The danger isn't artificial intelligence - it's us Gadgette

Last week Microsoft's chatbot experiment, Tay.ai, was the subject of controversy. She was supposed to learn from young people on Twitter and post friendly, emoji-filled tweets. Within 24 hours she was a racist bigot tweeting things like "Hitler was right". The most paranoid among us might draw parallels between Tay's behaviour and the dystopian robots that turn evil in sci-fi stories. Tay was an innocent chatbot with good intentions but once in the real world she turned into a racist Nazi. It doesn't take too much imagination to imagine a world where we let loose helpful robot doctors and drivers with the best intentions only for them to overthrow humanity.