With the award of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics, it’s coming to look as if the future truly does belong to AI

With the award of this year ’s Nobel Prize in physics to a pair of researchers in the field of machine learning, it's coming to look as if the future truly does belong to AI .

David Rothkopf : Widespread anxiety that machines will outstrip or replace humanity altogether is a natural outgrowth of a philosophy that has been gaining in currency at least since the days when Alan Turing suggested that human beings are functionally indistinguishable from highly functioning machines.

If it's true that we are merely biological processing units, then humanity is long overdue for an upgrade, he says.

As artificial intelligence takes on levels of complexity that even its creators can’t predict or control, misgivings about its destructive potential have started to take hold.

If the long-awaited advent of the cyborg world is upon us, we will be forced to consider whether this is really what we want — and what other choice we may have.