Why scientists want AI regulated now before it's too late

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla (TSLA) and Space X, recently sounded the alarm that murderous artificial intelligence-powered robots could one day rampage through American neighborhoods. And the only way to stop them, he said, is to begin regulating AI before it destroys us all. Musk's warnings that AI poses an "existential threat" may have been a bit dramatic, but he's not the only expert hoping for some kind of government regulation of AI. And as companies from Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) to Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) continue pouring money into the field, those regulations may be needed sooner than later. Carnegie Mellon's Manuela Veloso, an expert on AI, doesn't believe we're even close to the point where an army of T-1000s will march down Broadway and demand our fealty. But we should have regulations of any AI-created products that reach the mass market to ensure the safety of consumers, according to Veloso, department head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science.