The current focus of the world’s governments, business and media when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) is on the dangers it poses to jobs, democracy and even the future of humanity itself. For many of a certain generation, these fears crystallise in the cold but relentlessly courteous voice of HAL, the on?board AI in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. After a crew member questions HAL’s diagnosis of a faulty antenna, the system secretly lip?reads the astronauts, discovers their plan to disconnect it, and kills them…