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 This year experts from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking warned about the havoc robots could cause the economy and humanity.
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 Tesla owner Elon Musk has since warned that AI is an existential threat to mankind.
 Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Robot panic peaked in 2015 – so where will AI go next?
 This year experts from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking warned about the havoc robots could cause the economy and humanity.
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 The humans’ task was made easier, but it was abstracted from the process and outcome.
 What is indisputable is that robots equipped with computer vision and paired with artificial intelligence (AI) systems – often called “machine learning”, or “deep learning”, or “neural network” systems – will take over more of the work that humans do today.
 Foxconn is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of electronics, with giant factories in China which assemble phones, tablets and computers for Apple and other companies.
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 Isaac Asimov introduced his famous Three Laws of Robotics for Runaround, a science fiction story set in 2015.
 In July, an article appeared in the science journal Nature, pointing out that “working out how to build ethical robots is one of the thorniest challenges in artificial intelligence”.
 That month, a 22-year-old worker installing a robot at a VW plant in Germany was killed when it was wrongly activated.