The eminent British physicist Stephen Hawking, warns that the development of intelligent machines poses a real and significant threat to humanity. "The development of full artificial intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race," Hawking told the BBC.

The renowned scientist's warnings about AI came in response to a question about his new voice system, which he uses to communicate. He has recently been using a new system that employs artificial intelligence, learning how Mr. Hawking thinks and suggesting words he might want to use next.

Inventor Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, refers to the point in time when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence as "the singularity". In April, Hawking wrote an op-ed for The Huffington Post with well-known physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek of MIT, and computer scientist Stuart Russell of the University of California, Berkeley, forecasting that the creation of AI will be the biggest event in human history and, the scientists feel, possibly also the last.

In March, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher jointly invested $40 million in an AI company that is working to create an artificial brain

10/11/2017