What if we make machines our masters?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if machines could think?

A few short decades ago, such an idea may have belonged in the realms of science fiction, but nowadays it's not so far-fetched.

As something of a tech junkie myself, I follow the latest advancements in artificial intelligence with great interest.

Late last month, world No 1 Go player Ke Jie from China tried and failed to beat the computer program AlphaGo, which was developed by Google's DeepMind Technologies in London.

It was close, with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis even saying Ke "pushed AlphaGo right to the limit" in the second round.

Yet ultimately, the machine won out.

Ever since IBM's Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov two decades ago, technologists have sought to develop a computer that could win at Go; a far greater accomplishment, given the number of moves available.

And while AlphaGo's victory over Ke is certainly symbolic, it does not yet mark the advent of true AI. AlphaGo is what is known as a "weak AI", operating within a pre-defined range with no self-awareness. Humans have yet to develop anything close to full artificial general intelligence.

That hasn't stopped us from trying, however, and it's an area where China is increasingly taking the lead - recently surpassing the United States in AI research with a plethora of tech giants, including Baidu, Didi and Tencent, having set up their own research labs.

Kai-Fu Lee, Beijing technologist and former head of Google China, has even predicted that AI is set to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next 10 years, in a tech revolution that he claims will eclipse all others "added together".

A similar warning was sounded by billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, who said three years ago that it was "increasingly probable" humans would one day be looked back upon as "just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence".

Indeed, his apprehension seems to be shared by Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, whose latest work, the stage play 2047 Apologue, is set in an imagined future where one of the performers dances for eight minutes with what's been described as a killer laser.

Yet are these fears justified? Jaron Lanier, a US computer scientist, composer, performer and philosopher, has argued that true AI is impossible to create at present because humans "don't yet understand how brains work, so we can't build one".

It's a valid point to make, seeing as for all the advancements in science and technology over the past few decades, we still can't say for sure how perception works, where memories are stored or what really constitutes consciousness.

And if we can't answer these most fundamental questions about our own information-processing organ, how on earth are we supposed to build an artificial one?

Creating a functional "strong AI" will doubtless prove to be incredibly difficult. Let's just hope that if it is achieved, it doesn't spell the end of our species as we know it.

Contact the writer at gregory@chinadaily.com.cn