BEIJING, July 16 (Xinhuanet) -- A group of scientists from around the world will hold a first of its kind conference Thursday on global catastrophic risks, according to media report Wednesday.

They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as we know it.

Scientists at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with the Earth.

On the last day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference, experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as super intelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homosapiens.

"Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species."

"I think there are grave dangers," said Dr. Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist who calculates technology trends using what he calls the law of accelerating returns, a mathematical concept that measures the exponential growth of technological evolution. "Technology has always been a double-edged sword."

(Agencies)