Members of the general public are smart not to get too worked up when celebrities such as the late Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk predict that robots endowed with artificial intelligence will kill or conquer their human creators.
Musk put it in particularly colorful terms in an interview last fall, predicting that AI will force us into marginal habitats, or zoo cages, as we've done to our fellow primates.
It's not that the concern is completely on the fringe. Various academics take it seriously, their concern boosted in 2014 with the publication of the book "Superintelligence" by philosopher Nick Bostrom. There's even a group co-founded by an MIT physicist, the Future of Life Institute, devoted largely to this consideration.