As movies The Avengers: Age of Ultron, ex Machina and the new Terminator hit the theatres worldwide, people are looking at the direction of artificial intelligence more than ever before.

Fuelled by statements from the likes of Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, people are mostly freaked out over AI and fear the machines will, at some point, go rogue and we’ll end up living The Matrix.

Richard Boyd, former Chief Architect for Lockheed Martin’s Visual World Labs, plays down these apocalyptic views and says we must find “the right balance between humans and automation to optimize outcomes”.

“Soothing cultural anxiety is crucial to a foreseeable future with AI and machine learning; however, two of the biggest factors preventing this are fear and miseducation.”

He then goes on giving examples how machine learning helped humans overcome difficult problems, such as Google’s self-driving car which has the potential to eliminate deadly car crashes, or the transition from propeller-driven aircraft to jet aircraft.

“The key to successfully flying a jet aircraft was learning what to outsource to the automated systems and what to retain for human management.”

“In all of these cases, we see that machine technology works best when it is informed by human behavior.”

“This is the ideal future of machine learning, where data is extracted only to benefit those it is extracted from,” he says. “Where machines don’t replace humans, but rather rely on human intelligence to translate patterns and behaviours into information that can change the world for the better.”