China's 'Brain Project' --Ignores Stephen Hawking's Warning That "Evolution of Artificial intelligence Could Spell the End of the Human Race"

Artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence after 2020, predicts Vernor Vinge, a world-renowned pioneer in AI, who has warned about the risks and opportunities that an electronic super-intelligence would offer to mankind. "It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future," says scifi legend Vernor Vinge, "create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event -- such a singularity -- are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm." There was the psychotic HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the humanoids which attacked their human masters in "I, Robot" and, of course, "The Terminator", where a robot is sent into the past to kill a woman whose son will end the tyranny of the machines. Experts interviewed by AFP were divided.