The co-founder of Google’s artificial intelligence company has said that we need counter possible problems of artificial intelligence before it is too late to do so.

Demis Hassabis, the vice president of engineering at DeepMind Technologies, said that AI has to be controlled and have measures put in place before it can do any damage.

His comments came on the back of long-founded fears that AI could become a force that even the best researchers and computer scientists can’t control.

“I think AI is like any new powerful technology, it has to be used responsibly. If it is used irresponsibility it could do harm,” he told BBC Radio 4.

“There are valid concerns and they should be discussed and debated now, decades before there is any potential sort of consequence or power that we need to worry about.”

But he said that the potential for AI is huge. Hassabis, who was the CEO of the company before Google purchased it for $400m, said AI “could be as big a deal as the industrial revolution or the scientific revolution”.

Earlier this year hundreds of academics, entrepreneurs, scientists and researchers signed an open letter that said the benefits of AI could be huge, with “the eradication of disease and poverty” not being “unfathomable”.

But with their praise for the ever-sophisticated potential of computer learning, they also warned that everything may not go according to plan if we don’t act soon.

“We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do,” the letter, which Hassabis also signed, read. There were also 20 further members of DeepMind that signed the letter.

Elon Musk, who also signed the letter, has separately warned about the consequences of not being able to control artificial intelligence. “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence,” Musk said at an MIT conference.

“If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence,” he said, before going on to compare AI to “summoning the devil”. Bill Gates is also among those that have voiced concerns about AI.

With such a number of senior figures calling out the potential pitfalls of AI, it is impossible not to take their arguments seriously. Fortunately, the current development of the technologies means that keeping a lid on AI is relatively easy.

DeepMind’s existence is – at present, at least – to be a research company that isn’t concerned with profits. However, it is working with some Google services to see how it can integrate its deep learning into them.

So far, among other things, the company has taught AI to play arcade games. For example, after 300 games of Pong variant Breakout, the developed system doesn’t miss the ball anymore. It was then able to complete the game in a way that its creator’s hadn’t intended, and as it did so a room of experts exchanged shocked whispers, the Washington Post reported.

A paper published in Nature explained that the researchers have been able to create intelligence that can play Atari 2600 games and “achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games”.