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It’s an issue that’s currently on the minds of some of the world’s greatest minds, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, described AI as our “greatest existential threat” and compared its development as “summoning the demon.”
He believes that super-intelligent machines can use humans as pets.
Professor Stephen Hawking said it is ‘almost certain’ that a major technological disaster will threaten humanity in the next 1,000 to 10,000 years.
They could steal jobs
According to a 2016 YouGov survey, more than 60 percent of people fear robots will lead to fewer jobs in the next decade.
And 27 percent predict job cuts will be ‘a lot’, with previous research suggesting workers in the administration and services sectors will be hardest hit.
Other experts believe that AI not only threatens our jobs, but that it could go “rogue” and become too complex for scientists to understand.
A quarter of respondents predicted that robots will become a part of everyday life within just 11 to 20 years, and 18 percent predicted that this will happen within 10 years.
They can ‘go rogue’
Computer science professor Michael Wooldridge said AI machines can get so complicated that engineers don’t fully understand how they work.
If experts don’t understand how AI algorithms work, they can’t predict when they will fail.
This means that self-driving cars or intelligent robots can make unpredictable decisions at critical moments that do not suit their character, putting people in danger.
For example, the AI behind a self-driving car may choose to drive into pedestrians or crash into barriers instead of driving sensibly.
They can wipe out humanity
Some people believe that AI will wipe out humans completely.
“Ultimately, I think humanity will probably go extinct, and technology will probably play a part in that,” DeepMind’s Shane Legg said in a recent interview.
He called artificial intelligence or AI the “number one risk for this century.”
Musk warned that AI poses a bigger threat to humanity than North Korea.
“If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Much more risky than North Korea,” the 46-year-old wrote on Twitter.
“No one likes to be regulated, but anything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc.) that poses a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too.’
Musk has consistently advocated for governments and private institutions to adopt rules for AI technology.
He has argued that controls are necessary to prevent machines from moving beyond human control.