A TOP AI expert has issued a stark warning over the potential for world extinction that super-smart AI technology could bring.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a leading AI researcher and he claims that "everyone on the earth will die" unless we shut down the development of superhuman intelligence systems.

The 43-year-old is a co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and (MIRI) and claims to know exactly how "horrifically dangerous this technology" is.

He fears that when it comes down to humans versus smarter-than-human intelligence – the result is a "total loss", he wrote in TIME.

As a metaphor, he says, this would be like a "11th century trying to fight the 21st century".

In short, humans would lose dramatically.

On March 29, leading experts from OpenAI submitted an open letter called "Pause Giant AI Experiments" that demanded an immediate six month ban in the training of powerful AI systems for six months.

It has been signed by the likes of Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk.

However, the American theorist says he declined to sign this petition as it is "asking for too little to solve it".