Two short papers from Nick Bostrom: When Machines Outsmart Humans and Taking Intelligent Machines Seriously: Reply to Critics. Here’s the abstract of the first one:

Artificial intelligence is a possibility that should not be ignored in any serious thinking about the future, and it raises many profound issues for ethics and public policy that philosophers ought to start thinking about. This article outlines the case for thinking that human-level machine intelligence might well appear within the next half century. It then explains four immediate consequences of such a development, and argues that machine intelligence would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of the social, political, economic, commercial, technological, scientific and environmental issues that humanity will face over the coming decades.

The papers make a lot of good, and basic, points.