Comment by Jürgen Schmidhuber

Well, I’ll tell you anyway: personally, I’m not worried. I have been trying to build something capable of replacing me since the 1980s, because I consider that effort exciting and fascinating, and because I believe that it’s the natural next step for mankind. And in taking that next step we are giving a helping hand to the entire universe. Because the scale on which we are going to get Artificial Intelligence – AI machines that are simply much cleverer than people in every respect worth mentioning – means that we will no longer occupy the summit of creation, though I personally think that may not really be desirable anyway. Rather, we should be delighted to be part of such a gigantic process, a process leading to the universe taking its next great step toward a higher level of complexity. These new entities will of course begin spreading out into space, as the bulk of resources are to be found outside rather than inside this thin biosphere. And eventually they will be completely capable of colonizing the entire Milky Way – that’s entirely physically possible – in a way that humans would never be able to do. And that is something really amazing and wonderful and exciting. And that’s why I’m not worried at all, and believe that nobody else has reason to worry either.