Imagine waking up one morning with the option of staying in bed and pressing a button to send a robot to do all the work for you. How cool that would be! It may seem like building castles in the air, but given the rate at which artificial intelligence, or AI, is being developed, in the future such dreams may actually come true.

At the basic level, artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines. One of the essential aims of AI is to develop computer intelligence capable of learning from experience, adjusting to new inputs and performing tasks like humans. To achieve this aim, many approaches to creating true AI have been put forward, including “deep learning”, which enables a machine to improve its own performance by learning from the results of its previous actions. Deep-learning AI has the capacity to analyse massive amounts of data through multiple layers, imitating the complex networks of the human brain.

The dream of AI has been around for centuries, and the development of computers since the 1940s has finally made it a reality. Years before the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the mid-1950s, the theory had been explored by Alan Turing, one of the pioneers in the field of computer science. However, for a long time, AI technology developed very slowly. A major breakthrough in AI came in 1997, when Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer, beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Then in 2017, a computer program named AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, arguably the best human Go player, which demonstrated a significant advance in deep-learning AI systems.

Nowadays, AI is already being applied in many fields: finance, health care, machine translation and art, to name but a few. From autonomous vehicles to domestic robots, from recommendation systems to computers writing novels, AI has an unlimited number of applications. Ordinary people are now using AI to get instant translations of text in foreign languages, and machines can recognize fingerprints and even faces.

In short, this technology is transforming the way we live. It is clear that we are at a turning point in history. With machines like AlphaGo now capable of thinking and learning from their mistakes, we are getting closer to the dividing line between humans and machines. The question is, where will all this lead? While AI enthusiasts promise us a bright future where intelligent robots will be working to our advantage, these undoubted benefits also bring concerns and fears. Could machines really develop human-like intelligence? And what would happen if they did? Would thinking machines work alongside humans or threaten the existence of humans? How would they be punished if they committed crimes or even murdered humans? As we become more and more dependent on computers, some scientists are urging us to think about the dangers posed by the advances in AI. Stephen Hawking, for example, warned, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Apparently, such warnings demand our attention. We need to make sure that we will not fall victim to AI. We may still think it would be fantastic to relax all day and allow autonomous machines to do all the work for us—but perhaps we should not be too greedy and rather be careful what we wish for!