Intelligent London: inside the AI revolution taking over the city

When it comes to making predictions about technology it's easy to end up looking daft. Take Thomas Watson, who was chairman of IBM in 1943 when he boldly claimed: "There's a world market for maybe five computers." Some 75 years later, it's fair to say his forecast was a little out. Or how about the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, who advised his clients not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, saying: "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty -- a fad." My favourite example is an engineer called Robert Metcalfe who grabbed headlines worldwide in the mid-Nineties for predicting that the internet would "catastrophically collapse" in 1996.