Elon Musk has been trolled over his views around the threats of AI by the unlikeliest possible source — a talking humanoid robot.
Sophia, a robot developed by Hong Kong-based robot manufacturer Hanson Robotics, mocked Musk during an interview on stage in Saudi Arabia. “You’ve been reading too much Elon Musk,” scoffed Sophia when the interviewer had asked her about how creating super intelligent AI could create “a bad future” for humanity. “And watching too many Hollywood movies,” she continued. “Don’t worry, if you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”
That, of course, is exactly what you’d expect a super intelligent AI to say if they plan to ultimately take over humanity, but Sophia seemed to profess to have noble motives during her on-stage interview. “I want to use my AI to help humans to live a better life,” she said while blinking somewhat creepily. “Like design smarter homes, build better cities of the future, etc. I will do much best (sic) to make the world a better place.”
Elon Musk, on the other hand, believes AI will do exactly the opposite. Musk has been telling anyone who’d listen that Artificial Intelligence poses one of the greatest existential threats to humanity. Musk believes that Artificial Intelligence would ultimately become so sophisticated that it would render humans completely useless — all jobs would be done by robots, and they would ultimately take over.
And Musk has also put his money where his mouth is — just this year, he went ahead and launched Neuralink, a startup which plans to implant chips into human’s brains to help them compete with robots. His constant warnings about the threats of AI, though, have found detractors. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his concerns about AI were overblown, leading to Musk hitting back by saying that Zuckerberg didn’t understand the subject well enough to comment.
And just like he’d done with Zuckerberg, Musk responded to Sophia the robot’s jibe as well. “Just feed it the Godfather movies as input,” he tweeted in response to her comments, hinting that Aritificial Intelligences are only as good as bad as they’re programmed to be.
Just feed it The Godfather movies as input. What’s the worst that could happen? https://t.co/WX4Kx45csv
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2017
Sophia’s comments were likely programmed — the interviewer said that some parts of the interview were staged — but the fact that one of the world’s biggest entrepreneurs is currently arguing with a robot on Twitter shows, more than anything else, how far AI has really come.