by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

""Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on." ― Larry Page, co-inventor of the Google search engine.

Is there anyone in the Western world who hasn't seen (or at least heard about) the Terminator or Matrix movie franchises? As much as we've loved our Tamagotchis, Furbys, and Roombas, we still worry our digital and robotic creations will grow beyond us so fast and so far they'll learn to hate us or simply become indifferent to our presence, destroying us in the process. Even the late Stephen Hawking, probably one of the most intelligent people to ever live, worried it might happen.

Hawking aside, those who fear technology typically do so because they don't understand it. This has occurred throughout history. Some cavemen probably rejected that newfangled spear-thingy—until it proved itself in action. Consider weaver Ned Ludd, who supposedly destroyed two stocking-knitting machines in 1779, afraid they would take his job. Some alarmists in the 1800s thought riding trains would kill them, because the speed would rip them apart or cause them to suffocate; and parents in the 1920s refused to let their children listen to the radios for fear it would "enthrall" them. Those fears proved groundless. In the 1980s, many people thought computers would replace them, when in fact they just made most of us more productive. This type of mistrust has also hampered the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).