Rise of artificial general intelligence: risks and opportunities

Artificial intelligence is making extraordinary progress with an unprecedented rate, reaching and surpassing human capabilities in many tasks previously considered unattainable by machines, as language translation, music composition, object detection, medical diagnoses, software programming, and many others. Some people are excited about these results, while others are raising serious concerns for possible negative impacts in our society. This article addresses several questions that are often raised about intelligent machines: Will machines ever surpass human intellectual capacities? What will happen next? What will be the impact in our society? What are the jobs that artificial intelligence puts at risk? Reasoning about these questions is of fundamental importance to predict possible future scenarios and prepare ourselves to face the consequences.