Let's put aside your absolute and close-minded certainty about the future for a minute. Unless you can provide some quotes, you're putting a lot of words in El

Let's put aside your absolute and close-minded certainty about the future for a minute. Unless you can provide some quotes, you're putting a lot of words in Elon Musk's mouth. He's made some goofy pop culture references during interviews, and it seems to be a calculated decision on his part to flirt with sensationalism in order to publicize the issue, but he's never seriously argued that the movie Terminator is a documentary about the future. Call it conscience, intelligence, whatever you want. The danger isn't that some ominously calculating and murderous robotic mind is going to spring into being and hide from humans while plotting our downfall. In order to understand the danger, all you have to do is look at what the US military is already doing with autonomous weapons. Killer robots aren't hypothetical, they're historical. In fact, you're the prime example of the danger of AI. You probably have a stronger than average understanding of computers, and maybe you know a lot about actual AI implementations, which is what makes you so self-assured that there's nothing magical about them. So you trust them, and you're a big fan of throwing an ever-increasing amount of trust into AI. You even admit that there will be bugs (there always are) and misbehavior (now who's humanizing programs?), but you fail to see why that's a problem when the stakes are raised from "crap, an app leaked private data online" to "crap, the autonomous weaponized drone mistook backyard fireworks for an attack and bombed a family." The way I see it, Musk is far from alarmist, and all the kidding about "summoning demons" is almost a way of coping with what's starting to seem like a terrifying inevitability. We've been building "dumb programs" for decades, and there's still a constant stream of breaking news about software that didn't do what it was supposed to. And you want to believe that there's no danger in building software that has increasingly fuzzy logic and connecting it to real-world I/O? I'm guessing that Elon Musk saw this problem when he first started toying with the idea of self-driving cars. You say he has a limited understanding of AI, but Tesla autopilot says otherwise. And he probably became keenly aware of the stakes when he realized that people would willingly entrust their lives to the decisions made by his company's software, and that without regulation, it's entirely up to Tesla's QA process to make sure their cars don't accidentally kill people.