Last month, a Japanese insurance company laid off 34 of its employees in its payment assessment department. On its own, this story probably wouldn’t even be mentioned by local news stations. But the company in question, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, soon discovered that its recent terminations received international news coverage for one particular reason. Instead of hiring new employees that were either more qualified or more likely to accept lower pay, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance decided to replace its recently terminated staff with an Artificial Intelligence.

Sounds like something straight out of a science fiction novel, right? Well let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it’s not like Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance just hired HAL 9000 or Skynet. The AI that the insurance company is now using is actually based on Watson, IBM’s supercomputer. You may have seen Watson on “Jeopardy!,” where it defeated two of the game show’s best contestants while also having more charisma than the average “Jeopardy!” contestant.

Anyway, while Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance’s artificial intelligence probably can’t answer in the form of a question, it can analyze medical certificates, surgical procedures, and other information it needs to calculate payouts. Along with calculating payouts, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance’s artificial intelligence can also help prevent unnecessary payouts by looking for specific clauses in the insurance contracts of any customers that are suing the company. Installing the artificial intelligence will cost the company 200 million ¥ (around $1.77 million), while maintaining it annually is expected to cost 15 million ¥ (a little less than $133,000). But along with these expenses, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is also expected to save 140 million ¥ ($1.24 million and some change) per year by replacing 34 of its employees with the artificial intelligence.

So why are we talking about something that happened a month ago? Well, mainly because of what happened last week. This past Wednesday, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking officially endorsed The Asilomar AI Principles, a list of standards and concerns regarding the development of artificial intelligence. You might know Elon Musk as the CEO of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, but in 2014 he raised some eyebrows when he compared developing artificial intelligence to “summoning a demon.” This comparison might explain why he co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit research company dedicated to making sure that the development of artificial intelligence stays on the right track. As for Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist was quoted in a 2014 interview as saying “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of mankind.” But more recently, he attended last year’s opening of the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, during which he stated “In short, the rise of the powerful AI will either be the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not know which.”

The reason I bring up a Japanese insurance company’s implementation of an artificial intelligence and the opinions of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking on artificial intelligence, all in the same article, is pretty simple. I’m a firm believer that with every advancement we make, whether it be in the social, political, or scientific realm, we need to step back and reflect on where we go from there, or if we should even go any further. Now I realize this sounds like some vague, pretentious, wannabe philosopher nonsense. But if we don’t take time to evaluate our progress in artificial intelligence, we could end up “summoning a demon,” and not even have the chance to regret it.