#05
What are the odds AI goes badly for humanity?
Interviews
11
Answers
14
X posts
3
Span
2023 to 2026
First asked Oct 31, 2023, most recently Sep 15, 2026. Excerpts below are from machine transcripts with filler words (um, uh, you know) and stutters removed; … marks a cut. They are not checked word for word, so use the link to hear the exact words, or the transcript link for the raw text. Timestamps: 9 cross-checked against YouTube captions, 3 from the archive transcript only, 2 unverified (archive time, not checked against the X video). X has no link-to-time option, so X links open at the start.
How the answer evolved · oldest first
Oct 31, 2023 · The Joe Rogan Experience · asked by Joe Rogan
Q: Is it possible to overcome those problems?
If you say, like, what is the most likely outcome of AI? I think the most likely outcome, to be specific about it, is a good outcome, Most likely a good outcome, but it's not for sure. So I think we have to be careful how we program the AI and make sure that it is not accidentally anti human. So the accidentally extinctionist AI, you wouldn't want that
Nov 29, 2023 · DealBook Summit · asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Q: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I think we live there's that. I don't know if it's actually a real Chinese thing or not, but may you live an interesting time. It's apparently not a good thing, but I would prefer to, personally, I would prefer to live in interesting times. And we live in the most interesting of times. I think for a while I was like really getting demotivated and losing sleep over the threat of AI danger. And then I finally sort of …
Mar 25, 2024 · Abundance360 Summit · asked by Peter Diamandis
Q: Is digital superintelligence humanity's greatest hope or its greatest fear?
I mean, it's called the Singularity for a reason, as the Singularity Institute and whatnot. So when you have a sort of the advent of superintelligence, it is actually very difficult to predict what will happen next. So I think that's there's some chance that it'll end humanity. I think that's like I said, I probably agree with Jeff Hinton that it's about, I don't know, 10% or 20% or something like that. And then I …
Sep 8, 2024 · All-In Summit · asked by All-In Host
Q: I mean it's still, I think early in terms of where the big business impact is going to be. Do you have a sense yet?
I mean, I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean it does run ahead of the revenue right now, there's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far. And it's, I mean like for example, a Turing test used to be a thing. Now your basic open source random LLM you're writing on a frigging Raspberry PI probably could beat the Turing test. So …
Oct 7, 2024 · Tucker Carlson · asked by Tucker Carlson
Q: Are you still as worried about it as you seem to be two years ago when I asked you about it?
Well, I think that my guess is like, look, it's 80% likely to be good, maybe 90. So you can think of the glass as 80% full. It's probably going to be great. There's some chance of annihilation.
Watch on X at 1:30:19 ↗Transcript ↗Unverified timestamp: from archive transcript, not checked against the X videoOct 7, 2024 · Tucker Carlson · asked by Tucker Carlson
Q: if AI did, if it became clear to the rest of us that it was out of control and posed a threat to humanity, would there be any way to stop it?
I hope so. I mean, if you have multiple AIs. And ones that are. Hopefully you have the AIs that are pro. Human, be stronger than the AIs that are not battle the AIs. Yeah. I mean, that is how it is with, say, chess these days. The. The, like, the AI chess program is also vastly better than any human and incomprehensibly better. Meaning, like, we can't even understand why
Watch on X at 1:32:35 ↗Transcript ↗Unverified timestamp: from archive transcript, not checked against the X videoOct 29, 2024 · Future Investment Initiative · asked by Interviewer
Q: Are you still. You still on those odds?
I mean, one could say it's most likely going to be great. And there's some chance, which could be 10 to 20%, that it goes bad. The chances are zero that it goes bad. But overall, we could say that the COVID is 80% full. Is one positive way to look at it. Maybe 90%.
Nov 4, 2024 · The Joe Rogan Experience · asked by Joe Rogan
Q: What are the chances that we fuck this whole thing up 50%?
It's hard to say. I mean, I guess like I don't think civilization will be totally destroyed unless there's like some really massive global thermonuclear war. But I mean Stephen Hawking, he would say that there was like at least a 1% chance of total annihilation every century. That was his rough estimate. But there's a much bigger chance of civilization being less capable than it is today. So you say like. Well, …
Jul 27, 2025 · X Takeover · asked by Interviewer
Q: And really what does that mean for in the world of artificial superintelligence?
Yeah, that's a question that I struggle with, actually. This is part of the reason for neuralink, which is to improve the bandwidth communication with AI, so to help achieve a better human AI symbiosis, so that AI knows what we want and it can respond to collective human will. And I think things like payrolling can actually effectively dramatically increase our intelligence. But I think the future is very much one …
Feb 5, 2026 · Dwarkesh Podcast · asked by Dwarkesh Patel
Q: And so if Grok's gone Terminator like the main risk you're worried about, which is AI, why doesn't that follow you to Mars?
Well, I'm not sure AI is the main risk I'm worried about. I mean the important thing is that consciousness, which I think arguably most consciousness or most intelligence, certainly consciousness is more of a debatable thing. Most intelligent, the vast majority of intelligence in the future will be AI. So you know, AI will exceed you say, like how many, what's the how much, how many? I don't know. Petawatts of …
Feb 5, 2026 · Dwarkesh Podcast · asked by Dwarkesh Patel
Q: So why not just have a civilization where it's more compatible with lots of different intelligences getting along?
No, let me tell you how things can potentially go wrong in AI, as I think if you make AI be politically correct, meaning it says things that it doesn't believe, like you're actually then programming it to lie or have axioms that are incompatible, I think you can make it go insane and do terrible things. I think one of the. Maybe the central lesson for 2001 Space Odyssey was that you should not make AI lie. That's, I …
Jul 23, 2026 · The Economist: Interview with Elon Musk · asked by Zanny Minton Beddoes
Q: Do you think there's still a 10 to 20% chance that killer robots mean the end of humanity?
Well, in the long run we're all dead of course so I mean, so I mean according to the standard model of physics, the end of the universe is a long, boring, sort of thin gray soup of gradual cooling, meaning the sort of the heat death the universe is called. So if the heat death of the universe is in fact the outcome for our reality, then it really is all about the journey because the destination is terrible.
Jul 23, 2026 · The Economist: Interview with Elon Musk · asked by Zanny Minton Beddoes
Q: If it's 10 to 20% in 10 years, would you go into one of your rockets if you thought there was a 10 to 20% chance of it blowing up and killing you?
Yes, but let's say you can't do anything about it. I guess the only thing we can try to do is minimize the probability of the bad outcome. But trying to stop the intelligence in robots, I mean, for the longest time I declined to participate in AI or was created OpenAI as essentially a counterweight to Google because at the time they were, they had more or less a monopoly on AI. And then anthropic spun out of OpenAI …
Sep 15, 2026 · All-In Podcast: Elon Musk & Gwynne Shotwell on AI risks, Starship, Terafab and a SpaceX/Tesla merger · asked by Chamath Palihapitiya
Q: Can you help us understand when you said that?
I probably should have said, right. I did try to clarify it in subsequent posts on X, but those get much less attention. So what I meant by he's right is that the danger of AI is very significant at this point that we need to do better with AI safety or we have at this point exponentially increasing risk with the AI models. And I've heard this not just from Dario, but from many other people at Anthropic. And in fact …
In his own posts on X
@elonmusk · Apr 12, 2024
@PlanetOfMemes @Rothmus AI will solve this (slight chance of killing us)
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Feb 26, 2025
This is what I mean by the woke mind virus. The more I learn, the more insidious and deadly it appears. Maybe the biggest existential danger to humanity is having it programmed into the AI, as is the case for every AI besides @Grok. Even for Grok, it’s tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet. For example, when other AIs were asked whether global thermonuclear war or misgendering was worse, they picked the latter. The existential problem with that extrapolation is that a super powerful AI could decide that the only 100% certain way to stop misgendering is to kill all humans …
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Sep 14, 2026
People keep misunderstanding this. I CONTRIBUTED to Bostrom’s Superintelligence book and he thanks me by name in the foreword. I was thinking about AI safety long before 2014.
View on X ↗
Legend: Timestamp cross-checked; Timestamp from archive, not cross-checked; Unverified: caption-only timestamp; Timestamp checked against our transcript of the X replay; Unverified timestamp: from archive transcript, not checked against the X video. Report an error →