We have all had dreams of robots that can clean the house, cook up a Sunday roast and give us a foot massage. Almost-human computers that we can programme to do all those things we loathe without answering back, complaining or questioning. A robot that we can talk to that will understand our needs.

Artificial Intelligence is booming, bringing us robotic vacuum cleaners that whiz around sucking up the dust without us having to do anything (how cool is that?) and robots that are becoming more and more like humans.

There has however always been a line dividing humans and robots. Until last week that is, when the first ever computer passed the Turing test.

The Turing test was devised by Alan Turing back in the 1950s. Turing wanted to test whether a computer could be so intelligent that it would be indistinguishable from a real person during a conversation. For more than half a century the Turing test seemed unbeatable but US-based scientist Vladimir Veselov put his chatter robot to the Turing Test and won. Valdimir has spent 13 years creating “Eugene Goostman, a boy from Ukraine” who, in a display that would make Pinocchio jealous, has been widely mistaken for a real boy.

While the Turing test is all about conversation there is obviously a lot more to intelligence. Another group of US scientists are working on a robot that can learn how to make a bowl of ramen noodles from the request “Make me a bowl of ramen noodles”.

This might sound like a simple instruction but think about it. A robot that knows to boil the water, undo the packet, get a spoon etc – a whole set of tasks that aren’t explicitly stated but that the robot knows are needed to fulfill the request. This is a nice demonstration of how far we have come getting computers to do something akin to thinking.

So we can make robots that can have a human conversation and can think for themselves. Now some of our greatest minds are coming out saying that we need to start talking about the potential dangers of this technology.

It isn’t like Terminator is about to become reality but Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk (the clever dude who invented Paypal and Tesla) have both warned that we should be careful. Artificial Intelligence has huge potential to make a positive impact on our lives but as with all revolutionary technologies there are risks.

Hawking has said: “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”

There is a lot of debate about how we define intelligence and whether the Turing test is a good measure of computer intelligence but one thing is certain: the line between the robots of science fiction and those of reality is getting very thin and we all need to wise up to what that means before we start getting outwitted by our own creations.