There is a 20% chance that AI will end humanity, Elon Musk says

The systematic and constant development of artificial intelligence can lead to the death of all humanity, and the probability of this is about 20%. This opinion was expressed by the head of SpaceX and Tesla, the creator of the startup xAI, Elon Musk. At the same time, he believes that it is still worth taking such a risk.

According to Business Insider, during a speech at the four-day Abundance Summit conference in Los Angeles dedicated to AI, Musk noted that he agreed with the assessment of scientist and one of the main researchers in the field of artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton.

“I think there's some chance that it will end humanity. I probably agree with Geoff Hinton that it's about 10% or 20% or something like that.”

True, how exactly he calculated this risk is unclear.

“I think that the probable positive scenario outweighs the negative scenario,” he added.

Roman Yampolsky, an AI security researcher and director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, also believes that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity. Moreover, in his opinion, this risk is higher than the figure announced by Musk.

In a conversation with Business Insider, he noted that the death of humanity could be caused, for example, by AI control over humanity, its creation of new biological weapons, or the collapse of society due to a large-scale cyber attack or nuclear war. Yamplosky estimates this risk at “99.999999%.” According to him, since it will be impossible to control advanced AI, humanity's only hope is not to create such AI at all.

“Not sure why he thinks it is a good idea to pursue this technology anyway,” Yamploskiy added. “If he is concerned about competitors getting there first, it doesn't matter as uncontrolled superintelligence is equally bad, no matter who makes it come into existence.”

Many other experts today talk about the risk of an apocalypse due to AI: the numbers they mention range between 5 and 50 percent.