If humans ever develop super-intelligent artificial intelligence, scientists say there will be no way to control it.

AI has long been touted as either a cure-all for humanity’s ills or a Terminator-esque apocalypse. So far, however, AI has yet to even come close to achieving human-level intelligence. But keeping advanced AI in line could be too complex a problem for humans if it is ever developed, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

“A superintelligent machine that runs the world sounds like science fiction,” Manuel Cebrian, one of the paper's co-authors, said in a press release.

"But there are already machines that perform certain important tasks independently without programmers fully understanding how they learned to do so. The question then arises whether this could at some point become uncontrollable and dangerous for humanity."