You know a topic is trending when the likes of Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly bicker about its potential risks and rewards. In this case, Musk says he fears artificial intelligence will lead to World War III because nations will compete for A.I. superiority. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has called such doomsday scenarios “irresponsible” and says he is optimistic about A.I.

Elon Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles, but Silicon Valley’s latest rush to embrace artificial intelligence scares him. And he thinks you should be frightened too. Inside his efforts to influence the rapidly advancing field and its proponents, and to save humanity from machine-learning overlords.

Google’s director of engineering believes that robots will be as intelligent as people by 2029 – leading to an event called the technological Singularity. Google’s Ray Kurzweil is a futurist who claims to have an 86% success rate on predictions – having made 147 since the 90s.

For decades, Ray Kurzweil has consistently been wrong about the future. But people still listen to him for some reason. By Matt Novak. (July 26, 2016)

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal tackles the human technological singularity.