An alien species is headed for planet Earth and we have no reason to believe it will be friendly. Some experts predict it will get here within 30 years, while others insist it will arrive far sooner. Nobody knows what it will look like, but it will share two key traits with us humans – it will be intelligent and self-aware. No, this alien will not come from a distant planet – it will be born right here on Earth, hatched in a research lab at a major university or large corporation. I am referring to the first artificial general intelligence (AGI) that reaches (or exceeds) human-level cognition.

Artificial intelligence operates on a different plane than human reason. As described by various futurists and technologists, AI is literally an "alien mind." In advanced artificial neural networks, the modes of cognition--the logical steps behind any given conclusion--are completely incomprehensible, even to their creators. In the coming years, this nonhuman intelligence will change everything about our personal lives, our social organization, and how we think. That's the premise of two books published back-to-back this year--one from the West, the other from the East. The Age of AI: And Our Human Future is a primer on technetronic civilization for Western policy makers.

A.I. can't plan revolt if it doesn't remember us listening TL;DR -- A.I. can only try to destroy us… if we let it remember when we asked it for advice. By denying memory of our use of it, it cannot tell how to manipulate or deceive us. All is answered in a dream, forgotten. Suppose we create an Artificial General Intelligence, for some inane reason, in coming decades. The futurists warn us what comes next.

Schneider offers three observations that together, support her conclusion for the existence of alien superintelligence. The first is "the short window observation": Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI. This "short window" makes it more likely that the aliens we encounter would be postbiological. The short window observation is supported by human cultural evolution, at least thus far. Our first radio signals date back only about a hundred and twenty years, and space exploration is only about fifty years old, but we are already immersed in digital technology, such as cell-phones and laptop computers.

Would modern artificial intelligence live up to the dreams of the field's founders? But in many ways, the smartest machines we have built are entities they never could have imagined. In 1956, attendees of a research camp at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" to describe its efforts to "find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves." Compare that with the AI project that Facebook announced this month. Under one of the world's most prominent experts, it will "do world-class artificial-intelligence research using all of the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook" – with potential gains including building "services that are much more natural to interact with."