Zuckerberg soothes fears over AI dominating humans

Despite fears of machines becoming more intelligent than humans, Mark Zuckerberg has said in an interview with a German newspaper that machines will only overtake humans if they are programmed to do so and "unless we really mess something up." He added "fearful thinking might be standing in the way of real progress," and that humans would work out a way to make AI safe. 

Daniel Biskup

Fears of the oncoming artificial intelligence revolution are rampant and growing in Silicon Valley.

If it comes down to man versus machine, more tech leaders are starting to worry that it will be the machine that will win. Industry leaders from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel to Reid Hoffman have poured money into a Y Combinator-led project to make sure it doesn't happen.

In an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner for the German newspaper "Die Welt am Sonntag", Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to worry much about it, calling Musk's reaction a little more on the hysterical side of things.

Rather, Zuckerberg argues that the machines will only overtake humans if we program them that way. Those chess-beating computers are designed to be that smart, they didn't just learn it, he argues.

"I think that the default is that all the machines that we build serve humans so unless we really mess something up I think it should stay that way," Zuckberg told Döpfner in the interview.

Here's how Facebook's CEO sees the coming rise of robots and machines, and why it's not as scary as some make it out to be: