Can we stop robots outsmarting humanity?

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" was human civilisation. Humanity would cease to exist, predicted the essay's author, with the emergence of superintelligence, or AI, that surpasses human-level intelligence in a broad array of areas. Tallinn, an Estonia-born computer programmer, has a background in physics and a propensity to approach life like one big programming problem.