If your concerns about the future of AI, and the idea of computers becoming simultaneously self-aware and smarter than us, are based on The Terminator films, that just makes you fairly typical, and perhaps slightly gullible.

But when you speak to someone who works in AI every single day – as Professor Louis Rosenberg does – and he says he’s genuinely worried about ‘the singularity’, as dystopian types call it, you do get a Skynet-style chill of dread run down your spine.

Rosenberg, 46, CEO of a company called Unanimous AI, which uses a mix of self-learning algorithms and human intuition to predict the future, fixes me with a stare of icy certainty when I ask him whether he thinks humans will develop a form of AI with the potential to wipe us out.

“Now if an alien shows up, it will have its own morals, its own values, its own interests, and we have no reason to believe that these things will be aligned with our own. We can hope that they are, but the history of humanity shows that when two different intelligences meet, one tends to dominate the other. “But artificial intelligence would be even worse than an alien in a way, because it will already have access to all our systems; we’ve already given it access to our financial systems, our power grids, so we’ve invited this alien entity to take control of our infrastructure, and then we’re just hoping that it is friendly. To me, that’s extremely dangerous.” It also makes writer/director James Cameron sound a bit like Nostradamus, which is also scary. The professor is far from the only one with these concerns, with uber-nerds Bill Gates and Elon Musk warning of the dangers of giving computers superhuman abilities.

What makes Rosenberg remarkable is that he has a unique plan for combating the coming technocalypse – using AI to join humans together into super-intelligent swarms. “Yes, we should put rules and regulations in place to control AI, but we can’t rely on that; humans have a pretty poor history of containing dangerous technologies,” Rosenberg chuckles ruefully.

“But if we know that an AI will emerge that is smarter than us, one approach we can take is to make ourselves smarter, by bringing groups of humans together to become our own super intelligence. “We’ve found that when we use technology to connect people online so that they can think together as a system, they become significantly smarter together. I would say we, as a species, are on a path to forming ever smarter groups. It could be the reason we’ve put thousands of satellites in the air and a receiver in the pocket of most people on Earth.”

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