You might think roboticist Hans Moravec has been playing with wires and dials too long when he talks about Artificial Intelligence being able to manipulate humans by the middle of this century, but he was absolutely right about Roombas and bomb-defusing bots–actually, his timeline was conservative. From a 1997 interview he did with NOVA about the first four generations of robots:

“NOVA: 

Can you envision a robot understanding the psychology of a terrorist better than a human being?

Hans Moravec:

Well, ultimately. Now we’re talking 40 or 50 years from now, when we have these fourth generation machines and their successors, which I think ultimately will be better than human beings, in every possible way. But, the two abilities that are probably the hardest for robots to match, because they’re the things that we do the best, that have been life or death matters for us for most of our evolution, are, one, interacting with the physical world. You know, we’ve had to find our food and avoid our predators and deal with things on a moment to moment basis. So manipulation, perception, mobility – that’s one area. And the other area is social interaction. Because we’ve lived in tribes forever and we’ve had to be able to judge the intent and probable behavior of the other members of our tribe to get along. So the kind of social intuition we have is very powerful and probably uses close to the full processing power of our brain—the equivalent of a hundred trillion calculations per second—plus a lot of very special knowledge, some of which is hard-wired, some of which we learned growing up. This is probably where robots catch up last. But, once they do catch up, then they keep on going. I think there will come a time when robots will understand us better than we understand ourselves, or understand each other. And, you can even imagine the time in the more distant future when robots will be able to host a very detailed simulation of what’s going on in our brains and be able to manipulate us. 

NOVA: 

Wow.”

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See also:

• Moravec writes about the state of AI. (1978)