AI will soon make us look like monkeys

Elon Musk isn’t ready for our new robot overlords.

The eccentric tech billionaire issued a warning about the power of artificial intelligence at an event with Alibaba founder Jack Ma in Shanghai Thursday, saying that most people “underestimate the capability of AI.”

“They sort of think it’s like a smart human, but it’s going to be much more than that,” Musk said onstage. “It’ll be much smarter than the smartest human.”

“The first thing you should assume is that we are very dumb, and that we can definitely make things smarter than ourselves,” he added.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO compared the intelligence gap between human beings and AI to that between humans and chimps.

“Can a chimpanzee really understand humans? Not really,” Musk said. “We just seem like strange aliens. They mostly just care about other chimpanzees. And this will be how it is, more or less.”

The South Africa-born Musk added that the intelligence gap will probably be “much, much greater,” and said it could easily get to the point where things get out of humans’ control.

“What do you do with a situation like that? I’m not sure. I hope they’re nice,” he said.

Musk is no stranger to warning about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, having previously said that it brings “vastly more risk than North Korea.”