Cmv i don't think current research trends in machine learning justify the recent increase of people fearing ai apocalypse scenarios:
Many communities (e.g. Less Wrong, MIRI) and books (Our final invention) have popped up in the last few years attempting to combat a potential AI doomsday situation (also smart people Elon Musk, Hawking have made comments).  

Now I am not talking about robots taking jobs or military AI systems gunning people down.  I mean Bostrom's paper clip machine scenarios.  That is, you have AI system that you give some objective, and it takes over everything, improving itself, rearranging your atoms to its will, all to fulfill what seemed like a mundane objective function of making paperclips.  Anyway, I do not think this kind of universal optimizer is the trend in AI research.  To me it seems the focus (with deep learning etc) is on imitating the cortex's memory system and building really powerful classifiers.  

I'm not saying we shouldn't theorize potential disaster, but I think the current fear is overblown CMV