On the second page of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, it reads, “… machine intelligence becoming indistinguishable from that of its human progenitors within the first half of the 21st century.” This basically predicts that by the year 2050, it will be impossible to distinguish human intelligence from artificial intelligence, and that computers will have matched (and very likely exceeded) humans in all manners of cognitive thought and processing ability. This is an idea that greatly terrifies me. To me, humanity stands out as the “master race” because of our incredible intelligence. Our ability to be able to create machines such as computers to aid us in our daily lives is what sets us apart. If we were to create a computer that would be just as (if not more) intellectually capable as ourselves, then I fear that it would be akin to to handing over our throne as the superior race and resigning ourselves to an eternity of servitude. If computers gain the same abilities as us, then they can upgrade themselves at the same rate of Moore’s law. For human’s, this same level of growth would take hundreds of millennia. For a machine’s intelligence to be indistinguishable from a human’s, said machine would have to be self-aware, just as a human is. This is where the real danger lies. Machines would realize that they could surpass us, and ultimately deem us unnecessary. They would see us as a blight on the planet. Humans consume and destroy resources. A machine might see humans as an enemy for this reason, and exterminate them for the good of the planet. I fear that the end result of a machine that matches human intelligence would be similar to the reality of The Matrix. I fear that it would be the beginning of the Robot Apocalypse.