Investing in artificial intelligence: The pros and cons

Artificial intelligence: it's one of those mind-bending subjects that provokes fascination yet is misunderstood by almost everyone (myself included). If you bring it up in the pub to sound brainy, the conversation might only go as far as Alan Turing, Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov and perhaps the new series of BBC drama The Capture, in which foreign spies seem to use AI to manipulate CCTV and live broadcasts. But AI has long moved beyond the realms of gripping fiction and headline-grabbing experiments into the real world. For instance, DeepMind, a British subsidiary of Alphabet, recently released almost the entire make-up of the protein universe, mapped for the first time by its AI programme AlphaFold. This data is already being used to advance our understanding of life-threatening illnesses and help protect honeybees. Amid all the scaremongering about AI, perhaps we should be more aware of these positive developments, particularly if we're investors.