Getty/Scott Olson
At the DLD Conference in Germany, Hastings revealed that he's not particularly worried about hyper-intelligent AI destroying humanity. This stands in contrast to the view of people like Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who considers AI the biggest threat to humans.
"Some people worry about what happens when machine intelligence is too strong," Hastings said, according to VentureBeat. "That's like worrying about our Mars colony and people being overweight on our Mars colony. We can deal with that later."
But still, Hastings believes that in just 5 to 15 years, we won't be able to tell if we are talking to a human or a robot.
So why doesn't Hastings think AI is going to overrun the world?
One reason is that he believes that as the power of AI increases, so will our ability to change our genetic code to make humanity smarter, faster, stronger, etc.
"Future of intelligence is a race brewing between carbon-based lifeforms and silicon-based lifeforms," Hastings said, according to VentureBeat. "Both are rapidly evolving. It's unclear which type of intelligence will emerge dominant in 100, 150 years."
If Hastings is pitching the next Netflix series, he already has me sold. Imagine a world where robots and humans are fighting for dominance, each editing the very building blocks of their beings to outcompete the other. There could be star-crossed romance, ethical dilemmas, a struggle to find true happiness even as we build ourselves into super-beings. And, as the cherry on top, it has the potential for truly epic action scenes.
We know Reed Hastings would be on board. Now the question is whether that's the show Netflix's data scientists predict we want to watch.