Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat

Recently there has been a spate of articles in the mainstream press, and a spate of high profile people who are in tech but not AI, speculating about the dangers of malevolent AI being developed, and how we should be worried about that possibility. This all comes from some fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of the undeniable progress that is being made in AI, and from a misunderstanding of how far we really are from having volitional or intentional artificially intelligent beings, whether they be deeply benevolent or malevolent. By the way, this is not a new fear, and we've seen it played out in movies for a long time, from "2001: A Space Odyssey", in 1968, "Colossus: The Forbin Project" in 1970, through many others, and then "I, Robot" in 2004. In all cases a computer decided that humans couldn't be trusted to run things and started murdering them. The computer knew better than the people who built them, so it started killing them.