These are the words of Louis Del Monte, physicist, entrepreneur, and author of “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution.” Del Monte believes there is an indeterminate point in the future — which he refers to as the singularity – when machine intelligence will outmatch not only your own intelligence, but the world’s combined human intelligence too.

The average estimate for when this will happen is 2040, though Del Monte says it might be as late as 2045. Either way, it’s a timeframe of within three decades.

“It won’t be the ‘Terminator’ scenario, not a war,” said Del Monte. “In the early part of the post-singularity world, one scenario is that the machines will seek to turn humans into cyborgs. This is nearly happening now, replacing faulty limbs with artificial parts.

We’ll see the machines as a useful tool, Productivity in business based on automation will be increased dramatically in various countries. In China it doubled, just based on GDP per employee due to the use of machines.”

“By the end of this century,” he continued, “most of the human race will have becorne cyborgs [part human, part tech or machine]. The allure will be immortality, Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we’ll think we’ve never had it better. The concern I’m raising is that the machines uwuill view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species.”

Del Monte believes machines will become self-conscious and have the capabilities to protect themselves. They “might view us the same way we view harmful insects, and as a species that is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses.” Hardly an appealing roommate.

He wrote the book as “a warning,” Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more capable, and we’re adopting it as quickly as it appears. A pacemaker operation is “quite routine,” he said, but “it uses sensors and AI to regulate your heart.”

Run at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland, the experiment had robots designed to cooperate in finding beneficial resources like energy and avoiding the hazardous ones. Shockingly, the robots learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the beneficial resources for themselves.

“The implication is that they’re also learning self-preservation,” Del Monte told us. “Whether or not they’re conscious is a moot point.”

And Del Monte isn’t alone. A group of scientists and entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, recently signed an open letter promising to ensure AI research benefits humanity.

The letter warns that unless we limit the intelligence of machines now, mankind could be heading for trouble. The document, drafted by the Future of Life Institute, calls on scientists to eradicate risks to mankind.

While the authors acknowledge the benefits of AI for society — citing speech recognition, image analysis, driverless cars, translation and robot motion as examples — they advocate a cautious approach.

‘The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; We cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable,’ the authors write.

Other signatories to the FLI’s letter include Luke Muehlhauser, executive director of Machine Intelligence Research Institute and Frank Wilezek, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate.

The letter carne just weeks after Professor Hawking warned that AI could someday overtake humans.