To be clear, the AI we will be talking about here is not the kind of AI that powers your video game or Siri or the Google Assistant. It’s the kind that has the ability to learn like a human. The kind that can read something, learn it, and apply it in ways that we did not tell it to. We are not there yet, but the work towards this goal is continuing at an ever increasing rate.

There are a lot of people who are worried about AI and what the implications of a system that is smarter than humans would be. Would we be seen as threats? Would the system determine that the solution to a problem would be to eliminate all life? Would we become slaves to our new computer overlords? Even people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have expressed concerns about what could happen if an AI system decided that humans were expendable. …