Renown scientist Stephen Hawking believes artificial intelligence could one day become so advanced it would destroy humankind.
"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawking told the BBC.
Hawking, a theoretical physicist and author, warned against technological developments improving to the point where they outpace human intelligence- such as, for example, the communication system from Intel and the British company Swiftkey that studies a person's thoughts and presents words the person might want to use.
Hawking, who has the neurodegenerative disease ALS, recently received an upgrade in the machine he uses to speak using the same technology from Intel and Swiftly.
Basic forms of AI are beneficial, but there is a limit, said Hawking, the former Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University, a position held by Isaac Newton in 1663.
"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he told the BBC. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."
In some forms, AI is already surpassing humans today, such as machines that are used by some companies to do tasks normally done by humans, taking away potential jobs. A recent survey of Harvard University business alumni found that almost half would rather hire robots for labor than hire real people.
But not all technology experts see future doom and gloom for humankind.
"I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time and the potential of it to solve many of the world problems will be realized," Rollo Carpenter, creator of the app Cleverbot, where users have human-like conversations with the software, told the BBC.
Carpenter added that current technology is nowhere near achieving the level of surpassing human intelligence, but that it may come in the next decades.
"We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined or conceivably destroyed by it," he told the BBC.
