We are currently hearing a lot about AI (This gung-ho government says we have nothing to fear from AI. Are you scared yet?, 31 March). As a former dairy farmer, I thought the AI man was the chap who visited on request to artificially inseminate our cows to get them in calf. With the current use of the initials meaning something rather different, I now wonder what he was actually doing. In the fiercely competitive world of Guardian letter writers, will the letters editor spike submissions judged to have used AI (Elon Musk joins call for pause in creation of giant AI'digital minds', 29 March)? I confirm I haven't used AI to pen this epistle.

Would you like to ask Addison Lee whether the "self-driving" cars it aims to deploy in London by 2021 (Report, 22 October) will in fact have remote control capability? If so, the term "self-driving" would be a misnomer. The remote control would be dangerous for dissidents and whistleblowers – if you ride in a "self-driving" taxi with remote control capability, and the taxi knows who you are, the state could whisk you to a deportation prison, or a black site, at any time. There was a sudden rattle of crockery and a voice was heard from the kitchen: "What d'you want one of them for when you've got me?" He was also a good Hoover pusher.

Reading Stephen Buranyi's article (Rise of the racist robots, G2, 8 August) reminded me of a discussion 30 years ago with a sixth-form class (following a viewing of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) on whether daily contact with computers would make us more machine-like. "No," said one girl: "Since humans contaminate everything they come in contact with, we'll end up by infecting machines with our irrationalities. Percipient students are always ahead of their time. If Gatlin had not been there, Bolt would still have lost. In all the press and TV commentary, Christian Coleman, who came second, was hardly mentioned.