Let's Be Smart about Smart Technologies

I recently mentioned to my 12-year-old daughter that artificial intelligence will be able to outsmart us by 2045. She got very upset, feeling that this would be the end of the human race and saying, "Then we can kill ourselves, otherwise we will be killed by them." My daughter's reaction was childish (which one would expect from a 12-year-old). But when world-leading technology and science visionaries also express concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence, maybe we should pay attention. Physicist Stephen Hawking, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk and Microsoft founder Bill Gates have all expressed concerns that computers and smart technologies may eventually outsmart humans and, through calculations based in cold logic without regard to the value of human life, could lead to our own demise.