The author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies ,Nick Bostrom gave a talk at TED 2015 about artificial superintelligence (ASI):

“What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?”

From his polls of researchers he posits we will hit ASI by 2040 or 2050, this may be a dramatic change. To quote Nick:

“Now most people, when they think about what is smart and what is dumb, I think have in mind a picture roughly like this. So at one end we have the village idiot, and then far over at the other side we have Ed Witten, or Albert Einstein, or whoever your favorite guru is. But I think that from the point of view of artificial intelligence, the true picture is actually probably more like this: AI starts out at this point here, at zero intelligence, and then, after many, many years of really hard work, maybe eventually we get to mouse-level artificial intelligence, something that can navigate cluttered environments as well as a mouse can. And then, after many, many more years of really hard work, lots of investment, maybe eventually we get to chimpanzee-level artificial intelligence. And then, after even more years of really, really hard work, we get to village idiot artificial intelligence. And a few moments later, we are beyond Ed Witten. The train doesn’t stop at Humanville Station. It’s likely, rather, to swoosh right by.”

For those who are unfamiliar with the subject he breaks the problem down in a very straightforward fashion. He lays out many of the concerns about diverging interests with the human race, and limitations in our ability to control an ASI once it has been developed. His final prescription in the talk is an optimistic one, but looking at human advances weaponizing code in the past few years, it may fall short of assuaging concerns. It is definitely worth a look, over at ted.com