For decades, futurists have worried about computers getting human intelligence. Dystopian films from Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Terminator and Matrix movies showed smart machines wreaking havoc on humans.

Now serious thinkers have sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence, while robotics and automation already have caused profound social and economic dislocation.

Two weeks ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC, The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate, he warned. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldnt compete, and would be superseded.

And the brilliant entrepreneur Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla Motors TSLA, +2.48% and SpaceX, called AI our biggest existential threat.

With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon, he said.

Meanwhile, two researchers from the University of Oxford have estimated that computerization will put nearly half the jobs in the United States in jeopardy, including some creative professions that were thought to be immune.

Occupations that require subtle judgment are also increasingly susceptible to computerization, wrote Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne. To many such tasks, the unbiased decision making of an algorithm represents a comparative advantage over human operators.

Even for investing commentary? Just kidding I hope.

So, are the machines really taking over? I interviewed two leading researchers in AI and came away a little reassured, but not much. AI is progressing, but some technical barriers may delay immediate quantum leaps in machine intelligence.

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Howard Gold's No-Nonsense Investing: Are the machines really taking over?