“The real battle is between the extinctionists and the humanists,” wrote the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, on Tuesday afternoon. “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience, the owner of X and Tesla made his point more strongly. “If AI gets programmed by the extinctionists,” he said, “its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.”
Like many a thinking man thriving on X — and I’m told, by friends who know him well, he is a deep thinker — Musk has mastered the art of the intellectual leapfrog, coining -isms to advance outlandish conclusions under the veil of academic breakthroughs. “If you start thinking that humans are bad, then the natural conclusion is humans should die out,” he said. I imagine his fans nodding obediently, incensed by the idea of an AI extinctionist having the nerve to think most people are awful and plotting the end of the world.
