Elon Musk: Advanced Artificial Intelligence Could Take Down the Web

The internet could turn out to become a nefarious and lawless battle zone, with Elon Musk hinting that the carnage could make matters worse.

On a short exchange on Twitter, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors said that the technology built to improve the lives of human beings is slowly turning into a disastrous weapon. The day when we'll witness a massive artificial intelligence attack on the internet is not so far away, he added.

Musk's tweets come at a time when a group of hackers used a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to wipe out part of the internet on Oct. 21. This resulted in many sites like PayPal, Twitter, Netflix, and Spotify being unreachable and offline for hours. Authorities are of the view that a person or a group of people orchestrated the attack. Musk said that in the future massive DDoS attacks will not require real human hackers to create a ruckus on the infrastructure that runs the internet.

With the improvement of artificial intelligence, Musk said that hackers will misuse it to optimize their attacks. And the craziest part, he added, is the fact that if both hackers and cybersecurity workers start using advanced artificial intelligence, the internet could turn out to become an online battlefield between AI versus AI.

According to Musk, AI at the moment is a loaded gun and is a hacker's best weapon. He has nothing against the technology but suggests that attempts to make super smart robots by technology giants should be kept transparent and monitored by concerned authorities. Musk shared an article on Twitter that was published by The Economist, which elaborated on DDoS attacks and the risk of virtual weapons on the internet.

Artificial Intelligence has done wonders and made this world a better place. However, it can prove to be helpful as well as detrimental at the same time.