Artificial intelligence-is this the end of the world as we know it

AI aka artificial intelligence is one of the most misunderstood words nowadays, that's partially because of how loosely it's been used. One example of this is how the tech industry so often uses the word as a kind of buzzword to draw people's attention into whatever they're marketing. People are mostly confused about weather this technology will help or destroy us.

On the one hand, there are a lot of arguments that suggest AI is going to be Humanity's next best friend. We have already witnessed the unprecedented efficiency and competence of AI controlled tasks. For instance AI bots already beat their human counterparts in numerous video games proving that they are faster, more accurate and overall better performers, bringing us to our last argument which is the fact that the possibilities with AI are quite endless, because for the first time in Humanity's history we have made something that can actually “think” so we might even be underestimating how good it might get.

On the other hand, other people could swear that this whole thing spells out disaster to the world as we know it. For one AI is threatening to displace an enormous amount of jobs and while this has happened in the past like in the industrial revolution, AI is going to displace at a much faster rate than it creates jobs. Moreover the idea of something that can actually “think” creates a lingering fear to some people of this technology either getting into the wrong hands or getting out of our control, which may cause some very dreadful consequences like an all-out invasion by AI controlled death machines.

To sum up, and after some research through the history of mankind I have discovered that humanity went through a lot of stages similar to this one and we have always been fine going through them. The question that begs itself now though is “is this time going to be different ?”