With advances in artificial-intelligence technology occurring more rapidly than ever, the potential for AI to assist us in nearly everything we do at work and at home has become very real. However, some fear that along with AI's tremendous upside of delivering efficiencies humans could not possibly realize on their own comes a dark side--the possibility that super-intelligent AI machines could develop complete autonomy and act against human interests. Earlier this year at the AI Frontiers conference in Santa Clara, California, we sat down with AI experts from some of the world's leading technology-first organizations to find out if fears about AI overtaking humankind have any founding. An edited version of their remarks follows. Adam Coates, director, Baidu Research Silicon Valley AI Lab: I do think sometimes we get carried away and start to think about sentient machines--machines that are just going to understand everything the way that we do and totally interact with us like a human.

The next breakout star in Hollywood might be an AI named Arraiy. Arraiy is a computer vision and machine learning platform specifically designed for film and television effects. Arraiy's creators are training the system to rotoscope -- the process of separating certain parts of footage from the background (for example) separating an actor from the green screen behind them) with years' worth of human-created visual effects as training tools. The ultimate goal, though, is to do it more quickly and cheaply than humans can, and just as effectively. Rotoscoping by hand can take dozens of hours, but Arraiy can do it in a fraction of the time.

Inside an old Palo Alto auto body shop, Stefan Avalos pushed a movie camera down a dolly track. He and a small crew were making a short film about self-driving cars. They were shooting a powder-blue 1962 Austin Mini, but through special effects the rusted relic would be transformed into an autonomous vehicle that looked more like the DeLorean from "Back to the Future." Stepping back from the camera, Avalos referred wryly to the movie he was filming as "Project Unemployment." The film was a way of testing new technology from a startup called Arraiy, which is trying to automate the creation of digital effects for movies, television and games.

By Cade Metz CALIFORNIA: Inside an old auto body shop here in Silicon Valley, Stefan Avalos pushed a movie camera down a dolly track. He and a small crew were making a short film about self-driving cars. They were shooting a powder-blue 1962 Austin Mini, but through special effects the rusted relic would be transformed into an autonomous vehicle that looked more like the DeLorean from "Back to the Future." Stepping back from the camera, Avalos referred wryly to the movie he was filming as "Project Unemployment." The film was a way of testing new technology from a startup called Arraiy, which is trying to automate the creation of digital effects for movies, television and games.