Musk has called for regulatory oversight for artificial intelligence similar to vehicles and medicine
Establishing a “single world government” could bring about the end of humanity as a whole, billionaire Elon Musk warned while also calling artificial intelligence one of the “biggest risks” facing human civilization.
“I know this is called the ‘World Government Summit,’ but I think we should be a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government,” Musk said in a remote speech on Feb. 15 at the 2023 World Government Summit in Dubai. “If I may say, we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having—frankly, this might sound a little odd—too much cooperation between governments.”
“All throughout history, civilizations have risen and fallen. But it hasn’t meant the doom of humanity as a whole because there have been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances.”
Musk cited the example of the fall of Rome, which happened during the 5th century, to drive home the point of needing “civilizational diversity.”
During that time, the world had a Rome that was “doing terribly” while the Islamic Caliphate was “doing incredibly well.” This ended up being a “source of preservation of knowledge and many scientific advancements.”
Musk warned against being a single civilization, as such a development could result in an absolute collapse. “I’m obviously not suggesting war or anything like that. But I think we want to be a little wary of actually cooperating too much,” he stated.
“It sounds a little odd, but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization, then the whole thing doesn’t just collapse and humanity keeps moving forward.”
Artificial Intelligence Risk
With regard to artificial intelligence, Musk called it “something we need to be quite concerned about.” He pointed to ChatGPT as an example of an advanced AI. ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, was launched in November and has attracted considerable attention for its human-like responses to questions.
Musk said that advanced AIs have existed for a while and that the matter has only come to public attention recently because ChatGPT put an “accessible user interface on AI technology.”
