Source: Dick Thomas Johnson / CC BY 2.0As artificial intelligence continues to rapidly develop, many experts have expressed concern over the inevitable creation of murderous robots, with one former Google exec predicting that reality is only a decade or so off.

While believing that murderous bots such as the kind depicted in sci-fi movies and literature could become a reality within the next decade or two, former Google executive Eric Schmidt is also confident that humanity would be prepared to handle any such development.

“Everyone immediately then wants to talk about all the movie-inspired death scenarios, and I can confidently predict to you that they are one to two decades away. So let’s worry about them, but let’s worry about them in a while,” he said at the Munich Security Conference.

So while the message is less dire than the recent prediction from Space and Tesla CEO Elon Musk about artificial intelligence becoming so dangerous for humans that our species had maybe only a 1 in 10 or a 1 in 20 chance of surviving the rise of the machines, Schmidt offered the following assurances:

“Let me be clear: Humans will remain in charge of [AI] for the rest of time,” he added, “The other point that I want to remind everyone, these technologies have serious errors in them, and they should not be used with life-critical decisions. So I would not want to be in an airplane where the computer was making all the general intelligence decisions about flying it. The technology is just not reliable enough. There are too many errors in its use. It is advisory, it makes you smarter and so forth, but I wouldn’t put it in charge of command and control.”