Search Search Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment, warn experts The Meka M1 Mobile Manipulator.
 One of the many robots purchased by Google last year.
 Academics say half of US jobs could be automated within a decade or two 6169789578 Click to follow The Independent Tech Experts have warned that rapidly improving artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment just days after Google revealed the purchase of a London based start-up dedicated to developing this technology.
 Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Dr Stuart Armstrong from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford said that there was a risk that computers could take over human jobs “at a faster rate than new jobs could be generated.
” “We have some studies looking at to which jobs are the most vulnerable and there are quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting,” said Dr Armstrong.
 “Ultimately, huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence.
” Dr Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, agreed that improvements in artificial intelligence were creating “short term issues that we all need to be talking about.
” "It's very difficult to predict," said Dr Shanahan.
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 But it certainly is something we ought to be discussing.
" Both academics did however praise Google for creating an ethics board to look at the “how to deploy artificial intelligence safely and reduce the risks” after its £400 million purchase of London-based start-up DeepMind.
 Google's search technology power devices such as Google Glass (above), allowing users to perform searchs and ask for help in natural language.
 DeepMind has been operating largely unnoticed by the wider UK technology scene, although its advances in artificial intelligence have obviously been of interest to the experts - founded in just 2012, DeepMind is Google's largest European acquisition to date.
 Dr Shanahan hailed DeepMind as “a company with some outstanding people working for it,” noting that the company has mainly been working in the areas of machine learning and deep learning, which he described as “all about finding patterns in very large quantities of data.