As someone who has been involved in software for a long time (since I was a kid), of course I love to read news like this.
Having said that, I noticed that in almost all Hollywood futuristic-theme movies, software (or any ground-breaking inventions that usually found with the help more advanced software/hardware) tend to cause problems that forces humans to destroy them and put humans back to the world pre-software.
I hope that would never happen but looking at the trend that whatever Hollywood producers imagine usually come true (even though it may take 5-10 years since the movie is out) in real life makes me scared sometime when I read news like this.
Hollywood (media in general) can create self-fulfilling prophesies, but that doesn't necessarily mean things are set in stone:
1) Where is my flying car? Where is my personal jet pack? Where is my faster than light travel? Where is my single world government? What about space elevators? Why are we still eating food and not geometric shapes in primary/secondary colors (ala Star Trek's 'food cubes')?
2) People try to emulate the cool things that they see movies and read in books. Creating software that takes us to a post-apocalyptic world isn't 'cool.' People want to create light sabers, phasers, and/or transporters. People don't want to create master control programs that will manage the population.
3) There are many more things to be afraid of. We have nuclear arsenals that can wipe all of humanity off the face of the planet. We are so dependent on industrialized agriculture and mechanized supply lines, that we would be totally and royally screwed were they to be disrupted for a significant amount of time (e.g. a super-volcano goes off and we can no longer use most of a continent for farming).
Personal jet pack is here albeit still in its infancy. I'm quite sure people are researching into ways to make car flies. I don't think you can have time-travel (hence no faster-than-light-travel either). Of course there are "impossible" Hollywood tricks and of course some of the things would take longer to be created.
Sometime people invent something for a specific goal but ended up as something else. Nobody plans to create post-apocalyptic world. But if the invention evolves or ended up as a base to create something else, who knows what it'll turn out to be?
Take plastic as an example of that.
Yes, I do aware of the other things to be afraid of.
Having said that, I noticed that in almost all Hollywood futuristic-theme movies, software (or any ground-breaking inventions that usually found with the help more advanced software/hardware) tend to cause problems that forces humans to destroy them and put humans back to the world pre-software.
I hope that would never happen but looking at the trend that whatever Hollywood producers imagine usually come true (even though it may take 5-10 years since the movie is out) in real life makes me scared sometime when I read news like this.