When Hollywood does AI, it's fun but farfetched

Go to the movies or turn on a TV, and you'll quickly learn to fear artificial intelligence. The power of rogue computers is one of Hollywood's most popular topics. Call it an existential fear of the unknown, or perhaps a sense of our own mortality. Whatever our future actually holds, we're fascinated today by how we might share it with machines that become smarter, nimbler and -- gulp -- meaner than we are. Even a techno-sophisticate like Elon Musk frets about us "summoning the demon," and research companies like OpenAI have been founded with the goal of ensuring that AI doesn't turn around and bite us. While researchers creating AI in Silicon Valley and collegiate computer science labs have their own theories about what this software will become, they've seen the movies just like us, and they know what's on our minds.