All the pieces are coming together: big data, advances in hardware, emerging powerful AI algorithms, and an open source community for tools that reduces barriers to entry for industry and start-ups alike. The result: AI is being propelled out of research labs and into our everyday lives, from navigating cities, ride shares, our energy networks, to the online world. In 2018 everyone is starting to see the business value of AI. It is being added to more and more things every year, and it is getting smarter and smarter – accelerating human innovation. But as AI becomes more powerful, more autonomous and broader in its use and impact, the unsolved issue of AI safety is paramount. Risks include: bias, poor decision making, low transparency, job losses and malevolent use of AI, such as autonomous weaponry.

All the pieces are coming together: big data, advances in hardware, emerging powerful AI algorithms, and an open source community for tools that reduces barriers to entry for industry and start-ups alike. The result: AI is being propelled out of research labs and into our everyday lives, from navigating cities, ride shares, our energy networks, to the online world. In 2018 everyone is starting to see the business value of AI. It is being added to more and more things every year, and it is getting smarter and smarter – accelerating human innovation. But as AI becomes more powerful, more autonomous and broader in its use and impact, the unsolved issue of AI safety is paramount. Risks include: bias, poor decision making, low transparency, job losses and malevolent use of AI, such as autonomous weaponry.

What if we could create "god" in our image? Founder of modern psychiatry Sigmund Freud hypothesized that man invented the concept of god. Ever the killjoy in his quest for joy, the philosopher Nietzsche famously went so far as to say that modern man "killed god." Since their time, modern science and technology have sought to resurrect god. But, if god does not really exist, then it is necessary to create god.

The most important conversation of our time involves Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what we do with this marvellous technology. Max Tegmark's new book "Life 3.0: Being human in the age of Artificial Intelligence" squarely addresses what needs to be done and how. He is a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also the founder of Future of Life Institute – a thinktank dedicated to building friendly AI. In case you are wondering, Life 3.0 refers to the non-biological, intelligent life of future. And, unlike humans who can design their own software (learning new skills, languages, etc.) but are unable to design their hardware, the intelligent life of future would design both its hardware and software. In other words, life will break free from its evolutionary paradigm.

Neural lace made headlines this month with Elon Musk launching Neuralink, a medical research company that aims to merge the human brain with intelligent computers. And while this sounds like it's pulled from the pages of a Sci-Fi novel, neural lace could be the next advancement in the field of AI. See also: 10 Elon Musk ideas that aren't so crazy. At its most basic form, neural lace is an ultra-thin mesh that can be implanted in the skull, forming a collection of electrodes capable of monitoring brain function. It creates an interface between the brain and the machine. To insert neural lace, a tiny needle containing the rolled up mesh is placed inside the skull and the mesh is injected.

Forget about The Terminator, the real problem with AI (artificial intelligence) is what to do when it meets your boss or even your friends. This is not the pitch for some kind of sci-fi rom-com, but rather the genuine concern of Dr Stuart Armstrong, a research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. His job is to think about future threats to the human race and how to confront them. AI is in the top five threats to humanity that he lists quickly on the back of his napkin, set against the rather incongruous background of the student chit-chat that fills Oxford's cycling cafe, Zappi's (for the record, the other four are: pandemics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology and nuclear war). While dismissing the blood and guts of Hollywood scenarios, what worries Armstrong -- as he outlines in his upcoming research paper Thinking Inside The Box in the journal Minds and Machines -- is the potential for superintelligent AI to stage a "takeover".

Supercomputers are about to achieve a quantity and level of intelligence which allows them to grow hyper-exponentially over a short period of time. We call them superintelligences and this sudden growth poses some risks because they will be much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills (Nick Bostrom). I don't question that this will happen, as Ray Kurzweil said "Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.".

Relentless progress in artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly raising concerns that machines will replace humans on the job market, and perhaps altogether. Eliezer Yudkowski and others have explored the possibility that a promising future for humankind could be guaranteed by a superintelligent "Friendly AI" , designed to safeguard humanity and its values. I will argue that, from a physics perspective where everything is simply an arrangement of elementary particles, this might be even harder than it appears. Indeed, it may require thinking rigorously about the meaning of life: What is "meaning" in a particle arrangement? What is "life"? What is the ultimate ethical imperative, i.e., how should we strive to rearrange the particles of our Universe and shape its future? If we fail to answer the last question rigorously, this future is unlikely to contain humans.