How happy chatbots could become our new best friends

How do we stop intelligent machines from taking over the world and enslaving us all? That's the radical suggestion of Patrick Levy Rosenthal, founder and chief executive of Emoshape, a tech firm that has developed a computer chip that can synthesise 12 human emotions. "It's logical to conclude that autonomous machines made of electricity and metal will eventually see us as their main competitors for those resources, and try to take control," he says. This is the dystopian vision of artificial intelligence (AI) run amok that luminaries such as physicist Prof Stephen Hawking, and tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, worry about. But Mr Rosenthal believes this nightmare scenario will be avoided if we create machines that can empathise.