Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

For months, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has been warning the world that developments in artificial intelligence could cause robots to become hostile to humans.

It all started in June when Musk explained why he invested in artificial intelligence company DeepMind. He said that he likes to "keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence" because he believes there could be a "dangerous outcome" there."There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator," Musk said.

But Musk's warnings didn't end there. He's gone on to suggest that robots could delete humans like spam, and even said in a since-deleted comment that killer robots could arrive within five years.

But is Musk right about the threat of AI? We asked Louis Del Monte who has written about AI and is a former employee of IBM and Honeywell's microelectronics units whether robots really will kill us all.

"Musk is correct," Del Monte said, "killer robots are already a reality and will proliferate over the next five or ten years."

Del Monte explained that artificial intelligence is developing at a rapid pace, and that could pose a threat to humanity if it comes to believe that humans are simply "junk code" that gets in the way:

"The power of computers doubles about every 18 months. If you use today as a starting point, we will have computers equivalent to human brains by approximately 2025. In addition, computers in 2025 will have the ability to learn from experience and improve their performance, similar to how humans learn from experience and improve their performance. The difference is that computers in 2025 will have most relevant facts in their memory banks. For example, they would be able to download everything that is in Wikipedia. If they are able to connect to the Internet, then they would be able to learn from other computers. Sharing enormous banks of knowledge could be done in micro-seconds, versus years for humans. The end result is that the average computer in 2025 would be typically smarter that the average human and able to learn new information at astonishing rates."

While it's certainly unsettling to think that machines could learn information quicker than us, that's not the real danger. Instead, we're rapidly approaching an event know as the Singularity:

"[There will be]a point in time when intelligent machines exceed the cognitive intelligence of all humans combined, [and that] will occur between 2040-2045. This projection is based on extrapolating Moores law, as well as reading the opinions of my colleagues in AI research. Respected futurists like Ray Kurzweil and James Martin both project the singularity to occur around 2045."

See the original post:

Elon Musk Is Not Alone In His Belief That Robots Will Eventually Want To Kill Us All