The Road to Killer AI: ML Blockchain IOT Drones Skynet?

Lately, there has been a lot of concern about the recent explosion of AI, and how it could reach the point of 1) being more intelligent than humans, and 2) that it could decide that it no longer needs us and could in fact, take over the Earth. Physicist Stephen Hawking famously told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Billionaire Elon Musk has said that he thinks AI is the "biggest existential threat" to the human race. Computers running the latest AI have already beaten humans at games ranging from Chess to Go to esports games (which is interesting, because this is a case where AI could be better than humans at playing games which were built as software from the ground up, unlike Chess and Go, which were developer before the computer age). AI has been making dramatic leaps over the past few years -- the question that Hawking and Musk are asking is: Could AI evolve to the point where it could replace humans? If this scenario sounds like science fiction, it's one that science fiction writers have posed again and again. One of the most popular is of course, Skynet, the intelligence that takes over in the Terminator universe and decides to wipe out most of humanity and enslave the rest (except for the resistance fighters, led by John Conner, but that involves a terminator travelling back in time, and time travel will be handled in another essay). In perhaps equally popular trilogy of the Matrix, super-intelligent machines take over the planet as well, but rather than killing humans they enslave them in a unique way. In order to ensure that electricity generated by the human brain can be put to use, the super-intelligent machines put humans in pods, keeping our minds busy playing a giant video game or simulation (i.e. the Matrix).