18% of experts claim AI will likely lead to end of humanity

A recent study surveying 550 leading experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence shows that 18% of them believe that AI will possibly lead to the end of humanity, posing an “existential threat” to the human species.

The study – which Naked Security at Sophos reported on today – comes from Oxford University, authored by Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom. The study itself did not examine the threats posed to us from artificial intelligence, rather a paper gathering the opinions of many of those prominent within the field.

52% of those asked believed that artificial intelligence would be either “extremely good” or “on balance good”, which were the two popular answers.

But still, to justify the headline, almost 1 in 5 experts believe their own field of study will potentially lead to scenes reminiscent of The Terminator. Okay, maybe not exactly like that, but it still provides food for thought, as Naked Security points out.

It follows news we reported on in February over more debates over the future of AI, with Stephen Hawking himself claiming that AI could potentially “spell the end of the human race”.

Just like with the “Internet of Things” which we discussed only a handful of days ago, this is another journey we’re embarking on that could prove infinitely beneficial, or a total disaster. Or somewhere in between. Only in the case of AI, the possibility of disaster means the extinction of humans everywhere. So the stakes are high to say the least.

Either way what we do know is that the time to worry about evading killer robots running amok is still some way away. Progress still continues, and consumer apps like Siri and Cortana may seem increasingly human-like, but “true intelligence” is still a distant vision.

So, to ask our own readers what they think, we’ve broken it down into two questions –

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and…

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