Even when our debates seem petty, you cant say national politics doesnt deal with weighty matters, from jobs to inequality to affordable health care and more. But lately Ive become obsessed with an issue so daunting it makes even the biggest normal questions of public life seem tiny. Im talking about the risks posed by runaway artificial intelligence (AI). What happens when we share the planet with self-aware, self-improving machines that evolve beyond our ability to control or understand? Are we creating machines that are destined to destroy us?

I know when I put it this way it sounds like science fiction, or the ravings of a crank. So let me explain how I came to put this on your screen.

Matt Miller

A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the host of the new podcast This...Is Interesting, Miller writes a weekly column for The Post.

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A few years ago I read chunks of Ray Kurzweils book The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil argued that what sets our age apart from all previous ones is the accelerating pace of technological advance an acceleration made possible by the digitization of everything. Because of this unprecedented pace of change, he said, were just a few decades away from basically meshing with computers and transcending human biology (think Google, only much better, inside your head). This development will supercharge notions of intelligence, Kurzweil predicted, and even make it possible to upload digitized versions of our brains to the cloud so that some form of us lives forever.

Mind-blowing and unsettling stuff, to say the least. If Kurzweils right, I recall thinking, what should I tell my daughter about how to live or even about what it means to be human?

Kurzweil has since become enshrined as Americas uber-optimist on these trends. He and other evangelists say accelerating technology will soon equip us to solve our greatest energy, education, health and climate challenges en route to extending the human lifespan indefinitely.

But a camp of worrywarts has sprung up as well. The skeptics fear that a toxic mix of artificial intelligence, robotics and bio- and nanotechnology could make previous threats of nuclear devastation seem easy to manage by comparison. These people arent cranks. Theyre folks like Jaan Tallinn, the 41-year-old Estonian programming whiz who helped create Skype and now fears hes more likely to die from some AI advance run amok than from cancer or heart disease. Or Lord Martin Rees, a dean of Britains science establishment whose last book bore the upbeat title, Our Final Century and who with Tallinn has launched the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge to think through how bad things could get and what to do about it.

Now comes James Barrat with a new book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era that accessibly chronicles these risks and how a number of top AI researchers and observers see them. If you read just one book that makes you confront scary high-tech realities that well soon have no choice but to address, make it this one.

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Miller: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?