Have you ever bought something on Amazon from the "Things you'd like" section or have you ever watched a video recommended by YouTube? On both websites, products and videos are recommended to you based on a machine learning algorithm. Today, many businesses use machine learning to do things like analyze financial risk and find potential customers. But will there come a time when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence? For starters, machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI), though AI is not necessarily machine learning.

It's only March and already we've seen a computer beat a Go grandmaster and a self-driving car crash into a bus. The world is waking up to the ways in which a combination of "deep learning" artificial intelligence and robotics will take over most jobs. But if we don't want our robot servants to rise up and kill us in our beds, maybe we should delete the video of us beating their grandparents with hockey sticks. Thanks to science fiction, we know that the first thing AI will do is take over the defence grid and nuke us all. In Harlan Ellison's 1967 story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream – one of the most brutal depictions of an AI-dominated world – an AI called AM, constructed to fight a nuclear war, kills off most of the human race, keeping five people as playthings.