AI doesn’t have to be Strong to improve your life, or kill you. Weak AI can do the job just fine, whether it’s on an assembly line or the front lines. Director Neill Blomkamp, whose new film, Chappie, concerns a robotic police force, addressed these issues in an interview with Ramy Zabarah of Popular Mechanics. An excerpt:

Question:

How do you feel about the current state of robotics? Do you think that artificial intelligence will advance to something similar to the level shown by the autonomous robot police force in Chappie?

Neill Blomkamp:

I definitely think it’ll get there. That’s not even a debate. It will get there within a decade or less. Like if you take Petman or [other robots] from Boston Dynamics and look at what they’re doing, you mix that with some sort of complex code that has a bunch of protocols about how to react to certain situations. We will absolutely make that. That’s scarier to me, weirdly, than real AI. That actually bothers me more.

Question:

Why is that?

Neill Blomkamp:

Because if it really is strong AI—if it really is intelligence like us or beyond us, then maybe it wipes us out, but it’s going to be a binary thing. It’s either just going to wipe us out and we won’t know, or it’s going to not do that at all and it’s going to be something that may actually make life better for everyone, and it may enlighten us in a way that humans can’t.

It’s the intermediary that scares me. It’s the phase where we let a bunch of Boston Dynamics robots loose that have some sort of poorly written protocols about kicking in doors and raiding houses.

Question:

How do you think AI will ultimately be used in the future? Will it be used for good or for bad?

Neill Blomkamp:

I don’t think the word “used” is correct. I think it will do what it wants to do. We can have whatever idea we want about what it should be used for, and it will not do that. We’ll make it and then we’ll enter a paradigm shift where nothing will be the same. It’ll either solve all of our problems or it will declare war on us, which personally I think it’s not going to do.•