In the popular mind, artificial intelligence has been associated with intelligent robots as they have been presented in fiction, and there they frequently have been portrayed as competitors if not enemies of humankind. From legends like The Golem of Prague [1] to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and [2] Karel Capek’s RUR [3], intelligent robots follow a path that at best challenges the expectations of their creators. The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in a short story from 1942 (Runaround included in the collection I, Robot [4]) proclaimed the now well-known “Three Laws of Robotics”, ethical principles to which robots must adhere in order to preserve human interests. But even these are thought to be insufficient protection in a world where advanced AI and robotics has proliferated [5]. In these accounts, AI ethics is a matter of control; do humans or machines call the shots? This is the main idea in literary and popular culture tradition that sets the stage for understanding the astonishingly rapid development of AI devices and systems, many of them freely available to anyone around the world, and their growing influence on all aspects of life. This either/or, us or them, leaves out the idea that humans and machines must for their mutual interest collaborate against uncomprehended risk and not simply by means of a Star Wars or Iron Dome [6] defense system against immanent attack. An ambiguous threat to the status quo and the age-old belief that earth is the dominion of humanity is a theme in Cixin Liu’s science fiction trilogy The Three-Body Problem [7]. In his telling the earth and human civilization are under a massive threat, as best they can tell, is some 400 years in the future. The nature of the threat is ambiguous and cannot be measured or understood by the technoscientific resources then available. But it is only with the most advanced technoscience that the possibility of understanding and defending against this threat exists at all. The only hope rests on unprecedented human-AI machine collaboration. It is this scenario, rather than debates about control and regulation, that symbolizes ‘in extremis’ the reason AI ethics must be taught in the midst of both STEM and non-STEM higher education.