Will Artificial Intelligence take over? the world? And Will AI Kill Us All? The greatest threat to the destruction of humanity, according to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and the late physicist Stephen Hawking is AI or artificial intelligence. Could they be right? Will AI (Artificial Intelligence) take over the world? Or have they been watching too many science fiction movies. If anyone other than these three highly intelligent people had made the same statement, you could write them off as “crack pot pseudo scientists” But given that these are three preeminent and highly intelligent people, you have to take this seriously. First, what is AI? Quite simply it is a type of machine intelligence. It already exists, Siri on iphone speech recognition and the vision recognition systems of self-driving cars are low level forms of artificial intelligence. High level forms of AI would be self-learning machines, and perhaps even conscious such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the Terminator, or the robots in West World , which are at least as intelligent as humans. These don’t exist yet, …but we are probably going to get there in this century. Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, is a famous futurist who predicted the rise of the internet and fall of the Soviet Union. He believes that AI will be vastly more intelligent than humans by the year 2045 – This is the point at which there will be nothing that humans can do, that an AI Machine will not be better at. That’s less than 30 years from now. Does this mean that, humans will be destroyed at that point? No, it doesn’t mean that Does it mean that humans may be redundant, or mostly useless? Probably…yes. If AI does become much more intelligent than humans, yes, they may possess the capability to destroy us, but the question is not, “can they?” – The question is “would they?” To answer this question, we have to f