Why Elon Musk Worries About Artificial Intelligence

One thing you won't hear him championing is the unfettered rise of artificial intelligence, which he once described as the "biggest existential threat" to humankind. Musk's prejudice prompted him to donate millions to the ethics think tank OpenAI--and it's why he's urging other billionaire techies like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet's Larry Page to proceed with caution on their myriad of machine learning and robotics experiments. OpenAI is both an ethics and a research institution. Its mandate (plucked from its website): "Because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest."