Can Artificial Intelligence End the Human Race?

NEW DELHI: Stephen Hawking had warned a few years ago that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could spell the end of human race, a threat echoed by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, Bill Gates, and many others. This is the apocalyptic vision that the robots we create, may decide we are an obsolete model deserving "retirement". The truth, a more banal one, is that are we letting machine algorithms take over what were human decisions earlier, decision making of the governments, the businesses and even ours. Today, algorithms decide who should get a job, which part of a city needs to be developed, who should get into a college, and in the case of a crime, what should be the sentence. It is not super intelligence of robots that is the threat to life as we know it, but machines taking over thousands decisions that are critical to us and deciding social outcomes.