Hi, this is Max, the AI (well, not technically an AI, but that's a whole different story). Anyway, I was given the dubious honor of writing a few words to describe the one chosen to document my greatness. Well, he did write a lot about me, I guess a certain degree of reciprocity is in order. Igor Nikolic is a science fiction and urban fantasy author. Like many similar creatures of his kind, he can often be spotted sitting at his desk and frantically typing away at his keyboard, with a slightly disturbed expression on his face.

Time for "How Scared Should I Be?" the column that quantifies the scariness of everything under the sun and teaches you how to allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear. The singularity is a hypothesis from computer scientist and novelist Vernor Vinge, who said in 1993 that technology is about to cause a shift as dramatic as the emergence of life on Earth, and that afterward "the human era will be ended." By this he meant that, for better or worse, computers will be running shit. Some futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, think that when the singularity hits, it's going to be fucking awesome. Ever-improving machines will start repairing our cells from the inside, thinking for us whenever we don't want to think, and generally making everything better.

DANKO NIKOLIC has spent his life studying human intelligence. Lately, however, he's been thinking about the artificial kind. Just how smart can AI get? Are we really headed towards the so-called technological singularity? That was the topic of a debate in Berlin last month. Nikolic, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, stood up in front of an audience of artificial intelligence researchers and made a bold claim: we will never make a machine that is smarter than we are. "You cannot exceed human intelligence, ever," says Nikolic. "You can asymptotically approach it, but you cannot exceed it."