Jürgen Schmidhuber on the robot future​: ‘They will pay as much attention to us as we do to ants'

The German computer scientist says artificial intelligence will surpass humans' in 2050, enabling robots to have fun, fall in love - and colonise the galaxy

In a soft-furnished studio space behind a warehouse in west Berlin, a group of international scientists are debating our robot future. An engineer from a major European carmaker is just finishing a cautiously optimistic progress report on self-driving vehicles. Increasingly, he explains, robot cars are learning to differentiate cars from more vulnerable moving objects such as pedestrians or cyclists. Some are already better than humans at telling apart different breeds of dog. "But of course," he says, "these are small steps."

Then a tall, athletic man with a light-grey three-piece suit and a greying goatee who has spent most of the morning playing with his smartphone strides to the podium, and suddenly baby steps become interstellar leaps. "Very soon, the smartest and most important decision makers might not be human," he says, with the pitying smile of a parent explaining growing pains to a teenager. "We are on the verge not of another industrial revolution, but a new form of life, more like the big bang."