Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

It's not quite the question one expected during the Q&A session at the end of the 2019 BCS Turing Talk on Artificial Intelligence. The event was held earlier this week at the swanky IET building in London's Savoy Place and the audience comprised academics, developers and tech professionals. You'd think such an interjection was akin to someone grabbing the microphone in the main auditorium during a cryptocurrency conference and blurting "So… there aren't any actual coins?" Surely this was a cue for the auditorium to resound with an unpleasant cacophony of forehead-slapping and eye-rolling. And let me tell you, the ugly wet sound of hundreds of people rolling their eyes at the same time is the stuff of Japanese body horror nightmares.