Centre will examine the possibility that there might be a Pandoras box' moment with technology The founders say technologies already have the 'potential to threaten our own existence'

By Amanda Williams

PUBLISHED: 08:00 EST, 25 November 2012 | UPDATED: 03:03 EST, 26 November 2012

A centre for 'terminator studies', where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, will open at Cambridge University

A centre for 'terminator studies', where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, is set to open at Cambridge University.

Its purpose will be to study the four greatest threats to the human species - artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will be co-launched by Lord Rees, the astronomer royal and one of the world's top cosmologists.

Rees's 2003 book Our Final Century had warned that the destructiveness of humanity meant that the species could wipe itself out by 2100.

The idea that machines might one day take over humanity has featured in many science fiction books and films, including the Terminator, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a homicidal robot.

In 1965, Irving John Jack Good and wrote a paper for New Scientist called Speculations concerning the first ultra-intelligent machine.

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Cambridge University to open 'Terminator centre' to study threat to humans from artificial intelligence