Earlier this year, concerns over the development of autonomous military systems -- essentially AI-driven machinery capable of making battlefield decisions, including the selection of targets -- were once again the center of attention at a United Nations meeting in Geneva. "Where is the line going to be drawn between human and machine decision-making?" Paul Scharre, director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., told Time magazine. "Are we going to be willing to delegate lethal authority to the machine?" "Malicious computer programs that could be described as'intelligent autonomous agents' are what steal people's data."

When it comes to understanding artificial intelligence, is science fiction just a pesky distraction from the real dangers out there? Microsoft's authority on all things AI seems to think so, reports Jihee Junn. "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," declared Elon Musk back in 2014. "In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like – yeah, he's sure he can control the demon. Over the years, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has regularly come out to express his concerns over the future of AI. He's even warned of a possible Terminator-style robot uprising, telling a group of US governors earlier this year: "I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react, because it seems so ethereal." Could the world really be terrorised by artificially sentient beings? Are we on the verge of creating our own existential threat? Does this mean we have to endure another resurrection of Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting career? For Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and director of Microsoft Research, the likelihood of such a scenario occurring remains resoundingly low. "I think there's a much higher probability that humanity could wipe out humanity.

There's a line between constructing algorithms to analyze patterns similar to the way human brains analyze patterns and machines thinking and inferring the way people do. One is specifically about analysis and the latter, the one you're concerned about, is about how original thought manifests. You shouldn't worry about flying cars or machines being too smart. I get those are cool, fun things to worry about it. But they aren't real, and they are never going to be.

Artificial intelligence is either the bright shining future of technology or an insidious threat that could endanger all of mankind, depending on your point of view. Now Google, one of the companies leading the development of AI systems, has set out five key challenges that need to be overcome with the technology - but they are somewhat more mundane than robots rising up to take over the world. Instead, the company sees one of the key problems as being how to stop negative side effects, such as a cleaning robot that knocks over a precious vase to get its job done faster. Google has published a new research paper highlight five challenges it sees as needing to be overcome to prevent AI and robots causing unintended harm. It also says robots need to be programmed in a way so they do not'game the system' – such as simply covering mess in a room with a sheet it cannot see through rather than tidying up. Avoiding Negative Side Effects: How can we ensure that an AI system will not disturb its environment in negative ways while pursuing its goals, e.g. a cleaning robot knocking over a vase because it can clean faster by doing so?

RELAX: the AI apocalypse has been cancelled. A rash of recent headlines blared that Google was developing a "kill switch to stop a robot uprising against humans", as The Telegraph put it, with a picture of a menacing metal army. It may come as little surprise to learn that the technical paper on which the stories were based described a prosaic engineering problem, not ways to stop the Terminator in its tracks. But the excitable coverage reveals how deeply the challenges posed by artificial intelligence have seeped into public consciousness. We have had machines that can out-calculate us for decades. Now a new wave is outperforming us on tasks ranging from image recognition to video-gaming.