The biggest misconceptions about AI: the experts' view

Last year, Elon Musk made headlines by describing AI as a "fundamental risk to the existence of civilization." At the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg described such warnings as "pretty irresponsible." More recently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that the answer to fears about AI was to police it: "The example I would offer is, would you not invent the telephone because of the possible misuse of the telephone by evil people? No, you would build the telephone and you would try to find a way to police the misuse of the telephone," he said at the VivaTech conference in Paris last month. Others talk about the singularity – the point at which an AI suddenly becomes sentient – and use that possibility to stoke fears already fueled by dozens of sci-fi movies.