Longread(s) About Elon Musk And His Fight Against Artificial Intelligence

This recommendation comes with a restriction: if you can't spend at least 45 minutes, this text is not for you. Don't even start reading, because it's so well written, that you won't be able to stop until the end – which goes like this by the way: 

“If you believe the end is the heat death of the universe, it really is all about the journey.”

And quite a journey it is, to follow Elon Musk's Sisyphean fight against the threat of artificial intelligence from its beginnings as a pissing contest between him and Demis Hassabis, the founder of the AI startup DeepMind a few years ago ("I will push mankind to the next level"; "No, I will"), until today's perplexing announcement of Neuralink, Musk's new startup that wants to link brains to computers. If you followed the quarrel between AI opponents like Musk and Stephen Hawkings on the one side, and proponents like Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil on the other side, you have to go through a lot of redundancy. But this article is so densely written and packed with anecdotes and observations, that even AI-nerds should enjoy the read. One particularly telling observation about Kurzweil: 

"Sometimes (he) uses the word 'we' when talking about super-intelligent future beings – a far cry from Musk’s more ominous 'they'.”

This fragment contains the core of the narrative. The parallels to nuclear fission are baffling. In both cases some of the smartest minds of their time had/have to weigh the promises of unforeseen progress and power against the possible annihilation of mankind. If the genie won't go back into the bottle, at least the wishes should be chosen wisely. 

Enjoy (while you still can)! 

P.S.

If you can't get enough of this Musk-stuff, here's the always excellent Tim Urban with his legendary series of blog posts on the Muskosmos.