Elon Musk AI warning bolsters Iron Man image

If you didn't think Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk was living the Tony Stark life before, today's chatter should have you wondering if he's pumped up about Avengers: Age of Ultron. This film is about artificial intelligence getting out of hand – exactly the subject of Musk's most recent public set of comments. Even as he speaks, Musk continues to invest in AI companies, aiming to keep a watchful eye on the lot.

"Worth reading 'Superintelligence' by Bostrom," suggests Musk in a Tweet. "We need to be super careful with AI," he continues, "potentially more dangerous than nukes."

Earlier this year Professor Stephen Hawking spoke up about the film Transcendence. This film features a world in which artificial intelligence has effectively taken over regular operations, putting humans in a lesser role. "Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence, but are we taking AI seriously enough?"

"It's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction," suggested Hawking, on the film Transcendence, "but this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.

Meanwhile the book Musk refers to goes by the full name: "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies." This book is written by Professor Nick Bostrom from the University of Oxford. Next you'll see a video of him speaking about the possibility of a warning before the dawn of Artificial Intelligence.

Above and below you'll see Bostrom speaking about AI. More specifically, he's speaking on AI because of the film Transcendence, just like Hawking.

You can pretty fairly assume that Elon Musk also saw Transcendence recently, sparking his mind on how AI will overrun our planet in short order.

Finally you'll see how Bostrom speaking on how we'll be going about creating a machine intelligence. Uploading a person to a computer – that's how Transcendence works. How will it work for us? Perhaps more of a mathematical approach is better – it's certainly more traditional.