Elon Musk's forays into artificial intelligence include his work on Tesla's self-driving autopilot system and Neuralink's impantable brain-computer interface.

When asked about AI, he often warns about its dangers and says he believes strongly in regulation. But he also sees the technology playing a massive role in the future of humankind, so much so that he described humanity as a precursor to a new lifeform that will evolve once we merge our minds with machines.

Here's how he put it recently:

It seemed to me some time ago that you could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital super intelligence. For those who don’t know what a boot loader is, it’s a very tiny piece of code without which the computer cannot start. But it's sort of like the minimal bit of code necessary for a computer to start. Like you couldn't evolve silicon circuits—there needed to be biology to get there.