Who's Afraid of Artificial Intelligence?

Would it be an exaggeration to say we caress our smartphones? Our connection to them is emotional: We paw at them idly and endlessly. There are times when your phone can be your best friend. Google and Microsoft are betting big on artificially intelligent helpers--not like Apple's Siri, which is stuck only on its products, but a device-agnostic digital personality that follows you wherever you go. As Google's founders put it in their annual letter: "[O]ver time, the computer itself--whatever its form factor--will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world."