Billionaire Elon Muck’s latest suggestion might just save us from being irrelevant as artificial intelligence (AI) grows more prominent even though he is known for his futuristic ideas.

Humans need to merge with machines to become a sort of cyborg, said the Tesla and SpaceX CEO in a recent speech.

“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

“It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.”

While humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second, computers can communicate at “a trillion bits per second”, said Musk while attempting to explain what he meant by his statement.

According to Musk, there’s an urgent need to merge humans with machines as humans could potentially become useless in an age when AI threatens to become widespread.

“Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem,” Musk explained.

A new layer of a brain being able to access information quickly and tapping into artificial intelligence is seen to be the possible technological answer to the technologist’s proposal. The need for humans to evolve has been a constant theme of Musk’s talks on how society can deal with the disruptive threat of AI and hence this is not the first time that he has spoken about the evolvement of humans in relation to machines.

His fear of “deep AI”, which goes beyond driverless cars to what he called “artificial general intelligence”, was touched upon by Musk during his talk. AI that is “smarter than the smartest human on earth” and called it a “dangerous situation” is how he described this phenomenon.

However at present and the more eminent threat that is posed to humans, especially who are not adapted to technology, is the threat of being displaced from jobs by AI, particularly autonomous cars, which Musk’s own firm is developing, the Tesla boss said while mentioning that complete displacement of humans by AI might be some way off. He fears that 12 to 15 percent of the global workforce will be unemployed after the disruption to people whose job it is to drive will take place over the next 20 years.

“The most near term impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars … That is going to happen much faster than people realize and it’s going to be a great convenience,” Musk said.

“But there are many people whose jobs are to drive. In fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people … Driving in various forms. So we need to figure out new roles for what do those people do, but it will be very disruptive and very quick.”

(Adapted from CNBC)