It’s the battle of the billionaires.

In this context, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg disagree about the ramifications and unintended consequences of artificial intelligence.

For years, Musk — the Tesla and SpaceX CEO — has been warning about the risks to the human race posed by rapidly advancing progress in AI, which could make Terminator-like robots a reality rather than science fiction.

Earlier this month, he advised tech companies working on cutting-edge AI to slow down and allow a regulatory regime to be set up before anything scary happens. “AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” Musk declared during a presentation at the National Governor’s Association summer meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, the Independent of London reported.

Musk has already launched an initiative calling for AI safety standards with the nonprofit organization OpenAI. (Related: Read more about artificial intelligence at Robotics.news.)

During a Facebook Live broadcast, Zuckerberg responded to a question about Musk’s AI warnings. The Facebook founder offered a more optimistic view, expressing disagreement with those whom he described as naysayers pushing doomsday scenarios, which he deemed “pretty irresponsible,” the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported.

In the next five to 10 years, AI is going to deliver so many improvements in the quality of our lives. One of the top causes of death for people is car accidents still and if you can eliminate that with AI, that is going to be just a dramatic improvement.

Zuckerberg added that technology can have a downside, and care needs to be exercised in its development and implementation, but the good generally outweighs the bad.

But people who are arguing for slowing down the process of building AI, I just find that really questionable. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that.

In a brief tweet, Elon Musk described Mark Zuckerberg’s AI understanding as “limited.”

I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2017

Separately, Elon Musk recently bought a medical research start-up company for the purpose of developing a method to connect the human brain to a computer. Perhaps as an alternative to a disturbing future, he may have decided, to some degree, that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em with so-called neural lace technology.

Back in 2015, Health Ranger Mike Adams, the founder of Natural News, warned that once AI technology develops into highly evolved, self-aware, self-replicating systems, the human race has a big Terminator problem.

“Follow this along for just 4-5 generations and you get machines with demigod-level cognitive capabilities, and it won’t take but a microsecond for such a machine to conclude that humans are a threat to its own existence,” Adams wrote.

Sources include:

ZeroHedge.com

Independent.co.uk

BizJournals.com