Excerpt: I'm the executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Very roughly speaking, we're a group that's thinking in the long term about artificial intelligence and working to make sure that by the time we have advanced AI systems, we also know how to point them in useful directions.

Across history, science and technology have been the largest drivers of change in human and animal welfare, for better and for worse. If we can automate scientific and technological innovation, that has the potential to change the world on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. When I talk about “advanced AI,” it's this potential for automating innovation that I have in mind.

AI systems that exceed humans in this capacity aren't coming next year, but many smart people are working on it, and I'm not one to bet against human ingenuity. I think it's likely that we'll be able to build something like an automated scientist in our lifetimes, which suggests that this is something we need to take seriously.

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Nate Soares is the Executive Director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), an organization focused on ensuring that smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive outcome.