The future of artificial intelligence: two experts disagree

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to revolutionise our lives, drive our cars, diagnose our health problems, and lead us into a new future where thinking machines do things that we're yet to imagine. Even billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who admits he has access to some of the most cutting-edge AI, said recently that without some regulation "AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization". So what is the future of AI? Michael Milford and Peter Stratton are both heavily involved in AI research and they have different views on how it will impact on our lives in the future. Answering this question depends on what you consider to be "artificial intelligence". Basic machine learning algorithms underpin many technologies that we interact with in our everyday lives - voice recognition, face recognition - but are application-specific and can only do one very specific defined task (and not always well).