Stephen Hawking: Artificial Intelligence Could Lead to the 'End of the Human Race'

Stephen Hawking, the world renowned physicist and cultural icon, said he believes any efforts to create artificial intelligence could pose a real threat to our existence.

"Development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," the author of "A Brief History of Time" said according to BBC.

Although professor Hawking said the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved useful, he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or even surpass humans.

"It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate," Hawking said describing the sci-fi movie sounding scenario.

Hawking early life has been made the subject of the romantic drama "The Theory of Everything,"

"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded," he added.

On the other hand, Rollo Carpenter, creator of Cleverbot, a software that learns from its past conversations and has fooled a high number of people into believing they are talking to a human being, thinks humans will be lording over any thinking machines .

"I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time and the potential of it to solve many of the world problems will be realized," Carpenter said.

Although Carpenter claims we are a long way from having the proper computing power or from developing the algorithms needed to achieve full artificial intelligence, he feels this will all be a reality in the next few decades.

However, the articial intelligence optimist remains cautions.

"We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it," he said.

For all his obvious reliance on computers and technology, professor Hawking sounds like a sort of cautionary Luddite when addressing his concerns about the future and the dangers of the Internet becoming the command center for terrorists.

"More must be done by the Internet companies to counter the threat, but the difficulty is to do this without sacrificing freedom and privacy," Hawking said.