Forget killer robots: This is the future of supersmart machines

RELAX: the AI apocalypse has been cancelled. A rash of recent headlines blared that Google was developing a "kill switch to stop a robot uprising against humans", as The Telegraph put it, with a picture of a menacing metal army. It may come as little surprise to learn that the technical paper on which the stories were based described a prosaic engineering problem, not ways to stop the Terminator in its tracks. But the excitable coverage reveals how deeply the challenges posed by artificial intelligence have seeped into public consciousness. We have had machines that can out-calculate us for decades. Now a new wave is outperforming us on tasks ranging from image recognition to video-gaming.