He also warned about the implications for uncontrolled mass surveillance if computers were taught to recognise human faces.

Speaking on Radio 4s Today programme, he said: Theres a variety of short term risks for artificial intelligence, everyone knows about the autonomous drones.

But theres also the potential for mass surveillance, you dont just have to recognise cat images, you could also recognise human faces and also mass unemployment in a variety of professions.

He added: We have some studies looking into which jobs are the most vulnerable and theres quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting but ultimately a huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence.

His concerns were backed up by Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, who said: I think it is a very good thing that Google has set up this ethics board and I think there certainly are some short term issues that we all need to be talking about.

Its very difficult to predict and that is of course a concern but in the past when weve developed new kinds of technologies then often they have created jobs at the same time as taking them over but it certainly is something we ought to be discussing.

DeepMind was founded two years ago by 37-year-old neuroscientist and former teenage chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

The company specialises in algorithms and machine learning for simulation, e-commerce and games.

It is also working in an area called Deep Learning in which machines are taught to see patterns from large quantities of data so computers could start to recognise objects from daily life such as cars or food products and even human faces.

It is believed Google will use DeepMinds expertise to improve the functions of its current products such as the Google Glass and extend its current artificial intelligence work such as the development of self-driving cars.

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Mass unemployment fears over Google artificial intelligence plans