In the fevered dreams of Hollywood directors, artificial intelligence seems destined forever to be the bedfellow of armageddon. Of course, they are not the only ones who have prophesied doom at the hands of super-intelligent machines, and on the long list of existential risks that humanity faces, this has its place.

But AI deserves a more nuanced explanation than such visions allow for. The singularity, which has been put off many times before, still looks to be many years away, even as machine learning techniques have begun to unlock genuinely striking advances.

The promise of AI is enormous in almost every sphere it touches; in education, health, agriculture, care, to name just a handful of sectors, AI has clear potential to transform outcomes in just a few years, with especially profound implications for poor countries looking to leapfrog decades of development. As ever, risks abound, with autonomous weapons an area of special concern for experts today, and plenty more to come.

For this episode of ‘Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh professor in engineering, University of California, Berkeley; Jeremy Howard, founder of Fast.ai; Francesca Rossi, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Padova (currently on leave at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center); Farb Nivi, founder of Grockit and Learnist; Wendell Wallach, chair of technology and ethics studies, interdisciplinary center for bioethics, Yale University, and co-chair of the WEF global future council on technology, values, and policy; Geoff Mulgan, director of the UK’s national endowment for science, technology and the arts; and Erica Kochi, co-director of Unicef's innovation unit share their thoughts.

This article was written by Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen, of the World Economic Forum as part of the World Economic Forum annual meeting under a creative commons licence.