Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Threat--Yet

We need to be super careful with AI. That same year University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also cautioned: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence." How the AI apocalypse might unfold was outlined by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky in a paper in the 2008 book Global Catastrophic Risks: "How likely is it that AI will cross the entire vast gap from amoeba to village idiot, and then stop at the level of human genius?" His answer: "It would be physically possible to build a brain that computed a million times as fast as a human brain.... If a human mind were thus accelerated, a subjective year of thinking would be accomplished for every 31 physical seconds in the outside world, and a millennium would fly by in eight-and-a-half hours."