Google's artificial-intelligence researchers believe there are more urgent matters than the potential destruction of humanity at the hands of superintelligent machines, and that anyone talking about how AI will destroy us all is being “preposterous.”

“Whether it's Terminator coming to blow us up or mad scientists looking to create quite perverted women robots, this narrative has somehow managed to dominate the entire landscape, which we find really quite remarkable,” said Mustafa Suleyman, the head of applied AI at Google...