7 Ways Scientists Plan To Avert The Apocalypse

2. Robot Uprising

This has been the domain of sci-fi up until now, but as our technology advances, some people are beginning to get a bit edgy about the robot uprising.

We're not talking about people from the more paranoid corners of the internet either, as the likes of Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have all expressed their concerns. They, and others like them, see AI as the biggest technological threat to society in this century.

Musk has even taken matters into his own hands.The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has donated $7 million to Artificial Intelligence research teams around the world, with the proviso that they should dedicate some of their efforts to not only developing more and more sophisticated AI, but also ways for us to retain control of it when it begins thinking for itself.

Two of the major fields that have to be tightly controlled are banking and the military and the UN is already considering a blanket ban on AI weapons.

Whilst it's unlikely that we'll ever have to deal with robots travelling back from the future to murder us all, creating an artificial intelligence that is both capable of upgrading its own software and understanding when it is being exploited is surely a recipe for disaster.