Why you should worry about intelligent machines

THEY started off by wounding our pride. Will AI end up taking our jobs – or even our lives? Twenty years ago, IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess – then seen as the gold standard of human intellect. Now a new wave of AI seems poised to take over a wide range of human tasks, potentially putting huge numbers of people out of work. And an unlikely alliance of philosophers, technologists and movie-makers has stoked fears that the next generation of AI might snuff out humanity.