Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning have the potential to help people explore space, make our lives easier and cure deadly diseases.

But we need to be thinking about policies to prevent the technology from one day killing us all.

That’s the general consensus from a panel discussion in Washington D.C. today sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

“When will we reach general purpose intelligence?” said Stuart Russell, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at U.C. Berkeley. “We’re all working on pieces of it…. If we succeed, we’ll drive the human race off the cliff, but we kind of hope we’ll run out of gas before we get to the cliff. That doesn’t seem like a very good plan…. Maybe we need to steer in a different direction.”

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