Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking sound alarm about robots, artificial intelligence

Two leading voices in the world of science and technology warn that robots equipped with artificial intelligence could be leading humanity down a dangerous path.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla motors, told a pair of CNBC reporters that he thought robots were “dangerous.”

“There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator.”

Despite his reservations, Musk himself has recently invested in an artificial intelligence company.

Meanwhile, writing in The Independent, Stephen Hawking warned there are “no fundamental limits” to what machines may be able to accomplish in the future.

“One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,” Hawking writes.

The CBC’s Ron Charles went looking for the world’s most advanced, intelligent machines and also visited a robotics laboratory at the University of Waterloo to find out: should we fear the robot uprising?