Most geeks accept that smart robots or robots that learn are just around the corner.

But whether these robots armed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) will acquire nasty human habits such as committing murder and genocide is a matter for speculative fiction.

Billionaire Elon Musk, however, thinks intelligent machines will become humankind's ultimate enemy. Musk founded SpaceX and Tesla Motors, Inc. and is recognized as one of the world's top tech entrepreneurs.

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Musk believes a war between man and machine is almost inevitable. That's one reason he's in such a rush to get humans to colonize Mars. We've got to get away from these bad robots, otherwise known to humans as Replicants, Terminators, cyborgs, Gort, Eve (Wall-E's girlbot) or whatever you want to call them.

Fanciful or not, Musk's dread of Terminator-like killing machines that trigger the End of the World is leading him to work on ways to prevent this outcome or mitigate its more dreadful impacts.

"There are some scary outcomes, and we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad," Musk said during a recent interview on CNBC.

Musk recently invested big money in an AI company called Vicarious and in another AI firm called DeepMind.

"It's really, I like to just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is a potentially dangerous outcome there," he said.

Musk talked about the plot in the iconic 1984 movie, the "Terminator," where murderous and mean looking humanoid robots under the leadership of an omnipresent network called SkyNet almost wipe out humanity.

"They didn't expect some sort of 'Terminator'-like outcome," Musk said.

Musk had no prescription for managing the rise of AI other than to say "... you have to be careful."

That means we've got no place to hide if murderous AIs decided there's only room for one dominant race on Earth. But humans wouldn't be safe, not even on Mars.

"The AI would chase us there pretty quickly," Musk said.

Paging John Connor and Magnus, Robot Fighter. We need you.

TagsElon Musk, terminators, Robots, aritificial intelligence, mankind