As a programmer one thing that interests me more than anything and that is artificial intelligence. When i talk to people about the benefits of solving intelligence they tell me the exact same thing every time... "What if it revolts and kills us all?" I'd like to try my best to answer this question and hopefully clear up some negative thoughts on artificial intelligence.
First of all I will talk about the sci-fi/Hollywood A.I (artificial intelligence) and why they are doing it wrong. Think of any movie where they create a new species or they create a robot with intelligence, I will use the movie Ex Machina which is fairly recent as an example. The humans create a robot with A.I and lock it up in a a room where it cannot escape and it is always under surveillance... This is wrong! The humans created a "perfect" A.I in this movie this would mean the robot can think, has emotions, problem solve, and according to the tests we perform on A.I we compare their thought patterns to those of a human. Think about it, do you ever hear a prisoner say they enjoyed their stay in prison? It is very unlikely so of course an A.I that is brought up in captivity will revolt against those that locked it up and treated it as a monster.
Secondly there is much more to an A.I than robotics and creating human like creatures. If no power is given to an A.I and it does not have the ability to revolt for example it does not have a body then how will it kill us all? Personally I see a lot of potential in artificially intelligent computer systems, because humans take so much time to solve problems. Imagine giving a logical problem to a computer system and it checking every possible result in seconds? Having a computer system that learns things as it goes along in its daily job. A good example of this is a computer that spends its days studying cancer cells and figuring out ways to fight it, it would learn about them and how the different drugs can alter the cell and see what works best (I'm no biologist so excuse my poor explanation of that..)
I think A.I has so much potential and we are holding it back by continuously demonizing it with stupid movies that don't take enough into account. Having boxes with working brains would revolutionize problem solving; if we can solve intelligence we could definitely solve any problem in the world.
Here is an article about microsoft planning to cure cancer with A.I:
https://www.rdmag.com/article/2016/09/microsoft-reveals-ambitious-ai-projects-find-cure-cancer