Will Advanced AIs Ever Be Treated as Our Equals in Society?

For the first time, artificial intelligence (AI) may have eclipsed the science that brought it to "life": we now have AI that can converse in a human-like manner, robots designed to look like us, and deep learning machines built specifically to learn, think, and act the way we do. Experts believe that by 2030, machine intelligence will be on par with humans and that by 2045, the capabilities of AI will actually surpass human intelligence. Given the rate of advancement the field has seen and the resources being dedicated towards its continued development, robotics researchers believe we're closer to "thinking" machines than ever before. "It's getting to a point where we might be able to say this thing has a sense of itself, and maybe there is a threshold moment where suddenly this consciousness emerges," mathematician Marcus du Sautoy from the University of Oxford said. "And if we understand these things are having a level of consciousness, we might well have to introduce rights.