I am a coder, but I can say this. Many claims done in the early ears of computing said to pacify people afraid of computers have been busted by now. They said you can always turn it off. If you turn off computers now, you'll have to turn of millions of them at once causing an economic catastrophe in the process. They also said computers would only help us work faster, but would not form any threat to our privacy. Facebook anyone? And when it comes to Hawking's claim "artificial intelligence might well spell the end of the human race" people go against it by saying that something like that would never happen because computers cannot feel emotion and therefore not reason. Actually that is what makes them so dangerous. Make a AI computer which must learn every threat to the earth and eliminate it and you can count on it it will destroy the human race first without remorse. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of claims done, but now debunked, busted or outdated. And this iceberg might be more treacherous than the one that sunk the Titanic.
