Being Human Edward Drummond

Visions of a dystopian society are nothing new – in novels (from renaissance times through to modern) and films over the last 60 years we have enjoyed succumbing to the temptation of imagining our world where societal rules as we understand them are upended or menacingly transformed; from Swift's Gullivers Travels, HG Wells' The Time Machine, Orwell's 1984 to a whole raft of modern takes on dystopia (The Hunger Games, Divergent, Planet of the Apes, Mad Max, A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, Blade Runner and so on) – all take pot shots at human frailties, and importantly human strengths, individually and collectively. Much has been written and said about the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence technologies and the impact that this will have on our daily lives. It seems popular to predict a dystopian future where dysfunctional robots prevail with humans living a weaker, fearful and subservient existence as portrayed in a proliferation of films and novels such The Hitchhikers Guide, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, The Terminator, I,Robot, A.I, to name but a few. Put simply, these films sensationally play upon our fear of machines'taking over'. It's interesting that rapid advances in A.I. beg us to define what AI means, and indeed what being human means.