Computer pioneer Clive Sinclair has been predicting since the 1980s that self-designing intelligent machines will definitely be the doom of us, but he’s not letting it ruin his day. Che sera sera, you carbon-based beings. As you were. From Leo Kelion at the BBC:

“His ZX Spectrum computers were in large part responsible for creating a generation of programmers back in the 1980s, when the machines and their clones became best-sellers in the UK, Russia, and elsewhere.

At the time, he forecast that software run on silicon was destined to end ‘the long monopoly’ of carbon-based organisms being the most intelligent life on Earth.

So it seemed worth asking him what he made of Prof Stephen Hawking’s recent warning that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

‘Once you start to make machines that are rivalling and surpassing humans with intelligence it’s going to be very difficult for us to survive – I agree with him entirely,’ Sir Clive remarks.

‘I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. It’s just an inevitability.’

So, should the human race start taking precautions?

‘I don’t think there’s much they can do,’ he responds. ‘But it’s not imminent and I can’t go round worrying about it.’

It marks a somewhat more relaxed view than his 1984 prediction that it would be ‘decades, not centuries’ in which computers ‘capable of their own design’ would rise.

‘In principle, it could be stopped,’ he warned at the time. ‘There will be those who try, but it will happen nonetheless. The lid of Pandora’s box is starting to open.'”