Elon Musk has claimed AI is the key to ‘universal’ high wages for everybody in the world.
The world’s richest man, who has long been a proponent of artificial intelligence, took to his social media platform X on Monday, where he said AI is the ‘only path’ to the world’s entire population getting rich.
‘A welfare state and free immigration will obviously bankrupt any country,’ he said.
‘AI + robotics is the only path to universal high income for everyone on Earth.’
The tech tycoon made the sensational claims as fears around the technology – and its potential capacity to bring about human extinction – made headlines in recent days.
Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon started the recent conversation around the risks of AI when he quit the company – which developed the chatbot Claude – claiming it and its main competitor, OpenAI, was not acting ‘responsibly’.
Coxon quit Anthropic over fears the company was not acting responsibly (Picture: Fox News)
Coxon quit on September 8, telling his colleagues on Slack that he was sad to say goodbye to his fellow ‘Ants’ (a nickname for Anthropic employees).
‘Like many of you,’ his message continued, ‘I think that without international coordination we will incur a risk of causing human extinction.
‘I’ve recently become more concerned about the degree and imminence of this risk. I also find myself viscerally fearing the intelligence explosion where previously those concerns were unemotional.’
The messages – obtained by NBC – came hours before Coxon took to the social media platform X with a warning that the AI ‘arms race’ could seriously threaten human civilisation.
‘The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,’ he wrote.
In response, Evan Hubinger – Anthropic’s alignment science lead – said his former colleague’s assessment is ‘correct’.
Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, penned an essay expressing his fears about AI’s rapid development (Picture: Reuters)
‘We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,’ he said. ‘I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,’ he said.
‘I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.’
Musk’s recent declaration may come as a surprise after he publicly backed calls to slow the development of AI.
He and OpenAI boss Sam Altman rallied behind Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei after he penned an essay, We Must Pace the Frontier, outlining his own concerns about the speed at which AI is evolving.
Amodei even warned that AI could lead a swarm and take over the internet in six months to a year.
‘I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,’ he said.
Sam Altman (pictured) and Musk agreed AI’s development needed to be slowed (Picture: Matt Ramey / AFP via Getty Images)
In response, Musk – whose own AI bot, Grok, made headlines after it was found that social media users were using it to generate images of mostly women without their clothes on – wrote: ‘Dario is right.’
Amodei proposed a three-step plan to slow the development of AI and get regulators on side, including that AI companies allow third-party evaluators access to their systems to verify safety practices and report incidents.
‘Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Altman, whose company owns the popular chatbot ChatGPT, wrote on X: ‘I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussion we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.
‘Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.’
