Elon Musk's idea of merging machines with humans is 'alarmist', CEO of top A.I. firm says

Talk of mass job losses and the need to give humans a computer layer in their brain as a result of artificial intelligence (AI), an idea put forward by billionaire Elon Musk, are "alarmist" and distract from the good being done by the technology, a top start-up CEO told CNBC on Thursday. Major warnings have been issued by technologists about the impact of AI on society in the next few years. For example, Alibaba founder Jack Ma said society could face decades of "pain" from the result of automation, while Musk has started a company called Neuralink to research the development of human-machine interfaces. Babak Hodjat, the CEO of Sentient Technologies, one of the world's highest-funded AI start-ups, however, said that such developments were still in the realm of science fiction and in fact are distracting companies from developing world-changing solutions. "We are nowhere near that on the technology side, and it's distracting to the fact that AI today can help the world in so many places, and the discourse is being taken over by folks that are alarmists, around something that might happen in 100 years, 150 years," Hodjat told CNBC during an interview at the Pioneers tech show in Vienna on Thursday.