Artificial intelligence doesn’t hold a candle to the human capacity for harm.

Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about the threat of artificial general intelligence (AGI). An AGI is essentially an artificial superintelligence. It is a system that is able to understand — or learn — any intellectual task that a human can. Experts from seemingly every sector of society have spoken out about these kinds of AI systems, depicting them as Terminator-style robots that will run amok and cause massive death and destruction.

Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, has frequently railed against the creation of AGI and cast such superintelligent systems in apocalyptic terms. At SXSW in 2018, he called digital superintelligences “the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one,” and he said these systems will ultimately be more deadly than a nuclear holocaust. The late Stephen Hawking shared these fears, telling the BBC in 2014 that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

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Fears of artificial intelligence run amok make for compelling apocalypse narratives, but the real dangers of artificial intelligence come more from humans than machines.

With the help of robotics specialists, we can separate the truth from the hype.

Elon Musk has announced his plans for a new Tesla humanoid robot that will excel at “mundane tasks,” but he’s making some common robotics mistakes with his grand plans.

What does the future of a Tesla robot look like? With the help of a couple of robotics specialists, we can separate the truth from the hype in Musk’s claims.

What can we expect from a true humanoid robot?
Making a robot look and even behave like human figure brings many programming challenges. Will the Tesla bot do bipedal locomotion, the complex two-legged walking that humans have perfected over millions of years? (Or dance like the very obvious human in a Tesla Robot suit did at Tesla AI Day when Musk made the announcement?) Northwestern University robotics professor Michael Peshkin said it’s tasks like this that are often underestimated by the public.

“A baby spends several years learning how to move their body around,” Peshkin said. “We never appreciate how sophisticated people are to begin with. It’s the things that babies can do that are so hard for robots.”