Elon Musk takes on the "A.I. apocalypse"

Maureen Dowd for Vanity Fair, "Elon Musk's billion-dollar crusade to stop the A.I. apocalypse: Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles, but Silicon Valley's latest rush to embrace artificial intelligence scares him. ... Inside his efforts to influence the rapidly advancing field and its proponents, and to save humanity from machine-learning overlords":

• "Musk [says] this .. one reason we needed to colonize Mars [is] so that we'll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. ..."
• "You'd think that anytime Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are all raising the same warning about A.I. — as all of them are — it would be a 10-alarm fire. But, for a long time, the fog of fatalism over the Bay Area was thick. ..."
• "Some in Silicon Valley argue that Musk is interested less in saving the world than in buffing his brand, and that he is exploiting a deeply rooted conflict: the one between man and machine, and our fear that the creation will turn against us. They gripe that his epic good-versus-evil story line is about luring talent at discount rates and incubating his own A.I. software for cars and rockets."

Related: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says A.I. taking jobs from humans is ""not even on our radar screen."