Why are you worried about the rise of artificial intelligence?
The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.
You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants.
Would an AI have these basic drives, and if not, would it be a threat to humankind?
An AI that has been designed rather than evolved can in principle have any drives or goals. However, as emphasized by Steve Omohundro [a computer scientist and expert on machine learning], an extremely intelligent future AI will probably develop a drive to survive and acquire more resources as a step toward accomplishing whatever goal it has, because surviving and having more resources will increase its chances of accomplishing that other goal. This can cause problems for humans whose resources get taken away.
Source: Stephen Hawking: Robots aren’t just taking our jobs, they’re making society more unequal
Philippe RODRIGUEZ 