Elon Musk, Tesla: artificial intelligence race will create World War 3

The Tesla founder spoke about his fears after Vladimir Putin claimed that the nation which controls artificial intelligence will come to rule the world. On Twitter, Musk wrote: "China, Russia -- soon all countries with strong computer science. The development of killer computers would give any nation a clear edge over its competitors. Artificial intelligence could be used to command fleets of drones or battalions of killer robots, while responding to threats at speeds much faster than any human could manage, The Sun reports. The race to develop artificial intelligence could spark World War Three, according to Elon Musk. But there's a risk that a super-smart AI could go rogue and launch genocidal attacks without being constrained by human conscience and empathy. Musk said that it may actually be the AI itself that launches the next World War. He added: "[WW3] May be initiated not by the country leaders, but one of the AI's, if it decides that a pre-emptive strike is most probable path to victory." Nick Bostrom, head of the University of Oxford's Future Of Humanity Institute, recently claimed that we may have just 50 years to save ourselves from artificial intelligence. Competition to build a machine that's as clever as humans will be fierce in the coming decades, with considerable rewards on offer for the nation which manages to pull off the historical feat of achieving "machine intelligence". But the scrabble to create this silicon-powered mind could lead to mistakes with disastrous consequences, according to The Sun. "There is a control problem," Bostrom said. Killer robots, or lethal autonomous weapons, should be banned because of the potential scale of destruction and ability to be hacked, industry leaders say. "If you have a very tight tech race to get there first, whoever invests in safety could lose the race.