Moore's Law, which states that processing power will double every 18 months, is set to continue for at least the next 10 years, and quantum computers, though poorly understood at present, promise to add new tools to AI that may bypass some of the restrictions in conventional computing.
What was once the realm of science fiction has mutated into serious debate. While the focus is currently on cloning and genetic engineering, few people have seriously considered being annihilated by a robot race.
That is until an article published in Wired magazine early last year titled Why the future doesn't need us by co-founder of Sun Microsystems and esteemed technologist Bill Joy introduced a wider audience to the possibility that recent technological advances could be a threat to the existence of man.
Joy discussed the potential catastrophes that could result from tinkering with genetics, nanotechnology and artificially-intelligent machines.
Most disturbingly, Joy cites not technophobes or paranoid theorists, but some of the leading lights of AI research and academia who have voiced concern that machines might confront humans.
Steve Grand, artificial intelligence researcher and author of Creation: Life and how to make it says it would be impossible for humans to be totally sure that autonomous, intelligent machines would not threaten humans.
Perhaps more worryingly, he claims it would be futile to try to build Asimov's laws into a robot.
Artificial intelligence researchers have long since abandoned hope of applying simplistic laws to protect humans from robots. Grand says that for real intelligence to develop, machines must have a degree of independence and be able to weigh up contradictions for themselves, breaking one rule to preserve another, which would not fit with Asimov's laws.
He believes that conventional evolutionary pressures would determine whether machines become a threat to humans. They will only become dangerous if they are competing for survival, in terms of resources for example, and can match human's intellectual evolutionary prowess.
"Whether they are a threat rests on whether they are going to be smarter than us," he says. "The way I see it, we're just adding a couple more species."
It's *Isaac* Asimov