‘A race it might be impossible to stop’: how worried should we be about AI?

Scientists are warning machine learning will soon outsmart humans – maybe it’s time for us to take noteLast Monday an eminent, elderly British scientist lobbed a grenade into the febrile anthill of researchers and corporations currently obsessed with artificial intelligence or AI (aka, for the most part, a technology called machine learning). The scientist was Geoffrey Hinton, and the bombshell was the news that he was leaving Google, where he had been doing great work on machine lea