When it comes to developing AI to the next level, some are looking forward for a brighter future, while some others are afraid of it.
Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk for example, once said that AI is the greatest threat humanity is facing as a civilization, explaining that AI doesn't need to be evil to destroy humans. Elon shares a similar fear with the late physicist Stephen Hawking.
Others like Kai-Fu Lee, an expert in the AI field who worked as an executive at Google, Apple, and Microsoft, thinks otherwise, saying that AI in ending humanity is simply outrageous.
Lee has the same opinion with Andrew Ng, the British-born American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and AI.
While different people can have their personal opinions, Mo Gawdat, a Google X's former executive, is with the former.
He said that singularity is coming, and said that AI is posing a major threat to humanity.
Gawdat said this because he believes that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is inevitable.
AGI has the ability to learn, do, and excel in numerous tasks at the same time, in a way that the technology is predicted to be in equal, if not better than humans.
Gawdat said that he had this frightening revelation while working with AI developers at Google X, who were building robotic arms capable of finding and picking up a small ball.
After what he recalled as a slow progress, he witnessed one day that the robotic arm could reach down and pick up a ball, which it then displayed to the researchers.
The robotic hand seemed to hold the ball up in a gesture that according to Gawdat, seemed like it was showing off.
Even more eerily, Gawdat claimed that every single arm could replicate the maneuver and after another two days, the arms could pick up just about anything.
And what he saw there in his mind, was that the robotic hand looked like the robotic hand of a T-800 from the Terminator franchise.
"And I suddenly realized this is really scary," Gawdat said. "It completely froze me."
Read: Paving The Roads To Artificial Intelligence: It's Either Us, Or Them
"Like we had those things for a week. And they're doing what children will take two years to do."
"And then it hit me that they are children. But very, very fast children."
The key difference here is that, machines can quickly learn basic level of intelligence, in a way that is a lot faster than humans.
"The reality is," he added, "we’re creating God."
Google has been at the forefront of developing AI based applications, and Gawdat witnessed that first hand behind the closed doors. This put fear into him to an extent, that he warns of humanity creating AI that may cause a situation similar to the Hollywood movie's "judgement day."
Gawdat is certain that with the continuous developments of such technology would one day give birth to an AGI, a sentient AI that many consider a technological singularity.
While a godlike AI is still far from reality, AI is already having a footprint in people's everyday lives, from face recognition to many parts of the web and beyond. At this time at least, among the most damaging things AI can do, include racism and hate.
Coming from Egypt, Gawdat has an engineering background, and has a career than spans to more than two decades. And during his time at Google's innovation arm Google X, he led the business' strategy, planning, sales, business development, and partnerships.
