Elon Musk refuses to ‘censor’ Twitter in face of EU rules – Roya News English

At a question-and-answer session in front of 3,600 tech fans in Paris, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, rejected the idea of "censorship" of Twitter.

He defended the principle of "freedom of expression" on the social platform that he owns.

He also announced that he wanted to equip the first human being "this year" with neural implants from his company Neuralink, whose technology has just been approved in the United States.

Musk said: "Generally, I was concerned that Twitter was having a negative effect on civilization, that was having a corrosive effect on civil society and so that you know anything that undermines civilization, I think is not good and you go back to my point of like we need to do everything possible to support civilization and move it in a positive direction. And I felt that Twitter was kept moving more and more in a negative direction and my hope and aspiration was to change that and have it be a positive force for civilization. "

"I think we want to allow the people to express themselves (on Twitter, NDLR) and really if you have to say when does free speech matter, free speech matters and is only relevant if people are allowed to say things that you don't like, because otherwise it's not free speech. And I would take that if someone says something potentially offensive, that's actually OK. Now, we're not going to promote those you know offensive tweets but I think people should be able to say things because the alternative is censorship. And then, and frankly I think if you go down the censorship, it's only a matter of time before censorship is turned upon you," he explained.

He spoke about the neural implant saying: "Hopefully later this year, we'll do our first human device implantation and this will be for someone that has sort of tetraplegic, quadraplegic, has lost the connection from their brain to their body. And we think that person will be able to communicate as fast as someone who has a fully functional body. So that's going to be a big deal and we see a path beyond that to actually transfer the signals from the motor cortex of the brain to pass the injury in the spinal cord and actually enable someone's body to be used again."

He also brought up artificial intelligence saying: "AI is probably the most disruptive technology ever. The crazy thing is that you know the advantage that humans have is that we're smarter than other creatures. Like if we've got into a fight with the gorilla, the gorilla would definitely win. But we're smart so, but now for the first time, there's going to be something that is smarter than the smartest human, like way smarter than humans."

"I think there's a real danger for digital super intelligence having negative consequences. And so if we are not careful with creating artificial general intelligence, we could have potentially a catastrophic outcome. I think there's a range of possibilities. I think the most likely outcome is positive for AI, but that's not every possible outcome. So we need to minimize the probability that something will go wrong with digital superintelligence," he added.

He continued: "I'm in favor of AI regulation because I think advanced AI is a risk to the public and anything that's a risk to the public, there needs to be some kind of referee. The referee is the regulator. And so I think that my strong recommendation is to have some regulation for AI. "

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Elon Musk refuses to 'censor' Twitter in face of EU rules - Roya News English