I just read the two articles on AI on
Wait But Why and it's pretty interesting and a bit scary.
Here's the first one:
The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence - Wait But Why
It's a long read but sure gets you thinking.
The premise is there are 3 levels of AI: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) which are things like Google, Spam Filters, etc., stuff we already have; Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which would be on par with human intelligence, and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) which would be smarter than humans on about the same range we're smarter than ants.
Experts in the field expect us to reach AGI in this century, perhaps in the first half of this century. The scary part is a computer with AGI could potentially increase its intelligence so that it reaches ASI within a few years, days, or even hours of reaching AGI. And an ASI computer may not see much use for humans after that and have no moral reason to keep us. Or it may allow for humans to be immortal. Pretty interesting stuff.