The Wall Street Journal will consider AI a threat when an AI running a hedge fund starts firing CEOs.

'AI will not be a separate intelligent entity, it will be the extension/evolution of existing intelligent entity, that is us.'

With respect to intellectual threat I don't think you can say that. Your assumption is that any behaviour resulting from the creation of a separate intelligent entity (no one has the slightest idea how to do this) will be predictable (or be constrained by us) - having evolved 'from us'. Why should that be?

People don't really understand AI. I wrote a post about why AI is not a threat and the arguments are more of logical and fact driven then philosophical. https://medium.com/@ankur_dhama/artificial-intelligence-a-th...

There are seven questions in this article, and topics like machine learning and program verification are in quotes.

I don't think a competent engineer was consulted on this article.

Perhaps as a community we should elucidate in a more formal fashion to the press.

I've been giving this a lot of thought lately because of Musk and Hawking. I think they are wrong, for a couple simple reasons.

1) A true AI wont care about us, or probably anything. It may just suicide.

2) Very simple to destroy. EMP, etc.

In one respect, AI is already damaging the sense of self worth of swathes of humanity by making them economically redundant. This will be an accelerating threat for sometime.

That already happened, 140 years ago, with John Henry and the steam drill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_%28folklore%29

While I can empathize with the emotions behind that argument, it's rather hard to be persuaded by it. Jobs can become redundant, but people can't insofar as they can be retrained. If we're talking about what harms people's self worth, I'd imagine that telling people they're redundant is a lot more dehumanizing than having them retrain for new positions.

In any case, human beings are remarkable adaptive. It's one of our most impressive traits; don't sell it short.

Easier said than done. What are they going to retrain to? As AI continues to advance, more and more jobs will necome redundant. CGP Grey did a great video on this[1]. Even if you can't completely replace humans, often times, obe person will be able to do the job that used to take several. Where do those others go? What will we as a society do if for example AI-based Expert Systems make 90% of accountants and office clerks redundant? We can't retrain all of them to become doctors and scientists, can we?

[1] http://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU

This is creating so much buzz..

I would like to say that just wait and watch. Time will tell whether it is or whether it is not