Why Fear AI?

At Gigaom Change Leader's Summit 2016 in September, we will be exploring seven key business technologies that are real today. In anticipation of that event, we are doing a series of short pieces on the featured technologies. In 1950, Alan Turing asked the question of whether a machine can think. In 1955, John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence." In 1956, a group consisting of McCarthy and three other AI scientists proposed a summer retreat to work out the essentials of the new field.