India, Dec. 26 -- Most people who flag the unmitigated risks posed by artificial intelligence are no cranks. Jaan Tallinn, the 53-year-old Estonian co-developer of Skype, thinks his chances of dying from a fatal disease are the same as from rogue machines now. Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian Nobel-winning computer scientist known as the 'godfather of AI', warns that advanced intelligence could "mean the end of people".

None of this is far-fetched, says author James Barrat in an updated edition of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

The danger isn't that AI is going to be a million times smarter than people. A lot of stuff already is. In his telling, the problem isn't just smartness but that "...