Are you ready for Skynet? What about synths destroying the colonies of Mars as seen in Picard? With so much fiction bleeding apocalyptic images of artificial intelligence (AI) gone wrong, we'll take a look at some possible scenarios of what could actually happen in the rise of artificial intelligence. While many researchers and computer experts aren't worried, new technologies need risk-assessment. But, some high profile scientists like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking sounded the alarm years ago, and there is some reason for concern.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby interviewed Dr. Karen Panetta, IEEE fellow and dean of engineering at Tufts University, about the tech organization IEEE and a recent study concerning AI and healthcare. The following is an edited transcript of their interview. Dr. Karen Panetta: This is the third year that IEEE has been looking at artificial intelligence and the public perception of it with all the advances that are coming out. Most people think artificial intelligence is this magic black box. But those of us in the field understand that it really is very robust, proven technology.

Some believe that it is the future in problem-solving and the optimizer of existing solutions. The pioneer in discovering ideas we as humans would have never dreamed of. But it is also extremely disruptive -- changing the momentum in various industries and presenting to us new factors to take into consideration. We constantly worry about how AI may terminate our species, becoming the almighty ruler that decides not to obey our instructions. It would be foolish to not acknowledge that there are certain aspects of AI we should be concerned about.

If you think that AI cannot replace computer programmers in the future, you are wrong! This is the dream of researchers: building a machine that could build other machines. Recently, Jeff Dean, one of Google's leading engineers, announced a new project called AutoML. ML stands for Machine Learning, if you want to know more about the differences between Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, I made an entire video about this, and I'm going to put a link to it right up there. Put it simply, AutoML is a machine learning algorithm that can create other machine learning algorithm.