For most of my adult life, I have been maniacally focused on my work. I would answer emails instantly during the day, and even get up twice each night to ensure that all the emails were answered. Yes, I would spend time with my family members—but just so they didn’t complain, and not an hour more.

Then in September 2013, I was diagnosed with fourth-stage lymphoma. I faced the real possibility that my remaining time on Earth would be measured in months. As terrifying as that was, one of my strongest feelings was an instant, irretrievable, and painful regret. As Bronnie Ware’s book about regrets of people on their deathbeds all too accurately describes, I was wracked with remorse over not spending more time sharing love with the people I cared about most.

Kai-Fu Lee, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and the president of its Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

I am now in remission, so I can write this piece. I am spending much more time with my family. I moved closer to my mother. Whether on business or for pleasure, I travel with my wife. Formerly, when my grown kids came home, I would take two or three days off from work to see them. Now I take two or three weeks. I spend weekends traveling with my best friends. I took my company on a one-week vacation to Silicon Valley—their Mecca. I meet with young people who send me questions on Facebook. I have reached out to people I offended years ago and asked for their forgiveness and friendship.

This near-death experience has not only changed my life and priorities, but also altered my view of artificial intelligence—the field that captured my selfish attention for all those years. This personal reformation gave me an enlightened view of what AI should mean for humanity. Many of the recent discussions about AI have concluded that this scientific advance will likely take over the world, dominate humans, and end poorly for mankind. But my near-death experience has enabled me to envision an alternate ending to the AI story—one that makes the most of this amazing technology while empowering humans not just to survive, but to thrive.

My catharsis came at a point when we were losing perspective on AI. For much of my career, the great accomplishments of this scientific pursuit always seemed to be five years away. But recently they have been cascading one after another, most strikingly with AlphaGo’s victory in 2016. There is a feeling that HAL, the stubborn and deadly computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is looming at the gates, and a form of near-panic has set in. We are bombarded with dire predictions by a number of self-appointed futurists about “superintelligence,” “singularity,” “cyborgs,” and the unprovable claim that “we live in a video game.” These dystopian warnings are infectious, because they come from famous people—and perhaps because they are reinforced by the familiar plots of science fiction.

As someone who has worked on AI for 37 years, I assure you that there exists no engineering basis for these outlandish predictions. Science fiction is all fiction, and very little science, and it would be catastrophic for mankind to capitulate to these imaginative but irresponsible predictions.

What’s more, the real AI story is itself as fascinating as any novel—and indeed, it has its dark side. The excitement behind AI today is largely due to a 2010 invention called “deep learning,” which uses massive amounts of data to optimize decision engines with superhuman accuracy. Given a massive amount of data in a particular domain, deep learning can be used to optimize single objective functions, such as “win Go,” “minimize default rate,” or “maximize speech recognition accuracy.”

The results have been spectacular. Armed with deep learning and other machine-learning technologies, AI has proven capable of matching or surpassing some of the most impressive human feats of intelligence. It has vanquished human world champions in Go and poker, and is already superior than the average person in recognizing faces, videos, or words from speech. Critical mobile and internet applications, such as search ranking, e-commerce recommendation, and speech agents like Siri and Alexa, aren’t even imaginable without AI.