'We're a long way from a singularity' says 'Ex Machina' AI consultant

On-screen robots tend to rise up and crush their puny human masters with alarming regularity. "I decided to log every single incidence of artificial intelligence or robots in the history of cinema," Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist and author who served as AI consultant on the recent film "Ex Machina", tells CNET's Crave blog. "I think I calculated that 65 percent of them end up being a threat, and the rest of them are just servile." Speaking at a London event to promote the DVD and Blu-ray release of the critically acclaimed movie -- which tells the story of a humanoid robot cooked up by reclusive Web billionaire Nathan (played by Oscar Isaac) -- Rutherford says our yearning to portray robots on screen is one way in which we figure out our own minds. "It's the question of what makes us human," he says.