In his 1999 Law of Accelerating Returns , inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil proposed that technology would advance exponentially over the next decades so that human civilisation could achieve in the first twenty years of the 21st century the equivalent of what had been achieved throughout the entire 20th century.
While this is now, in retrospect, questionable, actual technological advancements since the 20th century have nevertheless brought about the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually surpass human intelligence.
Though AI is at the moment capable of sensing, recognising, and creating, it has yet to attain autonomy. The impression remains however that we are on the cusp of a technological explosion, and that what happens in the next few decades could potentially threaten the existence of humanity.