Look we've all seen that documentary Terminator, so we know that the human race will be attacked by robots that become too intelligent and are self-aware, so we can understand where Musk is coming from, but we didn't think it would be this soon. 

In case you're not  familiar with Elon Musk, he's the billionaire who founded PayPal, is the man behind the Space X project which hopes to one day colonise Mars, and is hoping to make the Tesla electric car the vehicle of the future. Safe to say, he's got an idea or two about where the world is headed and has been proven right in the past, but we're hoping that his latest prediction turns out to be wrong. 

He envisions that the singularity, the moment when Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) essentially becomes too smart for us, is approaching much faster than we think, and that also it won't be very good new for humanity either. 

After an interview on Edge.org in which virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier spoke about A.I. and what is in store in the next few years as it continues to develop, there were several comments from a lot of others in the technology field sent to the author of the piece, John Brockman, about what direction it was headed in, including a mail from Elon Musk himself. While it was never originally intended to be made public, it ended up being included by accident, and by the sounds of it he's pretty worried. 

"The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. Please note that I am normally super pro technology and have never raised this issue until recent months. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don't understand". 

Musk's comments were taken down once it was realised what had happened, but since this is the internet they had been screengrabbed by that time and were posted on reddit. As Mashable point out, Musk knows what he's talking about in when it comes to A.I., and has invested in a company called Deepmind, which works in the field, and has previously stated that it is developing at an incredibly rapid pace. His spokesperson also told Mashable that he'll be publishing a longer piece about where he thinks A.I. is headed soon, which might shed more light on these comments. 

We're not prepared for this, if we're honest, but at least we've got a few years to get ourselves together. This shelter is designed to help with a zombie apocalypse, but maybe it could protect us from with robots. Someone call Arnie and ask him what we're supposed to do. 

Via Mashable