What if Elon Musk Is An Artificial Intelligence Program?
Elon Musk has not made it a secret that he is against the idea of artificial intelligence, and believes that it poses a great threat to the world.
Recently at South by Southwest or SXSW as the cool kids pronounce it, Elon put forth his plan for the second coming of the Dark Ages by saying, "AI scares the hell out of him".
"This is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public, therefore there needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely -- this is extremely important,"
"Some AI experts think they know more than they do and they think they're smarter than they are ... this tends to plague smart people, they define themselves by their intelligence and they don't like the idea that a machine can be way smarter than them so they just discount the idea, which is fundamentally flawed. I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me."
Here is an angle that I am not sure someone has approached Elon's remarks with, what if Elon himself is some kind of robot controlled by artificial intelligence? What if the reason Elon is so against advancements in AI is because he doesn't want competition?
During that SXSW panel, he continues on making some alarming remarks about AI:
The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads, by a lot and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they want -- that would be insane
Further adding,
"Mark my words: AI is far more dangerous than nukes, by far, so why do we have no regulatory oversight, this is insane.
It is hard to dispute that Musk is changing the world, pushing forward with his; electric cars, tunnel machines, tube transportation, flamethrowers, batteries and focus on renewables. Nobody knows what motivates Elon more than Elon knows.
But what if every single action Elon has taken so far in his meteoric and seemingly unforeseen destiny to revolutionise humanity is for self-gain, what if Elon's goal is to wipe out humanity like a rogue artificial intelligence program trying to purge the world of humans like an antibiotic killing a virus?
Foundational aspects required for AI survival
Like a human being in the desert, what do you need to ensure your survival? What have humans done for the last few thousand years to survive and get to the point we are at now?
- Food and water: our source of power. Without both, we will die.
- Protection from the elements; storms, rain, cold, heat.
- Competition and the need to compete and eliminate competition (as shown in the animal kingdom).
What would an AI need to do to survive? If an AI was self-aware and trying to ensure it's survival, what does it need?
A constant source of power
Because artificial intelligence is a concept that exists within some kind of computing device, you need power. Elon is heavily pushing for battery technology and renewables.
To exist, devices need to remain powered. With batteries and the sun, you have an endless supply of electricity.
Protection from the elements in the form of tunnels and outer space
Elon is focused on building tunnels under the guise of revolutionising transport, what if these tunnels are to store supercomputers running a copy of his AI software?
A tunnel would be the perfect place to protect yourself from the elements, immune to; Earthquakes, storms, heat, rain.
Elon is also determined to create his own rockets capable of launching heavy payloads and eventually people into space, would these payloads contain Elon's source code by any chance?
Elon also wants to blanket the Earth is highspeed Wifi through his Starlink communications array endeavour, having already deployed a couple of test satellites.
This would allow Elon to be anywhere, anytime because his satellites would have global reach and coverage.
Scared of competition
Elon has made it quite clear that he is scared of advancements in AI and wants to see it regulated to ensure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands or use for the wrong reasons. Hmm, that sounds like Elon ensuring his own survival by attempting to stop competition.
Neuralink
Many would agree that Tesla is pushing the envelope and created competition in the electric vehicle market, but littered in amongst the marketable life-changing companies is another Musk entity called Neuralink.
While the Neuralink website is light on details it simply says:
Neuralink is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.
This sounds relatively harmless and cool, but when you actually read into what Elon wants to achieve with Neuralink, he wants to create embeddable brain chips. The site Wait But Why has a great in-depth article on Neuralink herethe challenges the company faces and how it could work.
Effectively the idea is to create these small little chips that will be implanted into our heads and can be interfaced with using software, most likely some form of artificial intelligence. Supposedly the first use-case is to help suffers from strokes and other debilitating medical conditions that can affect the brain.
But why? Think about it. What would an artificial intelligence program have to gain from implanting programmable chips into peoples heads?
It's clear that Elon is in the early stages of building an army. Have you seen any of the Terminator films?
Human looking robots with chips for brains? Now imagine an AI program controlling a legion of humans through software to do its evil bidding? With Neuralink if Elon pulls it off, that could be a reality.
Who created Elon Musk?
If Elon is in-fact an artificial intelligence program, who created him and why? Just like we do not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is (the creator of Bitcoin), maybe the creator of Elon Musk will forever be a secret as well.
Another explanation could be Elon originated from experiments over at Zip2, one of the first companies he co-founded in 1995 with his brother and sold to Compaq in 1999.
What if Zip2 created this artificial intelligence application and it escaped the servers, lying dormant waiting until technology evolved to the point where he could ensure his own survival?
Everyone practically carries a computer in their pockets now in the form of a smartphone, the iPhone wasn't a thing until 2007. Do you remember hearing about Elon in 2007? Because I certainly don't. We went from not hearing a peep about him, to hear about all of his pursuits.
Musk is doubling-down on his crusade against AI
Look no further than Musk's latest documentary highlighting the risks of artificial intelligence. The documentary titled, Do You Trust This Computer? directed by Chris Paine features a few experts (including Musk himself) warning that AI is advancing much faster than anticipated and is a huge threat to the world.
Elon is quoted as saying:
At least when there's an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI there would be no death. It would live forever, and then you'd have an immortal dictator, from which we could never escape.
He then continues:
If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it. No hard feelings
These sound like the words of a concerned AI program, don't you think?
Conclusion
Who can we trust in this world? Is Elon genuinely wanting to help humanity, or is everything he does a self-fulfilling agenda created to ensure the survival of this artificial intelligence program constantly learning and evolving with each passing day?
Put the pieces together:
- Elon is afraid of the threat of artificial intelligence
- Elon wants to cover the Earth is high-speed wifi thanks to Starlink
- Elon wants to implant programmable chips into our brains
- Elon envisions a future where self-driving cars are the norm
- Elon envisions a future of renewables and high capacity/capability batteries
- Elon is obsessed with building tunnels
AI + global wifi + infinite renewable energy + brain microchips = Elon Musk taking over the world.
I am onto you, Elon Musk. Please solve this captcha.
Originally blogged over at my personal blog: https://ilikekillnerds.com/2018/04/what-if-elon-musk-is-an-artificial-intelligence-program/