Over the last twenty years, artificial inteligence has transitioned from a concept used in movies such as the terminator to an increasingly common place reality.
In 1997 Deep Blue beat the world champion in Chesse, this year an artificial inteligence beat one of the worlds best players of Goe, a chinese game that's more complex than chess. As recently as two years ago, computer scientists believed it would take at least another decade for an artificial inteligence to become powerful enough to beat a Goe champion.
Two years ago IBM's Watson schooled the three best jeopardy players, and also last year, googles deep mind was taught how to play old atari games and came up with a strategy to win the game breakout that no human had ever discovered. 
Artificial inteligence recognizes our speech and printed characters and is rapidly getting better at recognizing objects in images. Facebook uses facial recognition software to identify people in photos.
For decades the goal of artificial inteligence researchers has been to build a General AI, which is, to put it simply, a computer program modeled to have the functionality of the human brain, the program would be able to learn new skills without guidance from its human handlers, and would present as conscious.
In my opinion the question isn't if we have the ability to do this, but at what time we will finally accomplish this goal. It could take five years or fifty years, but we're clearly making progress and I cannot think of one technological goal we've set out to achieve that we've given up on.
This kind of AI even if it was only as smart as a human could run at a faster speed than the speed at which our brains run, meaning that it could think all the thoughts it takes you a week to think in one minute.
I think the creation of such an AI will be our final mistake as a species.
I'm one of those people who is convinced that a General Purpose AI will
kill us all.
Why?
For the same reason that we don't worry about destroying ant collonies when we build new houses. If you contemplate the fate of the ants you might feel bad for a moment, but you'd never change your building site to save them.