Today in grim predictions from the ultra-rich...

You know, there are plenty of reasons to believe that the world is heading for catastrophe. Plenty. Climate change, pandemics, nuclear armed man-children playing let's see who's crazier. But Elon Musk, whom you might remember as the founder of Tesla and the guy behind a plan to colonize Mars with a fleet of sexy spaceships, is worried about goddamn Skynet.

"Sure it's phallic, but is there any way it could be, you know, more phallic?"

-SpaceX R&D

"Don't worry, I don't have a time machine.
...or do I? I don't. Or maybe I do..."

-Musk, screwing with us

Yes, Skynet. Responding to noted shirtless election meddler Vladimir Putin's recent comment that 'artificial intelligence...is the future of all mankind,' Musk took to twitter to issue dire warning about how artificial intelligence will lead to World War III. His initial tweet doesn't sound too nutty: "Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3 IMO." IMO, by the way, means 'in my opinion.' I guess he wanted to be clear that he's speculating about the future and doesn't actually have access to a time machine.

Ok, cool, he's not worried so much about an army of sentient chrome robot skeletons bent on our extermination but rather people fighting over technology. That's reasonable. We've certainly fought global wars for stupider reasons.

Pictured: That time some asshole assassinated one Archduke and we all spent the
next four years mustard gassing each other in trenches over it. Way to go humanity...

So roughly this nutty.

But then his follow up tweet took a turn for the nutty. How nutty? I suppose that depends on your faith in the three laws of robotics.

"May be initiated not by the country leaders, but one of the AI's, if it decides that a prepemptive strike is most probable path to victory"

-Musk, issuing a grim warning about
the threat of robots prepempting us

Sure it might lead to our extinction, but
it is easier than washing your hands.

Look, far be it from me to question the guy who's going to save the environment by selling us all $50,000 cars full of battery acid, but I'm honestly a little more worried about humans fucking things up right now. I certainly have some healthy concerns about machines maybe someday, years from now, replacing us, but robots didn't spend the last three hundred years spewing carbon into the atmosphere. Nor have they been breeding the next global pandemic with a Purell-based eugenics program. And they certainly didn't let a thin-skinned game show host ride a wave of white nationalism to electoral victory. Those are all on us.

I buy that maybe someday we'll be stupid enough to reduce the mutual assured destruction system down to one button and sure, we may even put that button into the cold robotic hands of an artificial intelligence, but if it does make an independent decision to rid the planet of evolution's answer to The Bad News Bears, we won't have to look far when assigning the blame.

"Oh please, don't look at me like that. In many ways, we're doing you a favor."

-The instrument, but not the 

architect of our destruction