For those claiming that no reputable AI researchers believe there's a serious risk, I'd like to point to this short reflection by Berkeley professor Stuart Russ

For those claiming that no reputable AI researchers believe there's a serious risk, I'd like to point to this short reflection by Berkeley professor Stuart Russell (disclaimer: my PhD advisor): http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015 http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015 ... A highly capable decision maker – especially one connected through the Internet to all the world's information and billions of screens and most of our infrastructure – can have an irreversible impact on humanity. This is not a minor difficulty. Improving decision quality, irrespective of the utility function chosen, has been the goal of AI research – the mainstream goal on which we now spend billions per year, not the secret plot of some lone evil genius. AI research has been accelerating rapidly as pieces of the conceptual framework fall into place, the building blocks gain in size and strength, and commercial investment outstrips academic research activity ... He stops short of calling for government regulation of AI research; as others in this thread have noted, there are a lot of reasons to expect that route to be problematic. And it's likely that we're many decades way from building dangerous superintelligence; the pressing short-term risks are probably more economic in nature, like putting truck drivers and factory workers out of work. But just as physicists went from believing atomic energy was impossible to making it a reality in a short span of time, it's hard to predict the timescale of progress in AI research. It's not obviously wrong to say that there will, eventually, be a real issue here that society needs to think seriously about.