest minds in the world are talking there.
