Why rage against the machines when we could be friends? Peter Donnelly

In recent years, popular culture has done a pretty good job of scaring us with the threat of machines turning on man. Just think of the red-eyed Terminator, from the movie franchise, shorn of its artificial flesh, the foot soldier of the Skynet artificial intelligence that lost patience with its human overlords and decided to wipe us out. Fortunately, that is science fiction, not science fact. The reality is that machines are among us every day and are becoming increasingly integrated into our lives in positive ways. Hence the report into machine learning, just published by the Royal Society.