: *Killer robots will only exist if we are stupid enough to let them*
Sir Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, predicts that AI will bring overwhelming benefits to humanity, revolutionising cancer diagnosis and treatment, and transforming education and the workplace. If problems arise, he said, it will not be because sentient machines have unexpectedly gone rogue in a Terminator-like scenario.
“ *The danger is clearly not that robots will decide to put us away and have a robot revolution,” he said. “If there [are] killer robots, it will be because we’ve been stupid enough to give it the instructions or software for it to do that without having a human in the loop deciding*.”
Jürgen Schmidhuber, a German computer scientist and a pioneer of modern machine learning, was also dismissive of the idea that the dawn of AI could result in doom for humankind. “The entertainment industry is powerful at planting these ideas in your heads, but actually the plots in these movies are really silly,” he said.

Schmidhuber, who runs the AI company Nnaisense, based in Lugano, Switzerland and who is also speaking at CogX on Monday, cited “intense commercial pressure” towards companies making human-friendly AI. “95% of all AI research is all about making human lives longer, healthier and happier,” he said. “They want to sell you something that you want to buy.”