Learning to live with robots

It is hard to think of the words "artificial intelligence" without conjuring up Doomsday images of The Matrix and The Terminator where man and highly intelligent machine are pitched into battle. Even a step further back from that science-fiction precipice conflates the term with massive job losses and the eventual irrelevance – or liberation – of humankind from labour as we know it. Artificial intelligence or AI is, of course, all around us already in obvious ways – Apple's voice recognition service Siri or Google's increasingly reliable search results – or in more obscure ones such as better weather forecasting and lower levels of spam e-mail in your inbox. There is nothing new about the concept of AI which started to gain traction in the 1950s when Alan Turing explored the notion of machines that could think. J.C.R. Licklider's paper Man-Computer Symbiosis from 1960 may have sounded like something penned by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, but was instead a formative paper on how the world would move beyond programmable computers to one where computers "facilitate formative thinking".