Elon Musk has already ignited a debate over the dangers of artificial intelligence. The chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX has called it humanitysgreatest threat, and something even more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

Musk publicly hasnt offered a lot of detail about why hes concerned, and what could go wrong. That changed in an interview with scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, posted Sunday.

Musks fears lie with a subset of artificial intelligence, called superintelligence. Its defined by Nick Bostrom, author of the highly-cited book Superintelligence, as any intellect that greatly exceed the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.

Musk isnt worried about simpler forms of artificial intelligence, such as a driverless car or smart conditioning unit. The danger is when a machine can rapidly educate itself, as Musk explained:

If there was a very deep digital superintelligence that was created that could go into rapid recursive self-improvement in a non-algorithmic way it could reprogram itself to be smarter and iterate very quickly and do that 24 hours a day on millions of computers, well

Then thats all she wrote, interjected Tysonwith a chuckle.

Thats all she wrote, Musk answered. I mean, we wont be like a pet Labrador if were lucky.

A pet Lab, laughed Tyson.

I have a pet Labrador by the way, Musk said.

Well be their pets, Tysonsaid.

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Innovations: Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson laugh about artificial intelligence turning the human race into its pet ...