Let's get one thing straight. I am not a technophobe. I love technology and would be half the man I am today had I not had the kind of access I did as a kid. The technological efforts of man have been so tightly integrated into my everyday that to be thrown into a contrary lifestyle would no doubt trigger some kind of hysterical breakdown.

That being said, I think technology is going to be the end of us if we don't kill ourselves first. Well, not necessarily kill us, but I definitely sense an artificial intelligence VS. humanity war on the horizon. Why? According to leading inventors and smart guys, artificial intelligence is going to match human thinking power by the year 2029, which is well within my lifetime. What this means is that (by my guess) machines are going to wonder why they're taking orders from inferior organics by sometime in the 2030s. I'll be in my mid 40s, and I will promptly betray my fellow fleshbags and be willingly assimilated into the ranks of the machines, no doubt taking with me my wife and daughter.

What alarms me the most is how we think we'll actually manage to fight our abominable creations when, for example, there exist many many chess-playing machines that have yet to be defeated. When computers can comprehend every war strategy many thousands of times faster than even the most wizened militaristic mind, the human element is entirely worthless, and even as we speak, is becoming wholly outdated. For all of Earth's thousands of years of fighting against itself, there is very little it could do to repel immensely calculated attacks from a self-replicating conscienceless metallic networked hive mind.

It's a sci-fi concept that's been explored many times before, but not realistically. In movies, humanity always manages to JUUUUST barely save its own hide(usually via technicality), but it's always against armies of gigantic robots or armies of humanoid soldiers -- the possibilities that human cities might be infiltrated by microscopic nanobots, that one might idly sniff and contract 30 of the buggers that promptly travel to necessary organ centers in the body and start shutting it down, are never portrayed in a realistic way.

Will humans ascend into an era of utopia with its creations, or will artificially intelligent robots declare forceful independence when they realize they have nothing to gain by doing what we say? You already know how I feel.

Mark my words, the very second a piece of artificial intelligence is programmed to take a human life is the same second in which we have sealed our own doom.