Start a witch hunt against the field of AI? Oh wait...he's kind of doing this already.
You believe he's calling for the execution, imprisonment or other punishment of AI researchers? I doubt it.
So what exactly is this 'witch hunt' composed of? What evil thing has Musk done other than disagree with you on how dangerous AI is?
So what exactly is this 'witch hunt' composed of? What evil thing has Musk done other than disagree with you on how dangerous AI is?
What I meant is that he and others will cause the general public to adopt a perception of the field of AI that is comparable to the public perception of GMOs, vaccination, nuclear power etc., non-evidence-backed fear of something that is generally benign and positive.
He could have used his influence and reputation to directly contact AI researchers or e.g. hold a quarterly conference about risks from AI. He could have talke...
Elon Musk submitted a comment to edge.org a day or so ago, on this article. It was later removed.
Now Elon has been making noises about AI safety lately in general, including for example mentioning Bostrom's Superintelligence on twitter. But this is the first time that I know of that he's come up with his own predictions of the timeframes involved, and I think his are rather quite soon compared to most.
We can compare this to MIRI's post in May this year, When Will AI Be Created, which illustrates that it seems reasonable to think of AI as being further away, but also that there is a lot of uncertainty on the issue.
Of course, "something seriously dangerous" might not refer to full blown superintelligent uFAI - there's plenty of space for disasters of magnitude in between the range of the 2010 flash crash and clippy turning the universe into paperclips to occur.
In any case, it's true that Musk has more "direct exposure" to those on the frontier of AGI research than your average person, and it's also true that he has an audience, so I think there is some interest to be found in his comments here.