uk Saturday 06 January 2018 Advertisement Should humans fear the rise of the machine?
 Artificial intelligence could usher in a new age of productivity.
 But it also threatens many jobs and raises fears that the machines could turn on us The killer robots of film might be closer than we think The Terminator is just one scenario where the robots take over Photo: Warner Br/Everett/REX By James Titcomb 5:05PM BST 01 Sep 2015 Follow Within the space of a couple of decades, a robot may be writing this article.
--
 And if it isn’t driving your car, you’ll need to get with the times.
 In the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from a pipedream, or the domain of science fiction, to a reality that is certain to have a profound impact on our lives.
 Not only is AI certain to make millions of jobs that exist today obsolete, it will also force us to ask major questions, about privacy, laws and ethics.
 Last week, many of the world’s eminent computer scientists and mathematicians gathered at University College Cork, Ireland, to celebrate the legacy of George Boole, a legendary mathematician whose work on logic and human thought laid the groundwork for modern computing and today’s artificial intelligence revolution.
 Boole, who was born two centuries ago this year, devised the theory of logic that underpins binary – the “on” and “off” or “one” and “zero” commands that make up the language of computer code.
 Many academics believe that, were it not for Boole’s premature death in 1864, the digital revolution that began when Claude Shannon used Boolean logic to build and devise a type of electrical circuit in the 1930s would have come several decades earlier.
 Claude Shannon pioneered modern computing Claude Shannon, who pioneered computing Boole was also an early influence of the idea of artificial intelligence, believing that all human thought could be reduced into a series of mathematical rules.
 On one trip to London, recalls his biographer Des MacHale, Boole marvelled at the “thinking” exercised by Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, an early calculating machine using looms and punch cards.
--
 He points out that HAL 9000, the antagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey who turned on his human passengers, was racked by paranoia.
 HAL’s problem wasn’t his artificial qualities, it was his human defects, and there is no reason to believe a real-life artificial intelligence would have such qualities.
 But fears over the power of artifical intelligence have not been helped by the eminence of the Turing Test, often seen as the litmus paper for AI.