Purpose: identification of opportunities and potential risks in the implementation of artificial intelligence technologies on the basis of the dominant trends analyzing in the current high-tech sector development of the global economy.Methods: the paper uses the system approach, the method of classification and systematization, the method of estimations and scientific abstractions, the methods of information analysis and synthesis, the method of data visualization.Results: the article considers economic and technical-technological aspects of building intelligent systems, establishes trends of their development in the direction of multitasking and autonomy of performed functions, identifies opportunities and threats arising from the development of this direction of scientific and technological progress. The study reveals the dual nature of further improvement of artificial intelligence systems, which offers broad prospects of application in various spheres of human activity, but can simultaneously generate risks due to the uncontrolled introduction of these technologies into the public space.Conclusions and Relevance:the development of intellectual technologies in the current period has a steady tendency towards increasing complexity of the tasks to be solved and increasing autonomy of artificial intelligence, provided by increasing its computational capabilities, which in a number of parameters (image classification, text content) exceed the capabilities of the human mind. At the same time, there is an aspiration of developers to gradually transfer to machines the key competences in the field of decision-making, which until now have remained in the exclusive competence of humans. This trend opens up broad prospects for the application of "smart" machines in public life, but at the same time generates a set of real and hypothetical risks, the dominant of which is the loss of human subjectivity in relation to the surrounding processes. The emerging dichotomy of technological development requires a serious rethinking of the existing approach to the creation and implementation of artificial intelligence systems in order to minimize the emergence of ethical risks and threats to human life.