Sign up here to receive the Davos Diary, a special daily newsletter that will run from Jan. 20-24. Google's chief executive officer has left no doubt about how important he thinks artificial intelligence will be to humanity. "AI is one of the most profound things we're working on as humanity. It's more profound than fire or electricity," Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday. Alphabet, which owns Google, has had to grapple with its role in the development of AI, including managing employee revolts against its work on the technology for the U.S. government.

Shimon Whiteson says we will all become cyborgs. I really think in the future we are all going to be cyborgs. I think this is something that people really underestimate about AI. They have a tendency to think, there's us and then there's computers. Maybe the computers will be our friends and maybe they'll be our enemies, but we'll be separate from them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been changing our lives for decades, but never has AI felt more ubiquitous than now. It seems as though not a week passes without yet another AI system overcoming an unprecedented hurdle or outperforming humans. But how the future of AI will pan out for humans remains to be seen. AI could either make all our dreams come true, or destroy society and the world as we know it. To get an a realistic handle on what that future might look like, Tech Insider spoke to 18 artificial intelligence researchers, roboticists, and computer scientists about the single most profound change artificial intelligence could bring. Scroll down to see their lightly edited responses.