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(CNNMoney) - It was the holiday weekend for Labor Day in the United States, in early September 2017, when Elon Musk started tweeting about World War III.
The executive director of Tesla and SpaceX was not making alarming predictions for a then recent nuclear weapons test conducted by North Korea. What really seemed to worry Musk about a world war was artificial intelligence.
North Korea "should be down on our list of concerns about the risk involved in civilization," Musk said in a message sent via Twitter that morning.
"In my opinion, competition for superiority in artificial intelligence at the national level will be the most likely cause of World War III," Musk said in another tweet.
The alarming prediction was in response to a comment made at that time by the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in which he said that "artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia but of all mankind" and said that "whoever be the leader in this field will be the ruler of the world ”.
At the moment, the United States, China and India are the three countries that lead the race for artificial intelligence, according to a senior executive in the technology industry.
But Musk said that other countries will try to reach them by any means. "Governments do not have to follow normal laws," he said in a tweet. "They will obtain artificial intelligence developed by companies at gunpoint, if necessary."
In another response via Twitter, Musk speculated that an artificial intelligence system could choose to start a war "if it decides that a preventive attack is the most likely path to victory."
Musk's concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence are not new and he has repeatedly called for new regulations to protect the public.
In that process, Musk has faced the billionaire of the technology industry, founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg describes Musk's alarmist rhetoric as "very irresponsible." And Musk responds by saying that Zuckerberg has a "limited" understanding of the subject.
Musk has tried to address his concerns about artificial intelligence through two ventures: OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company, and Neuralink, a company that builds devices to connect the human brain to computers.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on September 4, 2017 and has been updated.
Third World war
