It’s an issue that worries some of the world’s greatest minds right now, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk described AI as our “greatest existential threat” and compared its development to “summoning the devil.”
He believes that super-intelligent machines could 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 poll, more than 60% of people fear that robots will cause fewer jobs in the next ten years.
And 27 percent predict it will decrease the number of jobs “a lot” with previous research suggesting that workers in the administrative and service sector will be the hardest hit.
In addition to posing a threat to our workplaces, other experts believe that AI could “become rogue” and become too complex for scientists to understand.
A quarter of respondents predicted that robots would become part of everyday life in just 11 to 20 years, and 18% predict that this will happen over the next decade.
They could “come back bastard”
Computer science professor Michael Wooldridge said artificial intelligence machines could become so intricate that engineers don’t quite understand how they work.
If experts do not understand how AI algorithms work, they will not be able to predict when they will fail.
This means that driverless cars or intelligent robots could make unpredictable decisions “out of character” during critical moments, which could endanger people.
For example, the AI behind a driverless car could choose to deviate from pedestrians or crash into barriers instead of deciding to drive sensibly.
They could wipe out humanity
Some people believe that AI will wipe out humans completely.
“Eventually, I think human extinction is likely to occur, and technology will likely play a role in that,” Shane Legg of DeepMind said in a recent interview.
He pointed to artificial intelligence, or AI, as the “number one risk of this century.”
Musk warned that AI poses more of a threat to humanity than North Korea.
“If you’re not worried about AI security, you should be. It greatly increased the risk that North Korea has,” he wrote on Twitter, 46.
“Nobody likes to be regulated, but everything (vehicles, planes, food, drugs, etc.) that is a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be regulated too.”
Musk has consistently advocated for governments and private institutions to enforce regulations on AI technology.
He has argued that controls are needed to protect machines from advancing out of human control