Can AI escape our control and destroy us?

"It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life. It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line. In less than thirty years, it will end." Jaan Tallinn stumbled across these words in 2007, in an online essay called "Staring into the Singularity." The "it" is human civilization.