Mark Zuckerberg: We shouldn't worry about AI overtaking humans 'unless we really mess something up'

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: