Stephen Hawking warned it could "spell the end of the human race." In the Terminator movies, it results in the robot apocalypse.

Artificial intelligence has a friend, however, in "Chappie." The film from "District 9" director Neill Blomkamp looks at a world where robots hold the solution to our problems and humans are the villains more specifically, Hugh Jackman, decked out in a ridiculous mullet and short khaki shorts.

"The moment we gave birth to AI, it would be a different planet," Blomkamp told NBC News.

Disease? Eradicated. Poverty? Humans could spend more time thinking and less time working to make ends meet.

"You would have something that has 1,000 times the intelligence that we have, looking at the same problems that we look at," he said. "I think the level of benefit would be immeasurable."

It has been 60 years since computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence," which he imagined as "computer programs that can solve problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans."

In the narrow sense, that has already happened. IBM's Watson proved it could play "Jeopardy!" as well as most contestants. In science fiction, artificial intelligence usually equates to a broader set of skills, the computer equivalent of a human brain.

"Self-awareness means you perceive yourself as being unique," Wolfgang Fink, a roboticist at the University of Arizona, told NBC News. "It's like the Latin saying 'cogito ergo sum' I think, therefore I must be."

He isn't sure someone will ever build a robot that is self-aware, and if they do, he thinks it probably won't be for a very long time.

McCarthy died in 2011, the same year that Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S equipped with Siri. The gulf between Siri and the digital assistant in "Her" (another recent movie about AI) is vast.

See the rest here:

'Chappie' Doesn't Think Robots Will Destroy the World