Until recently, the most famous thing that Sophia the robot had ever done was beat Jimmy Fallon a little too easily in a nationally televised game of rock-paper-scissors.

But now, the advanced artificial intelligence robot — which looks like Audrey Hepburn, mimics human expressions and may be the grandmother of robots that solve the world’s most complex problems — has a new feather in her cap:














Sophia insisted that he was watching too many movies and reading too much Elon Musk.

Musk, the billionaire inventor who gave the world Tesla cars and wants to take people to space, told a group of governors in July that they needed to start regulating artificial intelligence, which he called a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

An AI revolution, he said, “is really, like, the scariest problem to me.”

“Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be,” Musk said. “AI is a fundamental risk to the future of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not. They were harmful to a set of individuals in society, but they were not harmful to individuals as a whole.”

Musk believes AI “could start a war by doing fake news and spoofing email accounts and fake news releases, and just by manipulating information. Or, indeed — as some companies already claim they can do — by getting people to say anything that the machine wants.”

His grim predictions are at odds with the demeanor of Sophia, a robot who seems so, well, personable.

Sophia has graced the cover of a fashion magazine, taken a spin in one of Audi’s autonomous cars and starred in a concert. At a conference in Geneva hosted by the United Nations, she said she could do a better job as U.S. president than Donald Trump.

She even tells jokes, though her voice is a bit monotone and her comedic timing needs a tuneup.

For example, after beating Fallon in rock-paper-scissors on his show, she quipped: “This is a good beginning of my plan to dominate the human race. Ha. Ha.”

There was laughter from the audience, but it was nervous.

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