It is an issue troubling some of the greatest minds in the world at the moment, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk. SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk described AI as our'biggest existential threat' and likened its development as'summoning the demon'. He believes super intelligent machines could use humans as pets. Professor Stephen Hawking said it is a'near certainty' that a major technological disaster will threaten humanity in the next 1,000 to 10,000 years.

This is the moment the makers of a Russian robot claim it saved a girl from being crushed - but is everything as it seems? Footage from Perm Polytechnic University, in central Russia, shows Promobot - a'self-teaching' robot - stopping a set of shelves from falling on a little girl after she tried to climb on them. Oleg Kivokurtsev, one of the creators of the robot, claims his machine carried out the manoeuvre all by itself - but his team have been accused of fakery in the past. There have been multiple bizarre incidents involving his creation - including two apparent escape attempts from its testing facility, and another time it started spouting profound answers to a question. While nobody has conclusively disproved the claims, prominent tech websites including Atlas Obscura and BGR have both poured cold water on the Promobot, while many have simply ignored it.

The robot is designed for education and aimed at children between the ages of 4 and 12, What's On Weibo reported. After this incident, however, parents will likely think twice before leaving a kid alone with this machine. According to Mashable, a statement on the company's website said the robot has sensors to stop it from hitting things when on its own, but those were disabled when the control panel was open. Over the summer, a robot security guard at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, knocked over a child and injured his leg. Although Knightscope, the company that makes the robot, apologized to the family, it also insisted that the robot was actually trying to avoid the child when the two collided.

Google's self-driving cars have'seen' a lot while cruising the streets of Mountain View, California and Austin, Texas. Other than the the picturesque scenery, the vehicles have witnessed a handful of strange scenarios - like a broom wielding woman in an electric wheel chair chasing a duck. In a recent monthly report, Google highlighted a few of these bizarre incidents, which the firm says are key to the cars ability to deal with unpredictable road behavior. The handful of strange scenarios seen through the eyes of Google's car reveals these machines need to be fully prepared for situations so strange that most of its creators can't dream them up, such as the woman chasing a duck (featured) In Mountain View, California Google's self-driving car witnessed a broom weilding woman chasing a duck in the ride while riding an electric wheel chair. Another strange incident occurred at an intersection, when three non-related cars each made a turn down a one-way, which was the opposite way they were traveling.